ARE YOU A REAL MANAGER?

Well are you? Interestingly enough, Rachel Van Doorene of Women Inc has been have a series of 'brainstorming workshops' called Conversations that Matter, on the subject of finding and retaining talent. Strangely enough, this particular point did not come up at all - although I am sure that that is because we were all SMME's with perhaps one or two staff at best.

Still, it is an interesting concept and one that should be taken into account, when trying to retain skills and talent.

If anyone is interested in joining Rachel for her monthly 'Conversations that Matter' please contact her or Linsey on 011 646 7878 or linsey@everywoman.co.za.

Are you a real manager?
Juliet Newton

04 September 2007 at 06h00

You were probably promoted because you were damn good at your job. As the top performer on the team, you were rewarded by the promotion that suddenly flips you from being an individual contributor, to getting work done through others. That means being catapulted into a new (and hugely uncomfortable) space of conscious incompetence: You suddenly "get" how much you don't know about doing this new job! I do think there's a simple secret to good management.

Jack Welsh said it best: "Most important, it is a job that's close to 75 percent about people, and 25 percent about other stuff." In essence, management is about your ability to connect with, inspire, grow, and support the people for whose performance you become accountable. David Rock (University of New York) believes that it's time to reinvent the manager. Many companies today are composed almost completely of knowledge workers, who sell their brains for a living. And most are proactive about the development of these knowledge workers, making sure they sharpen their skills and capabilities - they are, after all, the product.

The risk is that this investment could, at any time, walk out of the doors. Studies have shown that 60 percent of people leave bosses, not companies. Rock argues that knowledge worker management requires a whole new set of skills - and managers need to evolve themselves or will cease to be effective. Today's managers need to understand what it takes to manage and retain knowledge workers. Rock highlights three key competencies for the knowledge worker manager:

Get your people to think better.

Become master communicators in order to circulate and sell ideas better.

Become master facilitators of relationships and tough conversations.

To this list, I would add a fourth imperative, cited by Marcus Buckingham of the Gallup organisation:

Be clear about your own strengths, and those of your team, and play to those strengths wholeheartedly!

Getting people to think better. People are at their most effective when their strengths are in play and being developed. Coaching is a clever way to get people to think, and to improve their thinking over time. It may have been used as a minor tool in the management toolkit in the past, but it has never been more imperative that knowledge worker managers get a real handle on it. A much larger portion of their time should be dedicated to challenging their teams to get scratching around in their brains to make new connections.

Become a master communicator. Because the product of thinking is ideas, which are intangible until captured in another person's mind, the knowledge worker manager needs to become really good at communicating with people and cross-pollinating ideas and concepts. And because colleagues need to bounce off each other's thinking in order to evolve, and knowledge workers are in the business of selling their thinking, the ability to communicate ideas becomes paramount.

Become a master facilitator. According to a study on the "happiness factor" (Time, January 2005), the only common factor that can be attributed to the happiness of individuals in general, is the quality and quantity of the relationships they experience. If this is the case, then a strong retention factor that can be influenced by an effective manager, is the facilitation of good relationships within project teams, by consciously building an open, communicating, nurturing culture that makes people feel a sense of loyalty to an organisation that goes beyond pay packets, perks, and contracts.

Play to their strengths. Marcus Buckingham, in his recent book, The One Thing You Need To Know, uses the analogy of playing your team like a board game. In the older manufacturing management paradigm, the game would have been checkers: win the game by getting every piece to move in exactly the same way. Buckingham proposes that, in the knowledge worker environment, chess is a better game: understand the unique strengths of your team, and help them deliver and develop mastery where they are already strong. Each piece moves in its own unique way to win.

For more information, you can call Avocado Vision on 011-614-0206 or visit www.avovision.co.za