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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Serie: Practical Guide Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
Motivate your team to go the extra mile. New managers, experienced managers or aspiring managers – learn how to understand your team and get the best out of them. From hiring new members to dealing with poor performance, from goal setting to promoting work–life balance, understand how to foster effective employees with Alison and David Price's A–Z map to managerial success. Filled with expert insights, real-life case studies and proven techniques, this Practical Guide will make you a better manager – right now.
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About the authors
Alison Price is a Chartered Psychologist and Occupational Psychologist who has coached senior leaders and CEOs in prestigious organizations. Alison’s leadership development programs have been attended by thousands. As well as being an inspirational keynote speaker, Alison lectures at Kingston University London and comments within the media on business psychology. She was a semi-finalist in the competition ‘Britain’s Next Top Coach’.
David Price is an experienced senior manager, leading high performing and award-winning teams within prestigious organizations. David holds qualifications in management, consulting and coaching. He is a qualified Member of the Chartered Management Institute and the Institute of Leadership and Management.
Alison and David are passionate about enabling managers to be successful, so get access to free resources at:
www.TheSuccessAgents.com
Authors’ note
This book contains frequently used research and methods. Where we know the source we have been sure to reference it, but our apologies here to the originators of any material if we have overlooked them.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to all of our family, friends and acquaintances who contributed their stories and completed the management assessment.
Also, we would like to say thank you to all bad managers everywhere, who provided the suffering that produced many of the stories and inspired much of this book.
We hope that this book will result in us never hearing a bad management story again.
Contents
Introduction
A decade of experience in designing, delivering and evaluating management training has made us realize that what is taught in a classroom, or covered in a typical management textbook, can sound great in theory but doesn’t always translate to the real world.
For example, many managers will have been taught about the importance of setting SMART objectives (ones that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound) to focus employees on the things that matter. However, how much use are perfectly worded objectives if employees don’t actually look at them until the night before their annual appraisal, at which point they have to conjure up as much evidence as possible to show that they really have been focused on them all year?
This book is therefore grounded in reality, covering not only how to perform management activities appropriately but, crucially, how to make them work in the real world. It shares very practical (and easily applied) solutions to issues that managers and their employees face on a day-to-day basis.
To achieve this, we’ve interviewed many people, seeking to answer the following questions:
1. How can managers make a really positive difference to members of their team? This book is packed with examples of good practice that you can easily replicate within your own team to ensure that everyone thrives.
2. What have managers done in real life that absolutely crushed their team or individuals within it? During the research for this book we have been genuinely shocked at how easy it was to gather a wealth of horror stories, showing just how common management bad-practice is. For example, one interviewee described how her colleague received an absolutely devastating phone call to say that, very sadly, her aunt had committed suicide. Shockingly, their manager’s response was: ‘Could you just focus on your work for 24 more hours and worry about your family issues later?’ This book contains numerous real-life examples, and will give you very blunt (and hopefully helpful) feedback on what not to do as a manager.
3. What do managers find really hard about their role and what would they like to be able to do better? Being a manager isn’t easy. It can be very tough to tell a member of your team that they aren’t performing up to the required standard, or to manage the expectations of someone who is desperate to be promoted when there’s simply no opportunity to do so at the time. This guide will support you to overcome these challenges and many others, exposing the difficult aspects of management and, crucially, how to deal with them competently.
In addition to interviewing managers and employees, we’ve also surveyed them. This forms the basis of Chapter A: ‘Assessment’, and gives you the opportunity to measure and calibrate your own management capability. Since each question in the survey relates to an individual chapter in the book, you can use your survey results to prioritize which chapters to read first in order to identify areas for growth. You can then repeat the survey, say in three months’ time, and use it as a way to measure your progress.
Who will benefit from this book?
This Practical Guide to management is designed to benefit three key groups of people the most:
1. Newly appointed managers. People are frequently promoted to a managerial position because they are technically good at their job, yet being a manager requires an entirely different skill-set. If you want a succinct and easy-to-apply guide to developing that skill-set, read on!
2. Experienced managers. In 2009 a British national newspaper ran a story saying that 50% of experienced UK drivers would fail their driving test if they took it again. This isn’t because we Brits are useless drivers! Instead it reflects the fact that we learn to drive subconsciously and therefore pay less attention to doing everything right – and so we develop bad habits. The same is true for management. When you’re a newly appointed manager, you may be very conscious about how you interact with and manage your team. However, over time, you can pick up bad habits, and things that you might once have made a real effort to do right are now done on autopilot. Consider this book as a metaphorical driving test, making you consciously aware of what you’re doing, and challenging you to double-check that you aren’t displaying any major or minor faults.
3. Aspiring managers. If you have aspirations to become a manager, this book is a great starting point. You’ll find that the vast majority of exercises are designed so that both managers and non-managers can complete them – and we wish you the best of luck with getting that promotion!
It’s not only the manager who will feel the benefit of good management – organizations will too. A research report from the Chartered Management Institute (2012) highlights the benefits that improved manager capability brings, and why management development is so important.
The report found that high-performing organizations reported higher levels of management effectiveness compared to low-performing organizations. There is evidence that there’s a virtuous cycle between the ability of its managers and the performance of the organization. With 43% of managers in the research rated as ineffective and 63% of managers not having any formal training for their role, organizations – and all those who have a stake in their future – stand to be able to benefit from developing better, more effective managers.
The A–Z to management
You may have noticed that each of our chapters links to a different letter of the alphabet. In our home country, the United Kingdom, an A–Z is a map book – something that helps people to have smooth journeys and to get back on track when things go wrong. We very much hope that our A–Z is a useful guide to you as you continue on your own management journey.
Alison & David Price
B: Basics
Most of us forget the basics and wonder why the specifics don’t work.
Garrison Wynn
When building a house, you have to get the foundations right. It doesn’t matter how great the kitchen is if the walls can’t stand. This chapter will outline the ‘foundations’ for being a great manager.
To begin with, imagine that your country is hosting a major international sporting event and you’ve been offered a position as a volunteer to support it. You eagerly await day one, as you’ll be involved in something really special that the whole world is watching, working alongside thousands of other equally excited volunteers.
However, imagine how quickly everyone’s enthusiasm could plummet if you didn’t know:
• What work tasks you are meant to be doing?
• When you are meant to be working?
• When you can leave your post to take a break?
• How to use or access equipment needed to do your job?
• Who else is in your team?
• Who to report problems to?
And ask yourself, how long would you keep volunteering if you were:
• Bored from doing constantly monotonous tasks?
• Ravenous or thirsty – unable to access refreshments?
• Cold or wet, without proper protection from the elements?
• In personal danger due to unsafe working conditions?
• Bullied by other members of the workforce?
No matter how exciting the opportunity, you would be likely to get extremely fed up very quickly, and would probably consider walking out.
This example shows the importance of getting the basics right. Frederick Hertzberg called these basics hygiene factors. But why are they called that?
Think about your toilets at work. (OK, so maybe they’re not what you’d like to spend your spare time thinking about, but stick with us!) When your work toilets are clean, do you walk in and leap in the air because, hooray, they’re really motivating you? We think that’s highly unlikely. However, if you walked into the same toilets and found them to be absolutely rancid, how would you feel then? You’d likely become very annoyed at the poor conditions in which you have to work.
In the same way that hygiene probably doesn’t excite you, hygiene factors don’t motivate people either. They don’t make you think, ‘Wow, what an amazing day, the plug I touched at work was safe!’ When hygiene factors are missing, though, just like hygiene itself, it can make people feel very negative to the point where they will consider leaving their job. For example, if you were standing for hours outside in the freezing cold, making yourself ill because your uniform wasn’t warm enough, you would become extremely unhappy very quickly.
Here is a list of some of the most important hygiene factors:
• Food and drink
• Rest
• Shelter
• Access to toilet facilities
• Having a manager
• Clarity over when you will work and what you will do
• Personal safety and security (including freedom from bullying and harassment)
• Access to (and ability to use) equipment necessary to perform the job
• Access to physical locations required to perform the job.
Let’s explore the impact of a lack of some of these hygiene factors in more detail through a real-life example. Harry had been offered a part-time teaching role in a college, starting from the next academic year, which would involve him running a few scheduled classes every month. Here’s what happened:
• The new academic year had started and Harry still had no idea what dates he was due to be teaching.
• When Harry tried to find this out, he was told that the person who hired him, Pam, had left the college. Pam’s replacement was on maternity leave, and the person doing the maternity cover had no idea who Harry was.
• When Harry was eventually notified about his teaching dates he still had no idea where the lessons would be held, or how to use the equipment in the classroom.
• To get his staff pass Harry needed authorization from his line manager, but he didn’t know who that now was.
• To get a car-parking permit Harry needed his staff pass, so when he came to run the lessons, he had to travel by bus, with the journey taking over three times as long.
• After finally arriving for his first class, Harry was thirsty. The only nearby place that he could get some water was from a cafeteria, which he couldn’t access without the staff pass that he still didn’t have.
How do you think Harry was feeling before he’d even started delivering his first lesson? Which of the hygiene factors listed above were missing for Harry, and why was the absence of each of these hygiene factors demotivating to him?
How can managers get the basics right?
Some aspects of making sure the basics are right will be outside of a manager’s control. For example, it’s unlikely that a junior supervisor will be able to authorize the installation of a new water dispenser. However, despite some limitations, a manager can influence the basics being met. For example, managers can encourage their team members to take regular breaks, so that they have time to eat.
Look at the list of hygiene factors listed previously and come up with at least one way that a manager can directly support each hygiene factor being met.
We will give you much more detailed information to answer this question throughout the book, but in particular, look out for the content in Chapter I: ‘Induction’. This chapter will cover what needs to be put in place on day one of an employee’s role, which includes ensuring that a lot of these basic needs are met.
The psychological contract
When we sign up to work with an organization, sometimes it’s made very clear that the nature of the work will mean that some of the hygiene factors won’t be well met, for example the job might require access to temporary toilets, or lots of time outside in the cold and rain. Whereas these conditions might be completely unacceptable to some, others can accept this, because it’s what they signed up for and they understand that this is what the job demands.
Most employees will have a written contract, which specifies their hours and their place of work, etc. However, managers should understand that there is a second form of contract, an unwritten one called the psychological contract
