Understanding what it takes to be a manager is not always easy

11 August 2014 05:37 am Views - 3808

Many people - employers included - think that all it takes to be a manager is being the person with the most seniority or the best people skills. The fact is that to become an effective manager, you need to be able to efficiently and successfully integrate people and activities in order to meet your team’s needs and your organisation’s goals.

If you are in a position that requires you to manage even a small team, there are a number of essential skills you ould be wise to develop. In the past 34 weeks, in our series, we discussed 20 such skills. We divided them into two segments: ‘managing the organisation and managing people’. Under those two headings, we spoke from vision, mission and value statements to Pareto analysis and from goal setting to time management techniques.





If you have read the series of articles carefully, you will understand why management involves managing the organisation and managing people. According to Dr. Ken Blanchard, in his famous book ‘Putting the One Minute Manager to Work’, the ABCs of the manager’s world are as below:
nActivators - The type of strategy followed by a manager before his workforce sets on with performance.

nBehaviours - How the workforce performs or behaves within the activity or situation as a result of activators or consequences.
nConsequences - How the manager handles the workforce after the performance.

Research shows that although we may be inclined to think that an activator’s role brings about the most efficient behaviour in a workforce, in effect, it is how managers handle the workforce after a particular behaviour that influences future behaviour or performance up to a great extent. To quantify, activators’ base behaviour contribution is calculated to make up for 15 to 25 percent of behaviour, while 75-85 percent is known to be influenced by consequences.
Therefore, it is crucial that we understand and develop the basic management skills that will help bring out expected outcomes from a workforce. So, let’s get down to the most basic skills that need to be acquired, if one is to become a successful manager.

Mission and Vision Statements

A mission statement defines the company’s business, its objectives and its approach to reach those objectives. A vision statement describes the desired future position of the company. Elements of mission and vision statements are often combined to provide a statement of the company’s purposes, goals and values. However, sometimes the two terms are used interchangeably.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is a comprehensive process for determining what a business should become and how it can best achieve that goal. It appraises the full potential of a business and explicitly links the business’ objectives to the actions and resources required to achieve them. Strategic planning offers a systematic process to ask and answer the most critical questions confronting a management team—especially resource commitment decisions.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is utilised to understand their customer groups and respond quickly—and at times, instantly—to shifting customer desires. CRM technology allows firms to collect and manage large amounts of customer data and then carry out strategies based on that information. Data collected through focused CRM initiatives help firms solve specific problems throughout their customer relationship cycle—the chain of activities from the initial targeting of customers to efforts to win them back for more.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement surveys measure whether employees are fully involved and enthusiastic about their work and company. Intellectually and emotionally engaged employees help to create satisfied, more loyal customers and improved business performance. Employee engagement surveys gauge the degree of employees’ attachment to their jobs, colleagues and organisation, helping to determine their willingness to go beyond the basic parameters of their job. They can also be used to understand what factors have the greatest impact on engaging employees and to predict employee retention.

Balanced Scorecard

A balanced scorecard defines what management means by “performance” and measures whether management is achieving desired results. The balanced scorecard translates mission and vision statements into a comprehensive set of objectives and performance measures that can be quantified and appraised. These measures typically include the following categories of performance:  financial performance (revenues, earnings, return on capital, cash flow), customer value performance (market share, customer satisfaction measures, customer loyalty), internal business process performance (productivity rates, quality measures, timeliness), innovation performance (percent of revenue from new products, employee suggestions, rate of improvement index) and  employee performance (morale, knowledge, turnover, use of best demonstrated practices).

Core Competencies

A core competency is a deep proficiency that enables a company to deliver unique value to customers. It embodies an organisation’s collective learning, particularly of how to coordinate diverse production/marketing skills and integrate multiple technologies. Such a core competency creates sustainable competitive advantage for a company and helps it branch into a wide variety of related markets. The litmus test for a core competency? It’s hard for competitors to copy or procure. Understanding core competencies allows companies to invest in the strengths that differentiate them and set strategies that unify their entire organisation.

Management Programmes

Change management programmes enable companies to control the installation of new processes to improve the realization of business benefits. These programmes involve devising change initiatives, generating organisational buy-in, implementing the initiatives as seamlessly as possible and generating a repeatable model for ensuring continued success in future change efforts. A change management programme allows leaders to help people succeed, showing where and when trouble is likely to occur and laying out a strategy for mitigating risks and monitoring progress.

Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management synchronizes the efforts of all parties—suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, dealers, customers and so on—involved in meeting a customer’s needs. The approach often relies on technology to enable seamless exchanges of information, goods and services across organisational boundaries. It forges much closer relationships among all links in the value chain in order to deliver the right products to the right places at the right times for the right costs. The goal is to establish such strong bonds of communication and trust among all parties that they can effectively function as one unit, fully aligned to streamline business processes and achieve total customer satisfaction.

In the last 35 weeks, we have tried to describe some of the best tools and techniques (including the above) that have emerged in the field of management. Some of these have been developed by researchers and academics. Others have simply evolved through use over time by practitioners. All of them make lives easier for manager’s lives easier.

The basic management skills presented in the series of articles under the caption ‘Manager’s Essential Power Tool Box’ are only a doorway for you to get started on the long higher management goal that lies ahead.


Next week: Fast track your way up the corporate ladder
(Lionel Wijesiri, a corporate director with over 25 years’ senior managerial experience, can be contacted at lionwije@live.com)