The Effective Manager

Management skills for high performance

Sarah Cook

• Publisher: IT Governance Ltd
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781849281119
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This book will help you develop your management skills. It is designed to assist you in understanding the characteristics of a high-performance manager, to help you assess where your strengths and development areas lie as a manager and to create a plan of action for realising your management potential.

CHAPTER 1:
WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE MANAGER?

This chapter outlines for you:

• The characteristics of an effective manager.

• A model of where you should be focusing your attention.

• A diagnostic to help you assess your own management skills.

We join organisations and leave managers

Think back to when you joined the organisation where you currently work or an organisation that you have worked for in the past. I expect that when you joined either of these organisations, you were hopeful about what the future would bring. You probably had a good impression of the business that you were joining and felt that you were making a good choice of employer. Hopefully you still feel like this about the organisation you are currently working for. If you don’t feel like this, or if you decided to leave another organisation in the past, research shows that the biggest influence on a decision to ‘disengage’ from the organisation is your direct line manager.

When we work for a good manager we are more likely to feel motivated and committed to the organisation. We are prepared to go the extra mile for the customer, for the organisation and for our boss.

So what makes an effective manager? What does a good manager do?

Good and bad managers

Think of someone that you have known that you perceived as a good manager. This could be someone that you have worked for, or even worked alongside. Think about not just what this person did but how they do it. Consider:

• What did you appreciate about the way they approached the job?

• What did you value about them in the way they treated you and others?

Now think about a manager that you have known whom you perceived as not being particularly good as a manager. Consider:

• What behaviour did they display that made you think they were a poor manager?

• What could they have done better?

Look back over your thoughts and consider what are the characteristics of an effective manager.

So what makes a good manager?

I have spoken to a large number of people in the IT sector and beyond about what they consider makes an effective manager. Here are some of the characteristics that they have identified:

• Provides clear direction.

• Readily takes control in a crisis.

• Sets specific goals and guidelines.

• Is committed to the team and the people in it.

• Makes the time to listen to others.

• Delegates responsibility and accountability.

• Provides timely feedback.

• Acts as a coach to others.

• Willingly shares skills and knowledge.

• Helps others develop.

• Is competent and caring.

• Creates a good team spirit.

• Helps others manage change.

• Takes responsibility for the actions and outcomes of the department.

• Manages difficult situations.

• Looks beyond the department to understand the organisation as a whole.

A working model for the effective manager

The effective manager therefore balances the need for activity and achieving objectives with the need to create an effective team and the need to build the confidence and competence of each person in the team.

The management psychologist John Adair found that a manager’s effectiveness depends on the ability to influence and be influenced by the team and its members in the achievement of common goals. In practice this means:

• Setting departmental goals and ensuring that these are achieved.

• Developing each person in the team so that they have the necessary skills, knowledge, confidence and ability to contribute to achieving the goals.

• Building a high-performance team who work in a complementary fashion to collectively achieve departmental goals.

The successful manager therefore focuses on Activities, People and Team, often simultaneously. These three areas interact upon each other, as illustrated below. The quality of the interaction determines whether departmental goals are met and exceeded.

Figure 1: Achieving departmental goals

Look inside the arrow and you will see that the APT (Activities, People, Team) circles overlap. If the Activities circle is reduced, so too are large segments of the circles relating to Team and People. If you pay little a...