A Practical Guide to Management

A Practical Guide

Alison Price, David Price

• Verlag: Icon Books
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848314252
• Thema: Crescita personale
• Thema: Carriera

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.

A: Assessment

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

Charles Darwin

The focus of this chapter is to conduct a self-assessment of your management capabilities, but before we do this, we just want to provoke you into thinking that, as a manager, you are actually being assessed all of the time, for example:

• After a bad interaction with our own manager, we often go home and vent to our family about how we feel. Not only can your manager ruin your day, he or she has the potential to ruin your family’s too!

• We frequently judge how fairly we are being treated in comparison to our peers, and we can feel very disgruntled when we sense injustice.

• And we’re guessing that virtually everyone will admit to going to lunch or socializing after work with peers and having a detailed conversation about our manager!

So, imagine that you’re a fly on the wall listening to that conversation about you. Would you like what you hear, or would the truth hurt?

Managers can literally make or break an employee’s job satisfaction. Their impact extends far beyond the office doors. For example, only yesterday an employee told us that she’s currently having professional counselling due to a difficult relationship with her manager.

When you become a manager, not only do you take on the responsibility for getting the work of the team done, but you become someone who has a significant emotional impact on other people’s lives. It’s often said that ‘People don’t leave organizations, they leave managers’.

We want your employees to say great things about you in the pub after work. So to start you (or maintain you) on that track, we’ve provided a self-assessment to help you evaluate your management capability. You will also have an opportunity to rate your own manager.

For each of the following questions, rate your own manager between 1 and 5. 1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree.

A	My manager is a good manager.
B	I know what is expected of me at work and I have the working conditions/equipment that I need to do my job.
C	The way my manager communicates with me has a positive impact upon my attitude and performance.
D	The distribution of workload between members of the team is fair.
E	When team members are willing and capable, our manager gives them the freedom to be in control of their own work.
F	I am given useful and accurate feedback about my performance on a regular basis.
G	My manager helps me to set goals and objectives at work that motivate me.
H	When vacancies in this team are filled, the process is fair and leads to the appointment of suitable people.
I	New starters to the team are given the support, resources and information they need.
J	Members o...