Schwartz Manager's Oracle

125 Key Lessons Nobody Ever Taught You About Leading and Managing
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61842-895-0
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 274 Seiten

HOW DO I GET STARTED? Through no fault of their own, most new managers begin their careers with no real idea where or how to actually manage a team. Via its 125 KEY LESSONS NOBODY'S EVER TAUGHT YOU, 'The Manager's Oracle' uses sharp, easy-to-grasp concepts and more than 40 clear examples to expose new leader/managers to all 125 of those secret lessons long before any career adversity or failure can ever confront them. The book identifies four fundamental areas that all new leader/managers absolutely need to grasp, including: •Managing your own activities and personal resources; •Managing the boss; •Managing staff; and •Leading!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schwartz, Mark

Leseproben

A BIT MORE BEFORE WE GET STARTED

MANAGEMENT VERSUS LEADERSHIP. “Management” skills, alone, are absolutely necessary but, by themselves, are usually not sufficient to guide a team through the long-term.  Anyone who has ever attempted to run a large company, department, team or even a two-person, ad hoc squad, would agree that “leadership” is another very necessary element.  As applied in this book, I think it is important to provide definitions for those two terms:

Management is something close to a science.  It is devoted to deploying and coordinating human, as well as financial and technical resources in the pursuit of stated goals and objectives.

Effective managers apply: (1) technological tools, (2) cultural and organizational rules, (3) an understanding of their team members’ abilities and (4) a distinctly understood mission.

Leadership, on the other hand, is much more a combination of art and science that merges a would-be leader’s:

o Desire to be successful;

o Self-confidence and strength of will;

o Innate understanding of acceptable risk versus unacceptable danger;

o Willingness to chance being embarrassed;

o Projected trustworthiness;

o Understanding of team members’ motivations; and

o Charisma.

Most leaders are either natural extraverts or are introverts who have somehow overcome their innate shyness and mastered the ability to act beyond their own self-doubts.  Leadership skills are most useful in motivating and inspiring living human beings and instigating teamwork.

Good leaders establish an identifiable and worthwhile banner under which they and their teams relentlessly move forward.

The two concepts (management and leadership) are synergistic: each, without the other, is indispensable.  In combination the two are definitely worth more than the sum of their individual values.  Throughout this book, you will see the two terms used together often (as in “leader/manager”); meaning that the combined term applies.  Occasionally and where appropriate, the terms are also used individually to indicate that only one or the other is applicable in a given instance.

HOW THIS BOOK IS STRUCTURED. I developed this material to match a style I hope I would project if I were speaking directly to you – as an instructor standing in front of a class or perhaps a mentor working directly with a pupil or protégé.  To convey my message, this book is divided into four sections:

Section I: Managing Your Activities and Personal Resources. After I had been working as a manager for a while, I discovered that I was spending a tremendous amount of time just trying to keep my own work in order, my thoughts straight and my team on track with all of us moving forward toward our goals.  Sure, I was doing the work but I had no truly organized approach to help me:

o Remember exactly what everyone on my team was supposed to be doing at any given moment;

o Understand which tasks were more important than others, as well as track how, when, and why priorities had changed;

o Deal with the dynamic issues impacting my team members’ work (and in some cases, their personal lives);

o Motivate staff to high achievement;

o Routinely carry myself as a professional;

o Remember to promptly address my boss’s most overriding issues;

o Fit in with my peer managers;

o Effectively handle a meeting.

Basically, I was carrying everything around with me, in my head.  I suddenly understood that my lack of any formal organization was a great way to constantly forget important bits of information, misplace documents I needed, lose track of team members’ priorities, confuse the details of one critical situation with those of another and plenty more.  Under this virtual non-methodology, I could often literally feel myself losing ground; I knew I was struggling way too hard for even the pretty good results I was getting.

I began to understand that I had to come up with better methods.  From that point on, I started developing organized tools and strategies that could help me excel at my very complex job and I’ve never stopped working on those ideas.

The purpose of this first section is to help you jumpstart your management/leadership career with a few basic tools that will at least keep your work and your resources under control.  With those tools in hand, you’ll be able to confidently start your new job standing on a firm platform, and with quite a bit of extra confidence.

Section II: Managing The Boss. First, a note: I wrestled with the idea of placing this section after Section III: Managing Staff, instead of right here, where it is.  After some thought however, I left it alone because I really believe establishing ground rules to deal with the boss should precede even the concepts you’ll use with regard to staff.  After all, your boss is the person who’ll be issuing many instructions directed toward you.  Therefore, that’s Person Number One, whom you’ll usually be trying to serve. 

From time to time, you’ll have important opportunities to exert your own will, express your own ideas and carry out you own objectives – impacting everyone around you, including your boss and others at and above your boss’s level.  It’s a dynamic world out there: What you say and do absolutely impacts others.  Conversely beware, because what all those people do and say also impacts you.  I’ve included this “managing the boss” section because how you deal with your boss in the more rarified atmosphere above your level, can easily mean the difference between failure and success to all of you.

Even though most managers would obviously consider clients to be the raison d’etre for their work, you’ll see that I have directed no section specifically toward clients.  This is because your boss sets certain requirements and goals for you and your clients also establish theirs for you, as well.  Bosses and clients are therefore both effectively your masters; you somehow have to satisfy each of them.

Your two masters may occasionally contradict each other because, ultimately, they each have their own individual agendas and goals.

o For example, you’ve known for weeks that your boss needs and expects your semi-annual budget update THIS COMING TUESDAY.   The final product is 90% ready, but requires certain important last-minute inputs – as well as a careful final edit and a couple of last-minute numbers that you’ve just received – before you’ll be ready to submit it.  At this point, you certainly feel you’ve given yourself enough time to complete the job right.

o As it happens, your largest client experienced a large disaster in the middle of last night.  The client needs your team’s and your own full input to get back into production – again, BY TUESDAY!

Since you haven’t the resources to complete both jobs on time, even by putting in extreme amounts of overtime, you know you will not be able to satisfy both masters.  On the other hand, you always have a duty to try to reconcile and satisfy each of them.  Somehow, you’re either going to pull off the impossible or find yourself explaining a certain failure to at least one of them.

Section III, Managing Staff: I offer no lengthy remarks about this section just because as a new leader/manager reading this book, you already expect to learn plenty about managing the people on your team.  However, I will say that this section explains how to bridge numerous difficult divides including, just for example: (1) dealing with “underachieving” and “problem” employees, (2) getting everyone to put forth their best efforts, (3) what “management by walking around” is all about and why you should do it, and (4) making sure your employees know and fully understand their responsibilities.  Of course, you’ll find loads of additional issues and how to resolve them in this section.

As above in the synopsis of Section II, Managing The Boss, this section also works around a parallel kind-of duplication issue: Just as you establish requirements and goals for your staff, you also expect your suppliers and vendors to meet the objectives and conditions you set for them.  After all, you are the source of...