BASIC CAPABILITY OF A MANAGER

BASIC CAPABILITY OF A MANAGER

1. According to the F. John Reh for beginning manager :

Level 1 of the Management Skills Pyramid shows the basic skills any beginning manager must master. It is the foundation of the management skills pyramid, which shows the skills a manager must master to be successful and shows how these management skills build on each other toward success.

Basic Management Skills

There are four basic management skills anyone must master to have any success in a management job. These four basic skills are plan, organize, direct, and control and are discussed separately in detail below.

Plan

Planning is the first and most important step in any management task. It also is the most often overlooked or purposely skipped step. While the amount of planning and the detail required will vary from task to task, to skip this task is to invite sure disaster except by sure blind luck. That's what gives us the adage of the 6 P's of planning (or 7 P's depending on how you count).

Organize

A manager must be able to organize teams, tasks, and projects in order to get the team's work done in the most efficient and effective manner. As a beginning manager, you may be organizing a small work team or a project team. These same skills will be required later in your career when you have to organize a department or a new division of the company.

Clearly, there is a lot of overlap between planning the work and in organizing it. Where planning focuses on what needs to be done, organization is more operational and is more focused on how to get the work done best.
When you organize the work, you need to:

• determine the roles needed,
• assign tasks to the roles,
• determine the best resource (people or equipment) for the role,
• obtain the resources and allocate them to the roles, and
• assign resources to the roles and delegate authority and responsibility to them.

Whether you have been assigned a small team or a project to manage, beginning managers must also be able to organize offices and data systems.

Direct

Directing is the action step. You have planned and organized the work. Now you have to direct your team to get the work done. Start by making sure the goal is clear to everyone on the team. Do they all know what the goal is? Do they all know what their role is in getting the team to the goal? Do they have everything they need (resources, authority, time, etc.) to do their part?

Pull, Don't Push
You will be more effective at directing the team toward your goal if you pull (lead them) rather than push (sit back and give orders). You want to motivate the people on your team and assist and inspire them toward the team goals.

Control

In the steps above, you have planned the work, organized the resources to make it happen most efficiently, and directed the team to start work. In the control step, you monitor the work being done. You compare the actual progress to the plan. You verify that the organization is working as you designed it.
If everything is going well, you do not need to do anything but monitor. However, that seldom happens. Someone gets sick, the database sort takes longer each iteration than projected, a key competitor drops their prices, a fire destroys the building next door and you have to evacuate for several days, or some other factor impacts your plan. The control step now dictates that you have to take action to minimize the impact and brings things back to the desired goal as quickly as possible.
Often this means going back to the planning stage and adjusting plans. Sometimes it may require a change in the organization. and you will have to re-direct everyone toward the new goals and inspire them. Then, of course, you control the new plan and adjust if needed. This cycle continues until you complete the task.

                 

          2. Team Management Skills

There are three categories of team management skills anyone must master to have any success in a management job. These are motivation, training and coaching, and employee involvement and I will discussed separately in detail below.

Motivation

The most fundamental team management skill you must master is motivation of your team and of the individual members of the team. (I will discuss self motivation later in this series.) You can't accomplish your goals as a manager unless your team is motivated to perform, to produce, to deliver the results you need. Motivating each of the individuals on your team requires a recognition on your part that each team member's motivation needs are different. And motivating the team requires a different approach from motivating the team members.

Motivating Individuals

• The Coffee Cup
  One of your best management tools may be a coffee cup. The simple act of taking someone to coffee gives you an opportunity to sit with them, listen, and learn. That kind of a conversation can be powerful employee motivation.
• Management Tips for Motivation
  These are some additional motivation tips.
• De-motivating Your Employees
  And while you are working hard to motivate your team, be sure you are not doing anything that will de-motivate them.

Training and Coaching

It is unlikely that you will ever manage a team where everyone is adequately trained. It is even more unlikely that you will have a team that never needs coaching. You need to be able to identify the training needs of your team members and be able to get that training for them. And you need to coach all the members of your team, even the well trained ones, to help them achieve their best levels of performance.

Training

• New Employee Training
  Regardless whether you spend a few hours or a few months orienting new employees, there is a cost. New Employee Orientation (NEO) can save you money in the long run if you take the time to properly train new people.
• Learn at Lunch
  Learn at Lunch, is a program to help employees grow and advance. Learn how to set one up so both the company and the employees benefit from it.

Coaching

• Employee Coaching: When To Step In
  You have to let people make mistakes if they are going to learn. The trick is knowing when to step in and when to hang back and let them try on their own.
• Performance Management Instead of Layoffs
  It costs too much to leave an incompetent manager in place. If the employee won't request a return to a level at which they were competent, the company must take action. Specific training can be part of this.

Employee Involvement

All the training we do as managers, all the motivation we attempt, all that positive feedback and morale building are all aimed at one thing. Increasing employee involvement. If your employees are not involved,if they just come to work to warm a seat, you won't get their best performance. If you don't get their best, everything they do will cost you more than it should have. It might be in a high error or rework rate. It might be in an innovative new idea that they didn't share with you. Whatever the issue, it will cost you.

So how do you get your employees engaged and committed? Here are the basics.

• Inspire and Admire
  One of the biggest mistake a manager can make is to ignore their employees. The same attention you paid to their work assignments, to their satisfaction levels, to their sense of being part of a great team needs to continue for as long as they are in your group. As soon as you start to slack off, their satisfaction and motivation decreases and you lose them.
• How to Innovate in Business
  Give your employees the freedom to think for themselves. Don't be a micro-manager. If they have a little breathing room they will be more innovative and more committed to your goals.
• Employee Retention Tips
  The same things that reduce turnover and increase employee retention are the things that increase employee involvement. Give them clear goals and honest feedback.