Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.
Beginning a career in management can throw the best of us. You are probably excellent at the job you have just finished and, whilst you will still need some of your technical skills, they will play a far lesser role in determining your success. You will naturally feel a draw towards the security and comfort of burying yourself in the technical aspects of your role, but almost certainly, this will be a mistake. Your role is management and managing should now occupy the bulk of your time.
So, what are some of the things you will need to focus on now?
- supporting and motivating your staff
- setting expectations and assessing performance
- giving recognition for achievement and corrections for errors
- planning and preparing at increasingly strategic levels
- maintaining an environment where your team can succeed
- securing the resources your team needs – including new members
- training and developing team members
- reporting on progress and on setbacks
- negotiating for opportunities, resources and funding
- financial and personnel management
Exercise: Understand your Management Responsibilities
Using this checklist, speak with your boss and with your new peers to get a clear idea of what your roles are and also how you are likely to need to split your time among them. Understand:
- which are most important to your and your team’s success?
- which are most time-consuming?
- where are the pitfalls?
- what are the annual cycles and how will the balance of priorities shift through the year?
What First?
As a manager, your role will be to manage resources: usually people, but sometimes materials or assets.
Step 1: Your first priority is to understand those resources: meet the people, inventory the stock and survey the assets. As you do, make notes to help you remember what is important.
Step 2: When you have finished, write yourself a readiness memo, titled: ‘An analysis of the resources at my disposal and their fitness for the task at hand’. You may want to conduct a SWOT analysis to help you with this.
Step 3: Next, use this as the basis for drawing up a two to three month plan of action. At best, it will focus on stabilisation and incremental improvement. At worst, it may need to be a turnaround plan.
Step 4: When you have done this, file your memo securely, where nobody else can access it or, better still, destroy it. It will likely contain frank opinions about the people on your team that you will not want to become public.
