There are plenty of highly competent managers on the planet, and you are no doubt one of them. You manage people because you’re good at it, and you got to where you are by showing the appropriate level of competence in the various disciplines of achieving results through people.
Trouble is, there are also plenty of managers who are so called because they got given the title for reasons other than their ability to manage people. Quite possibly they were excellent technically and so for promoted as a reward for their results. And then, unfortunately, didn’t receive the support they needed to develop their line management skills. This is often because it is not recognised that they need help, and also because at a certain point in your career being trained in stuff is a sign of weakness.
And so your top performing salesperson gets promoted to Regional Manager, and finds herself winging it, and hoping her lack of knowledge and experience in the subtle and all elusive craft of managing people will not be exposed. The competitive attitude she brought to being successful selling software does not translate into being even halfway competent at the critical skill which, according to Google’s research of what it takes to be an effective manager, is coaching. In fact it mitigates against it.
Attitudes may therefore be misaligned, and chances are basic knowledge is weak too.
The How NOT 2 videos team has many years of face to face exposure to line managers from the training workshops we run. We therefore know where some of their weaknesses sit. One of them is basic awareness of corporate and legal policy.
We dare you to challenge our theory. We would bet that if you were to test your line managers on their awareness of your disciplinary procedure they would display a worrying lack of knowledge.
Maybe we can challenge you? Here is an 8 minute video we put together with our eLearning partners Artifex eLearning. It is of a purported disciplinary meeting in which the Manager (the guy on the left) makes 10 basic (and deliberate!) errors. Can you correctly identify all 10? If not, should you not be just a little bit worried? Just click through to their post to access the module. Good luck!
