Management Mastery

It’s one thing to be able to attract desirable candidates to interview at your firm.  As we discussed in a previous episode, top candidates are looking for a successful company, a challenging job, an excellent boss and senior management, and teammates who are bright, stimulating and want them on the team, as well as a position where they can visualize a career path for themselves.  Once having attracted a desirable candidate, it’s up to you, as the hiring manager, to entice them to want to join your company and your department.  That’s the subject of this episode.

One of the most important tasks the manager faces is recruiting top talent.  When you have the opportunity to make a new hire, you should approach it as an excellent opportunity to strengthen your department by adding a new personality with unique skills, abilities, and energy.  And, increasing abilities of your team can make you more effective in your role.  In this episode, we’ll discuss what top talent seeks in a job, how you need to be prepared to address those wants, and how they will evaluate you as the hiring manager.

As a manager, you’re probably past the time when others will watch out for your career growth.  A critical part of managing your personal career involves knowing your own strengths and weaknesses.  It’s this type of self-awareness that’ll allow you to further develop the skills you have as well as learn new ones.  This’ll put you in the best position to make your greatest contribution.  It’ll also help you to be alert in order to identify career opportunities when they happen. In this episode we discuss ways to evaluate your own strengths and weaknesses.

For every manager, creating a great team is extremely important, but has become much more complicated with remote working, teams working across geographical boundaries, and greater diversity in the workforce. Under any conditions, creating a strong team is a critical problem for managers and those who do it well have the opportunity to surpass their colleagues, as well as their competitors. In this episode we’ll focus on the basics of producing a great team.  In future episodes, we’ll address, in more detail, the issues related to managing diverse as well as geographically disbursed teams.

There are a number of characteristics that organizational researchers have found distinguish high-performing teams.  The recent move to remote working and to virtual teams that can have members in different countries, makes some of these features of high-performance more difficult.  In this episode, we’ll explore how to employ the tactics of high-performing teams even when working virtually.

A good manager knows that it’s important to manage not only relationships with their subordinates, but also those with their bosses. Successful management of one’s boss is not always easy or intuitive.  In this episode, we’ll discuss some of the common problems in dealing with one’s boss and suggest ways for handling them. 

Promotion to management means taking charge and exerting power.  It also means you are vulnerable to a number of traps.  A common one is hubris, which can be defined as “the excessive pride and self-confidence that can come with power”.  For a new manager, hubris can lead to any number of problems.  The most effective way to counter hubris in yourself is by showing humility. In this episode, we will talk about the dangers of hubris as well as how to assess and demonstrate your own level of humility.

Great managers lead by setting the appropriate context. That is,by explaining the business objectives, the competitive environment and the regulatory constraints in which the department and company operate, rather than by trying to control people simply through a set of rules and procedures. Once managers explain the context, staff are better able to understand the direction and strategy and the manager is able to minimize the rules that inhibit individual initiative in decision-making and thus, perceived ownership of their work. In this episode we’ll discuss the relationship between the business context and rules, and how the manager can improve production and maintain a happier, more engaged staff through keeping rules to a minimum.

At some point, you very likely will find yourself called upon to present to an audience larger than a small group.  If you’ve never done it – or even if you have – this can be a fear-inducing experience.  In this episode we give you some advice on how to get through it successfully.

:  The climate of a department involves how staff interact, engage, and exchange ideas to create a positive work environment.  It is important to build a healthy team climate to ensure that staff feel comfortable, confident, and supported when around one another.  Many managers don’t focus on climate but simply accept the way it is when they arrive. Thus, they possibly miss a major opportunity to build a more effective and efficient team.  We’ll focus on evaluating your current climate, identifying opportunities and possibly improving it in this episode.