Is there a management Bible?

For those of you who start a fantastic journey in the Team Management world I have a good news – There is a Bible or maybe let’s call it a leadership guide. In my humble opinion this book is a great collection of knowledge and advice helpful for a fresh Leader during first months in the new role.

“Managing People. A Practical Guide for Line Managers” written by Michael Armstrong was the first book that one of my Professors recommended to me during my postgraduate studies. After a couple years since I bought it I must admit that it’s really helpful to come back to this book on regular basis, especially when some unusual situation happens.

What are the information that you may find helpful?

• First of all the process of motivating employees. I think that we need to be aware of how important this part of of our job is. How positive motivation can help us in building strong and stable team and mostly how this affects people engagement and morale.
• Second thing worth reading is recruitment process and how interview should look like. Another good example of how short conversation can influence your future results. This part will explain how important it is to be well prepared Recruiter and how the meeting should be lead. Believe me that for most of the Leaders this part should be regularly refreshed. Even from my friends I hear lots of stories about how not prepared recruiter discouraged them from choosing the company.
• Last part that I really enjoyed was a chapter about manager’s responsibility for people development. I’ve already mentioned this in my previous post but this is the top priority on the list of things that you need to take care of. People will expect that you’ll support them in their growth and make everything that’s possible to open right doors for them. In this part author is also showing us how to manage training programs and how to analyse the results.
• Other than that we can find information about delegating tasks, results management and one of the most difficult part – salaries management.

There are many books on the market that can help you on the first stage of you leadership career, this one was a huge help for me, therefore I thought that it would be good to share it. If you know any other titles that can be recommended feel free to use comment section.

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Forced Leaders- Is it a sign of the times?

Last time I’ve mentioned about interesting situation of promoting people who are personally not convinced to became a Leaders. It may sound a bit odd but this situation seems to be getting more common this days and the impact that it may have on companies can be significant.

First of all, how this is even possible? Answer is very simple, market needs generate the situation where gaps have to be filled as quick as possible. One way or another. In this case companies in development phase look for Leaders to run their teams and secure quality of delivered processes. First and most natural move will be to find experienced Leaders inside own playground. If this won’t happen we need to extend our researches and look on the market. But what happens when your operating in city like Warsaw, where biggest companies are opening their offices practically every month? What happens if you don’t have enough Leaders inside and outside of your company?

Usually companies have three available options:

1. Office can be moved to another country or city. In this case company need to make a decision if they will pay for that process, which is quite risky by the way, because we can’t be sure if the quality of delivered services will remain on the same level after mentioned change.
2. Company will offer better salaries than competition to encourage potential employees to choose them. Again we’re talking about additional costs but in this case quality of work wont suffer. To be honest it can even increase if we’ll make a good decisions during recruitment process.
3. Complement existing shortages by looking for potential talents in own company. In my opinion most reasonable approach but unfortunately at some point we can face a situation where we wont be able to find promising talents. Usually those people will be gems in the Team and as we all know ‘gems’ are quit difficult to find.

What then? What happens in case where company don’t want to go in the direction described in points 1 & 2 and point 3 at some point is impossible to implement because we used all available talents. Yes, that’s the point when bad decisions take place. Directors and Managers try to convince people who are not ready (or will never be) to became Leaders. In those cases most of the potential Leaders will accept the offer because change results in higher salary, promotion, prestige. It’s nice to say to your family and friends ‘Guys, I’ve been promoted to a Leader’s role. I’ll manage my own Team now’. Every mother will be proud hearing that her son or daughter did that.

But at the same time when such decision is made and new Leader take over the Team it’s expected that features such as decisiveness, organizational skills, communication skills, exceptional moral values and especially a vision will come to a scene.

Person without all of mentioned features will make mistakes, sometimes without bad intentions and sometimes without having a clue why something happened. It wont be so important but in this case Leader is responsible for employees. Every mistake may have an impact on their career or even family life. That’s why it’s so crucial to promote people that feels it, people that need only some small experience to wake up their leadership skills.

Do you observe same trends in your city? I’m really interested if such issues appear in other countries around the world.

In the next post I’ll try to shed some light on the best time for make a decision about being a Leader and the effects related to that.