You write a blog, you have a website, you write articles and send them to nice Editors about how good talent is being overlooked and they ignore you. Then one of them goes on a course and suddenly they can't wait to say exactly what I have been trying to say.
Rant Over
I am exaggerating, as usual, but I picked up this month's Director Magazine from the IOD while waiting for someone to turn up on Friday and there was a good article by Jane Simms on page 27 entitled 'Leading Questions'. It appears Ms. Simms had an epiphany when she attended a training course for a profiling tool while doing some research for an article. She found the results to be startling and spent most of the two day course in 'denial' (yes I have a bit about that before) of the results.
As a self-employed journalist she believed her core attributes were innovating, promoting and producing. The test revealed she was a control freak, most interested in inspecting and auditing. She rightly points out she must have been hell to work with at her previous jobs as an editor manging people and I have to say I wouldn't have liked to have been on the receiving end of those 'attributes'.
But Jane Simms also points out that she was one of the many thousands of people 'who are thrust into management positions and expected to understand intuitively how to manage others'.
I couldn't agree more.
Personal Experience
My first 'big' management job I have written about before - due to resignations I had a 'dead man's shoes' role managing a £13m revenue business with some 56 reports. I was rightly chuffed but as the country lurched around recession and our main vendor did a volte-face on strategy we rapidly found that around 70% of our main vendor's business was at risk as we added little value. The business plummeted and staff got demoralised, some left, some I had to 'let go'. After a year of hell, we managed to shore up the business and survive. I was 27 at the time.
It had been a bad time to find out that I knew nothing about managing a business - but I did learn an incredible amount over the course of that year and I also learnt a lot about myself. One thing was sure, the cockiness of thinking I knew it all prior to taking the job had been rapidly beaten out of me and I had found myself vastly under prepared. In the end, I was certainly to blame for sticking my neck out to take on such a job but equally the senior executives were daft in putting an unprepared and untested person into such a big role at that time.
Lessons Learnt
During that year, I certainly did learn something of great importance. While Richard Branson is right that business should be fun, I rapidly found it it isn't always fun. Looking into the eyes of a grown man crying as I made him redundant with his boss pleading with me to not do it was a memory I have found hard to forget. I also learned that planning is the best way to avoid disaster. It's difficult to plan for all eventualities but you have to know what it is you are trying to achieve, work out what is required to achieve it and think about as many things that might get in the way as possible. And above all, think about what might happen in your market place that makes the plan most vulnerable - the golden assumption that becomes the Achilles Heel of any business.
And people. I had thought beforehand that I was nice enough chap, got on well with people, had some leadership skills and was ambitious enough to make things happen. How dumb I had been. Leadership skills are the crux of it all and this was the point of Jane Simms' article.
Leadership
I have turned off watching things like 'The Apprentice' mainly when Ruth Badger became a revered 'leader' for apparently just making scowls when other people are talking. I hate that - such disrespect no matter what tripe people are talking is just disgusting, and I am sure she would have hated it if she had received similar treatment. But that's the kind of leadership revered in such programs, perhaps as there seems to be a reverence toward the leadership styles of Alan Sugar, Philip Green and Donald Trump - I don't know. But there is this thinking of sling the person into a few situations under TV spotlight, get them to out-slag-off the others and you will know them. Leadership is about managing people to get the right results.
Apprentice-style management may work when business conditions are good, but when things go slightly awry, the core attributes of individuals bubble to the surface and they revert to type. I have blogged about this before. Why is it that when recession bites so many business leaders hand the company to accountants and external cost-cutting executives and let them cut the company to ribbons before handing it back in no condition to take advantage of any upturns? But they do. Fair weather managers, perhaps.
Many such leaders are strong personalities who lead by sheer dominance of character but many lack the planning and people management skills to work businesses when times are hard. Such people seem to be brilliant when sales are vibrant and leading bold acquisition plans or fabulous trading in banks, but when the downturns bite they retreat into a shell and mumble things about 'Global Market Conditions'.
Getting The Best Out Of People
I agree with Jane Simms - often forceful characters at the top of business are useless when downturns arrive. They are so used to managing things their own way that they have ignored the power of the people below. It was the big lesson I learnt about people when I was in that fateful first big role. People have much more to offer than you think and getting the best out of them is something that doesn't come natural to 'big personality leaders' as so much revolves about them.
I remember an older Product Manager who worked for me. I thought he was not performing well as he largely ignored what I told him and plodded along his own way. I felt he was a Luddite so we should get rid of him. But having attended a short course on Interviewing Techniques run by an Australian and thinking I knew it all beforehand, I realised you needed to know what made people tick to understand their real abilities. So I sat this PM down and we just talked about what he did in his spare time. To my amazement, every year he organised the second largest Regatta in the UK - from planning to budgeting to executing. It was a far bigger job than my day job and he did it in his spare time! From that day onwards our relationship changed and I valued his opinion and took time to understand how he was working. Sure we had our differences but I adjusted his responsibilities to get the best out of him and, for that matter, me.
When times are harder, you need to turn to your people as they have many of the ideas, innovations and skills to help you survive - owning those common goals is crucial to making the sacrifices and changes required to help a business manage a recession and take advantage of the upturns on offer at the end of it.
My Point
Similar to Jane Simms, I believe that innovation comes as much from within the heart of the organisation as from the leadership or outside and most managers have little clue how exploit the talents, skills and capabilities of their people as they have had little direction and help themselves. Ms. Simms also points out that many look to HR to get direction on this but frankly HR are probably the least equipped to do so.
The skill of any manager is to keep looking and understanding to find the inner qualities of their people and listening to their thoughts and ideas. Very often signals for opportunities or threats can come from people in the firing line but managers often will have just a few 'pet' workers they listen to. Grading staff rigorously doesn't help as most systems tell you there are elite and then also-rans by grade and only the elite are worth grooming and listening to. How foolish, when the downturn comes, it is the majority or also-rans of the workforce who will save you by their extra efforts but you have already alienated and trained them less by grading.
The mark of any manager in a downturn is not how fast they handover the keys to the shop to the accountants for cost cutting but how they planned in advance to avoid it.
We are seeing businesses going belly up within short trading cycles as they Hit The Wall and yet simple people like me highlight a little planning can a) help you survive a recession and b) help you thrive on the upturn and, heaven knows, may be even during it.
I have talked a lot about reviewing business pipelines, talking to customers, checking the Value Proposition, making tough decisions early, spending less etc but these are not the things that many leaders and managers like to do as a) it makes them look not too great and ego is important and b) they have no idea where to start.
Jane Simms highlights that line managers and leaders need the skills to get the best out of people particularly in a downturn. I have highlighted before, the biggest cost to any business is poor recruitment and the management of the process afterwards. How much money could be saved, profit earned and businesses have survived if only more managers were better skilled in managing people?
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