This is a good time to be talking about managers people management skills. The predicted financial crises in the Public Sector means the message is going out management post will be cut, hierarchies will be flattened, more will have to be don with less, and services will have to be delivered in different ways. Whilst your organisation may continue to function with fewer managers are you confident that the remaining managers can inspire staff when services are being cut and staff made redundant? Do your managers have the negotiating and influencing skills to get people to work in different ways? Delivering more with less will require innovation are your managers innovative? Partnerships will be threatened as budgets are tightened can your managers maintain good relationships when partners retreat to core business? Flatter management structures will mean greater spans of management control can your managers manage across traditional service boundaries, can they manage services they don’t have a professional back ground in, and can they cope with not knowing the detail?
To deliver in this climate all managers will need good people management skills that is the ability to inspire people, a willingness to take responsibility, the ability to challenge appropriately and the confidence to let people get on with it.
This is not the time to cut back on management training and development however tempting that might appear. It may however be the time to review management development to do more with less and ensure you are equipping managers with the skills and experiences that will benefit the organisation.
Traditional management development is expensive. Frequently these courses are developed with local universities allowing them to be tailored to an organisations needs with an emphasis on work related situations in return for a guaranteed supply of students. Managers enjoy the fact that they can bring in their work experience but their real popularity with managers is that the resulting qualification looks good on the CV. Few employers can justify this level of expenditure on a small proportion of their managers when budgets are under sever pressure. Nor is this the most effective way of growing the type of manager specific to your organisation needs.
What organisations increasingly need is a cost effective way of developing the leadership skills of large numbers of managers in a way that moulds them in to the type of manager best suited to the organisations’ needs. Preferably without taking them away from their day jobs. Ideally through an approach that allows them to dip in and out when time and opportunity permits.
In Lancashire we have built just such a management development programme based on executive coaching, management learning sets, 360 degree feed back, mentoring and management surgeries plus posting discussion material on the intranet. The aim is to give managers insight into how their behaviour affects others and to provide opportunities to share and reflect on their experience. The programme starts with 360 degree feedback from colleagues and direct reports and then either one to one executive coaching or membership of a management learning set.
Executive coaching was provided to all 30 senior managers. This involved observing managers in a range of management situations such as board meetings, presentations to multi agency groups, addressing a large staff group or conducting negotiations with a key partner agency. Senior managers rarely get such direct feed back on their performance but despite some initial apprehension those involved felt the material generated offered some genuine insights.
The feedback was well received even though some of the messages were blunt e.g. “talks too much”, “needs to listen more”, “needs to recognise the need to move at the pace of the slowest ship in the convoy”, “can come over as demanding and impatient”. This was balanced by plenty of positive feedback around individuals being supportive and making their expectations clear.
The rolling out of executive coaching to all senior managers promoted considerable discussion about what type of manager and what type of management behaviour the organisation wanted to promote. If all managers were to be good at people management then all managers needed opportunities to gain insight into how their behaviour affected others and how they might adapt their management style. Ideally all managers would have access to executive coaching but this was impracticable and too expensive. A simplified 360 degree questionnaire was produced specific to assessing an individuals people management skills which could be interpreted without a computer software package or skilled technician. Management learning sets were set up with 15 managers in each. The learning sets were originally lead by the management consultants but as more sets were established they became co facilitated with senior managers. The aim was to give middle managers and then all managers an opportunity to explore how their behaviour affected others. The emphasis was on discussing the type of management situations they routinely came across and to share their experience in dealing with these.
It became clear that learning sets were identifying within middle managers the need for more and ongoing support. In response to this the idea of management surgeries was developed. Four days were put in the calendar over the following twelve months when the management consultants would be available for an hour’s slot booked in advance to discuss any issue any manager wanted to raise. It was also agreed that all managers would be offered a mentor starting with those who had been in a management learning set. This was seen as a way of building on the work already started with individuals whilst recognising that management development was not a one off exercise.
Blair McPherson