After savage public sector budget cuts organisations will look very different. They will require a very different type of manager. Those managers who remain will have to unlearn what they thought management was about.
New smaller organisations will have fewer staff and a lot less managers. Fewer managers means greater spans of responsibility. Managers will find themselves responsible for a very broad range of services in which they have no professional background and no technical expertise they will have to rely on their management skills and be enthusiastic delegators.
To start with three long held truisms will have to be unlearnt. Management is about controlling people. Management is about knowing things .Management is about doing things. These will need to be replaced with management is about asking good questions. Management is about freeing people up to get on with it. Management is about helping people get another job.
Management will no longer be about knowing things. Put another way, in the new organisation being good at your profession doesn’t qualify you for management. Lots of managers have excellent technical skills, they were a great engineer, a brilliant teacher, a skilful lawyer, an accomplished accountant but now they are a manager and they need to develop management skills. Managers should not spend time doing things because that usually means they are trying to do someone else’s job, possibly drawing on those professional skills that served them so well in the past. Now they have to delegate and learn to manage people who have technical knowledge and skills in areas they don’t. They must instead rely on their management skills. Management skills are about knowing the right questions to ask, the ones that make people stop and think, and demonstrate you are taking an interest. These are often why questions. Why are we doing this, how will this benefit customers?
Management is not about controlling people, it’s about trusting them, building up their confidence in their own ability, and supporting them by removing the obstacles which stop them from doing a good job. This means delegating financial decisions so that the individual does not have to get authorisation from above before they do what they know needs doing. As long as someone stays within their budget, why do they need you to authorise expenditure?
In order to delegate tasks and decisions you have to help the individual develop the knowledge and skills required. This is not about sending someone on a course, it is about showing them how to do something, being there to answer questions and advise. Of course, delegating is initially time consuming, it’s quicker to do it yourself, but in the longer term if you skill up someone, then that’s another thing you don’t have to do.
Why would someone want to take on more responsibility, learn new skills and increase their knowledge? Why to get a better job of course. So, a good manager helps their best people to leave.
Blair McPherson was until recently a Director in a large local authority he is author of UnLearning management-short stories on modern management and People management in a harsh financial climate www.blairmcpherson.co.uk