The Effective Manager: Management skills for high performance
By Sarah Cook
()
About this ebook
This book will help you develop your management skills. It is designed to assist you in understanding the characteristics of a high-performance manager, to help you assess where your strengths and development areas lie as a manager and to create a plan of action for realising your management potential.
Sarah Cook
Sarah Cook is the Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy Ltd. She has over 20 years’ consulting experience specialising in team building, leadership and change. Prior to this, Sarah worked for Unilever and as Head of Customer Care for a retail marketing consultancy. As well as having practical experience of helping to create high-performing teams across the globe, Sarah is a business author and has written widely on the topic of team building, leadership, management development and coaching. She also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars on these topics. Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Chartered Marketeer. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA. Sarah is an accredited user of a wide range of psychometric and team diagnostic tools. She may be contacted via sarah@thestairway.co.uk.
Read more from Sarah Cook
Building a High Performance Team: Proven techniques for effective team working Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEssential Time Management and Organisation: A Pocket Guide Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Coaching for High Performance: How to develop exceptional results through coaching Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leading for Success: Unleash your leadership potential to achieve extraordinary results Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCoping with Unplanned Absences: A Pocket Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Effective Manager
Related ebooks
Vendor Management Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow To Lead A Successful Organizational Transformation: Leadership and Organizational Development Executive Guide Series, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWinning at Leadership: How to Become an Effective Leader Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBecoming a New Manager: Expert Solutions to Everyday Challenges Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Start with a Vision: How Leaders Envision a Better Future and Show Others How to Get There Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How To Overcome Challenges of Creating Effective Work Teams: Leadership and Organizational Development Executive Guide Series, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsManaging Others: Teams and Individuals: Your guide to getting it right Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Be a Manager: A Guide for Success and Profits for Managers and Leaders in These Difficult Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeader versus Manager: Discover the Differences between the Two Roles Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Experimental Leader: Be a New Kind of Boss to Cultivate an Organization of Innovators Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Strategic Leader's Roadmap, Revised and Updated Edition: 6 Steps for Integrating Leadership and Strategy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStrategic Leadership and Strategic Management: Leading and Managing Change on the Edge of Chaos Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMind Tools for Managers: 100 Ways to be a Better Boss Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Development of Leadership Skills Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The New Art of Managing People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Building A Winning Team: Technical Leadership Capabilities Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStrategic Thinking: A Four Piece Puzzle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaders Ought to Know: 11 Ground Rules for Common Sense Leadership Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsManager's Guide To Providing Feedback: The No Waffle Guide To Providing Feedback and Rewards Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHigh Performance Leadership: Leaders are what leaders do Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsProject Leadership and Team Building in Global Project Management: Best Practices Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsForce For Change: How Leadership Differs from Management Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pragmatic Project Management: Five Scalable Steps to Success Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lens of Leadership™: Being the Leader Others Want to Follow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDesigning Workplace Mentoring Programs: An Evidence-Based Approach Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeadership Practice Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Process Optimization A Complete Guide - 2021 Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Four Mindsets: How to Influence, Motivate and Lead High Performance Teams Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Guide to Project Management for New Managers and Management Assistants: How to Get Things Done in Less Time Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Management For You
Managing Oneself: The Key to Success Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: 30th Anniversary Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Third Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New One Minute Manager Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Principles: Life and Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace: Empowering Organizations by Encouraging People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of The 5 AM Club: by Robin Sharma - Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. - A Comprehensive Summary Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Revised and Updated: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of The Laws of Human Nature: by Robert Greene - A Comprehensive Summary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Emotional Intelligence Habits Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 80/20 Principle (Review and Analysis of Koch's Book) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 Summary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win | Summary & Key Takeaways Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Company Rules: Or Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the CIA Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 360 Degree Leader Workbook: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Get Ideas Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/52600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews: Ready-to-Use Words and Phrases That Really Get Results Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The 12 Week Year (Review and Analysis of Moran and Lennington's Book) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Lead When You're Not in Charge Study Guide: Leveraging Influence When You Lack Authority Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leadershift: The 11 Essential Changes Every Leader Must Embrace Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Spark: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for The Effective Manager
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Effective Manager - Sarah Cook
978-1-8-4928-111-9
FOREWORD
IT is often seen as a ‘hard-skill’ profession where there is no place for soft skills. Yet the importance of soft skills for the IT professional should not be underrated; they underlie all behaviours and interactions. Both IT and non-IT professionals need to work together and learn from each other for effective business performance. All professionals, be they in IT or elsewhere, need to understand how their actions and reactions impact on their behaviour and working relationships.
This series of books aims to provide practical guidance on a range of soft-skills areas for those in IT and also for those not in IT who deal with IT professionals in order to facilitate more effective and co-operative working practices.
Each book is written by an experienced consultant and trainer. Their approach throughout is essentially practical and direct, offering a wealth of tried and tested professional guidance. Each chapter contains a diagnostic and focused questions to help the manager plan and steer their course. The language used is jargon-free, and a bibliography and a helpful glossary of terms are included at the end of the book.
Angela Wilde, February 2009
PREFACE
This book is intended to provide IT managers with practical advice and tips on how to become an effective manager.
Whether you are new to management or have been a manager for some time, management is a skill that can be learned and developed in order to gain the trust and respect of your team members and to achieve team and organisational goals.
This book will help you to develop your management skills. It is designed to assist you in understanding what the characteristics are of a high-performing manager, to help you assess where your strengths and development areas lie as a manager and to create a plan of action for realising your management potential.
I hope that you will find this book informative and practical and that it provides you with details on how you can become an even more effective manager.
Sarah Cook
The Stairway Consultancy Ltd
www.thestairway.co.uk
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Cook is the Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy Ltd. She has 15 years’ consulting experience specialising in team building, leadership and change. Prior to this, Sarah worked for Unilever and as Head of Customer Care for a retail marketing consultancy.
As well as having practical experience of helping individuals improve their management skills, Sarah is a business author and has written widely on management development, leadership, coaching and team building. She also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars on these topics.
Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Chartered Marketeer. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA. Sarah is an accredited user of a wide range of psychometric and team diagnostic tools. She may be contacted via sarah@thestairway.co.uk .
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to acknowledge:
John Adair, Action Centred Leadership, Gower Publishing, 1979.
Dean R. Spitzer, SuperMotivation: A Blueprint for Energizing Your Organization from Top to Bottom, AMACOM, a division of the American Management Association, 1995.
Steve Macaulay of Cranfield University for his thoughts on conflict management.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Tom worked as an IT manager for a large multinational. Recently promoted, Tom sometimes wished that he had given up the opportunity to become a manager and had continued to work on his own. He had taken the job on with such good intentions: he would be an effective manager, he would manage the performance of individuals on his team, he would recruit and create a high-performing team, he would deal effectively with difficult situations and help others manage change.
It had all seemed so perfect in the ideal world, but six months into the role, Tom’s confidence in his own abilities was waning. Being a manager was not as easy as Tom had expected. After speaking to a friend who had been an IT manager for five years in another organisation, Tom realised that managing others was not easy, even for people with more years of service than his own.
This book is dedicated to people like Tom and his colleague who have made the transition from a technical role to managing others. It provides practical advice and proven techniques to help you enhance your management skills. You will find exercises and assessment tools, as well as theory on how to manage others effectively. Each chapter provides examples and ideas that you can readily put into practice.
CHAPTER 1:
WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE MANAGER?
This chapter outlines for you:
• The characteristics of an effective manager.
• A model of where you should be focusing your attention.
• A diagnostic to help you assess your own management skills.
We join organisations and leave managers
Think back to when you joined the organisation where you currently work or an organisation that you have worked for in the past. I expect that when you joined either of these organisations, you were hopeful about what the future would bring. You probably had a good impression of the business that you were joining and felt that you were making a good choice of employer. Hopefully you still feel like this about the organisation you are currently working for. If you don’t feel like this, or if you decided to leave another organisation in the past, research shows that the biggest influence on a decision to ‘disengage’ from the organisation is your direct line manager.
When we work for a good manager we are more likely to feel motivated and committed to the organisation. We are prepared to go the extra mile for the customer, for the organisation and for our boss.
So what makes an effective manager? What does a good manager