Training opportunities and self development for managers | Managing Leadership

Learning to walk the walk

In the past two days we have reviewed the basic elements of a self-development program for managers. But those are essentially passive efforts to attain knowledge and insight. These don’t become experience, judgement, and skill until you reflect on and practice them. Today, we will complete this adaptation with some ideas about how you can convert theory into effective, alert, consciously-guided practice:

Observation. As you follow the suggestions offered in yesterday’s piece, you will be arming yourself to become a keen observer of the managers around you. Be aggressive about this: there can hardly be a better laboratory than the firm, or better experiments than the actual ways management is practiced by managers.

Anchor your observations to results. As you do this, set the concepts and frameworks aside for a moment, and just assess the management actions and styles you see in terms of how they meet organizational goals, or the particular targets assigned the managers you are observing. Consider also their effects on organizational morale and endurance.

Be alert to what you can learn from negative examples. Often, careful consideration of them can teach much more, of more lasting value, than the rest combined.

Application. Most important of all: use what you’ve been learning. This is how you really become a better manager. The key issue here is to get effective feedback. Try to find objective data about unit performance, employee morale, and employees’ success in their careers.

Routinely ask your seniors and your mentor for their assessments. Ask for formal evaluations even more frequently than your company’s scheduled reviews. If necessary, rotate these between your immediate boss and your mentor. You can consult with peers, also (it may be more effective to do this with your network contacts in other firms).

But the keys are these:

Your management development program comes down to you practicing what you’ve determined is relevant and valuable from all your varied sources of learning, and then
Obtaining and reflecting on the feedback your management initiatives generate so that you can reinforce good practices, improve others, and jettison still others. Please bear in mind that this feedback isn’t merely the opinions of various colleagues, but should rigorously and intelligently incorporate hard data about results in productivity and efficiency.

In this way you will train yourself to become a manager who knows how to apply theory to the demands of work. Moreover, you will become adept at doing so in the midst of a dynamic, collaborative, social environment, developing and deploying assets for both your work and career among your employees, peers, and seniors.

That, after all, is what managers do. And this is how you learn to do it.

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Today’s tip: Once you’ve developed a professional approach to continuous development, you have the means available to you to turn your focused attention to real mastery. Please see this potent description of what that means, by Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership.

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