These are some management secrets you are never taught

"Imagine you’re a violinist in an orchestra. You’ve been playing for 20 years and have dedicated years of your life to practicing your technique, the theory, instrument maintenance, ensemble, and solo playing. Over time, your peers have come to recognize your exceptional technique and your command of dynamics, and they respect and admire your mastery.

Now imagine that you arrive to rehearse with your orchestra and before you pick up your violin, you’re handed the baton and are guided to a small podium in front of the orchestra. You’re the conductor now.

You’ve followed the guidance from conductors for years; you’ve seen them conducting but you’ve never conducted yourself and—worse—you’ve never thought about conducting. You don’t know how to hold the baton, and you don’t know how to give cues, control the tempo, the dynamics, or the mood of the performance. You don’t know how to conduct.

But due to your expertise on the violin, the patrons of the orchestra expect that you’ll be able to conduct the entire orchestra quite naturally. They’ll actually be surprised and disappointed if you can’t do it. After all, you’re the best violinist they’ve heard for decades.

As implausible as this scenario might seem to any musician, this is exactly what is happening in almost all workplaces around the world. According to the Chartered Management Institute, around 2.8 million people in the UK have been handed this metaphorical “baton” accounting for 70% to 80% of all managers. If these levels are at all similar in the U.S. then this would equate to over 17 million people poorly equipped to engage their workforce. These are our accidental managers.

An accidental manager is someone who’s been given people management responsibilities for reasons other than their notable people management skills. Accidental managers are normally appointed to positions for which they may be unsuitable due to being particularly good at something else. In our orchestra example, while the violinist has been part of an orchestra for year—they understand orchestras and are an expert player—they have never conducted the orchestra. The expectation that they should suddenly be an expert may cause feelings of disorientation, confusion, and anxiety, similarly for writers promoted to become editors, top-performing sales people promoted to manage sales teams, coders promoted to become software leads, waiters promoted to become restaurant managers, and GPs expected to run integrated healthcare services.

Like playing the violin, coding, welding, serving food, writing, and diagnosing patients, people management is a distinct skill that you have to learn and develop. Being a good manager is not simply a natural consequence of being good at something else. In fact, being particularly good at a certain skill can often be a barrier to becoming a good manager, especially if the ability to coach, mentor, and transfer skills is lacking. Excelling at a certain discipline in the absence of management skills can often foster an attitude of “it’s quicker for me to do it than to show you.”

This is not to say that all accidental managers are bad managers. Some people who find themselves managing people will excel at it, either through intuition, emulation, proactively developing themselves—or most likely—a combination of all three. But they’ve succeeded in spite of how they became managers, not because of it.

The good news is that your route into management, whether by accident or design, doesn’t determine your future success. And you need not be defined by your informal diagnosis as an accidental manager. So, what can accidental managers do to effectively handle the?people?side of leadership?

ASK YOUR OWN MANAGER FOR GUIDANCE

Chances are, your own manager will have gone through a similar journey in their management career. Speak to them and explore what options are available within your organization to further develop your people management skills.

ADJUST YOUR MINDSET

In order to fully step into the people management side of your new responsibilities, you must adjust your mindset from being a doer to being an?enabler?of others. This is often the hardest shift for managers to make. Your job is no longer to write code, produce articles, analyze data, or indeed play the violin. Your job is now to?empower, guide, and motivate?your team to achieve results through their own endeavors.

LEARN TO ASK MORE POWERFUL QUESTIONS

Once you’ve shifted your mindset, you’ll have to change the way you handle situations where new members of your team come to you with problems. Rather than adopting a command-and-control management style, where you provide the solutions by telling or advising them what to do, you must build a deeper understanding of how to ask questions that generate a positive outcome.

Questions are the keys not only to increasing performance and engagement, but also fostering an authentic connection with your staff. Learning how to ask questions in a way that fits in with the flow of your conversation and that are genuinely for the benefit of the other person you’re speaking with provides a powerful way of engaging their thinking.

It also means that the ownership of ideas that the dialogue produces remains with the other person; they’re?their?ideas, not?yours. Your intention should be to create a conversational tone that gets people to open up, and then to actively listen to what they say and respond appropriately, in order to foster authentic connection and engagement."

by Laura Ashley-Timms