What do you do when you want to improve your management skills?

Many people take a class, get another degree, and attend leadership school, all with the hope of finding management Tao. They crave a methodology, a set of actions they can do that assures management success.

But as the old adage says, it ain’t gonna happen.

Or to quote Bob Sutton, “I’ve come to conclude that all the technique and behavior coaching in the world won’t make a boss great if that boss doesn’t also have a certain mindset.”

So when you face new and challenging situations go ahead and

• access expert information, but don’t stop there.
• Discuss it with friends/colleagues,
• think about both what you read and what they said and
• watch the magic happen when you synthesize the input, tweaking it so it fits your MAP and the situation.

It is this process that makes it an approach you truly own.

Try the process with Sutton’s 12 Things Good Bosses Believe at the link above.

Management skills evolve, both personally and on a wider front, as they are shared with other managers, who also use the process, adding and subtracting based on their situation, experience and MAP.

Stop trying to use the whole cloth from just one source as seems to be happening more often these days.

Yes, the demands on your time are greater than ever, but there  is a crazy idea floating around that most, if not all, solutions are available on the Net if one searches long enough and, worse, that a better-than-50% fit can be used as is.

While this beats the “do first, think later” school of management, it’s not something that will win praise from your bosses or kudos from your team.

The way to become a great manager is to think, mull, accept, reject, evolve and even change your MAP as you digest and apply the information around you.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/4192571173/

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 1:15 am and is filed under Business info, Personal Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: management, robert sutton
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