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If you want a tried, tested and logical approach to help you become an even better manager, then you are in the right place. This site will provide you with the essential theory and practice that you need to get the most out of the people you manage. If that already sounds like what you need then sign up using the form on the right and you won’t miss a thing.
Otherwise, read on…
I will produce a series of posts covering:
1. What Makes an Outstanding Manager?
An outstanding manager knows how to help others to do their best work. This requires a set of skills, behaviours and attitudes that we can help you learn. I will show you how to manage your own learning to become an outstanding manager. I will also show you how to develop a systematic approach to your management that produces the best results.
2. Working Relationships
I will help you to explore the difference between working relationships that work and working relationships that don’t. You will understand the importance of responsiveness and the process of change and progress. I will show you how to develop a working relationship as the pre-requisite for effective management and how to overcome relationships that are not working. I will show you how to approach the management of Overwhelmers, Underwhelmers and Whelmers. I will help you tailor your management behaviours to work well with a wide range of personality types. This will help you to recognise different types of personality and to change your approach accordingly to get the best response.
3. Feedback and the Outstanding Manager
I will show you how to use feedback as information that changes behaviour. You will learn how to use this powerful tool to get more of the behaviours that work and less of the behaviours that don’t. You will understand the importance of courage in giving and getting feedback. We will also contrast feedback with praise, thanks and criticism, and explore the importance of feedback in a hyperlinked world!
4. Getting Feedback
The focus of most managers is on improving the behaviours of others. The outstanding manager focuses on improving their own behaviours. We will explore why an obsession with getting feedback helps you to be a better manager, and how to make it easy for people to give you feedback that you can use to be a better manager.
5. Giving Feedback
Before you can start to give feedback you must understand the behaviours that create or destroy value. What do you need more of? Less of? I will show you how to recognise labels (‘professional’, ‘unprofessional’, ‘caring’, ‘lazy’, ‘pedantic’, ‘detailed’) and how to use them to provide feedback that will change behaviours for the better. I will show you how to use feedback to get more of the behaviours that create value, and use feedback to reduce behaviours that destroy value. I will also show you how to make sure that your feedback gets listened to and what to do if it does not get you the results that you need.
6. Manager as Coach
Feedback is the answer to most of your performance management challenges. But sometimes it doesn’t work because the person getting the feedback does not have the knowledge, skills or desire to change their behaviours. This is when the outstanding manager has to move into a coaching role. I will show you how to set up and manage a coaching contract including goals and milestones to improve performance, and how to provide coaching to every member of your team, all of the time.
7. Delegation
Delegation is about empowering others to develop their careers, take on new responsibilities and work at the leading edge of their abilities. It will also help you to retain talented people who might otherwise outgrow their jobs. It will also help you to get the most value out of your team, to get them working at the edge of their potential. So many managers have bad experiences with delegation and end up just doing the job themselves. I will show you how to delegate successfully, how to choose who to delegate to and how to make sure that the delegation stays on track and ends up with a celebration rather than a nasty surprise! You will also learn how to develop a schedule of delegation.
8. Time and Priority Management
It is impossible to manage time. It slips by at the rate of one hour, every hour. We cannot make time, nor can we find it. But we can make choices about what we spend our time doing. I will show you how to use the 168 hours in every week to achieve the things that matter most to you, your loved ones, your career and community.
9. Managing and Leading – not being ‘The Sticky Middle’
If managing is about helping people to do their best work, then leading is about changing that work in a changing world. It is about transformation and change, while still delivering today’s priorities. This chapter will explore your role in leading, and supporting the leadership of others. I will show you how to use a sense of mission, vision and values to make sure that things get done, the way you need them to be done.
10. Managing Strategy
Strategy is what we do to try and influence our future for the better. I will help you to develop your own strategy and learn how to implement someone else’s. To learn how to shape the future. I show you how to manage a team that thinks and works strategically and how to ensure that strategy leads to the right things being not just talked about but done.
Possible additional lessons:
13. Recruiting People
14. Managing Underperformers
16. Managing Innovation