The Managerial Mindset!
By Dilip Saraf on 03 Jun 2012
As a career coach I have now worked with over 5,000 clients globally during the past 11 years. The most common need with which clients come to me is to break into management from being an individual contributor. A notch below that is their need on how to get into executive ranks (above a senior director), followed by how to be more effective in their leadership roles where they work. Of course, there are many, who come to me for relationship problems with their colleagues and bosses, and other career issues.
In this blog I am going to focus on what makes for a good manager and what characteristics—mindset—I see in my clients that allow them to rapidly get promoted past the first level of management and into executive ranks.
As we advance in our careers there are two major points of inflections in how we grow and change our mindset. The first occurs when one moves from being an individual contributor to a manager, and the second one occurs when a functional manager (up to a senior director) moves into VP ranks.
The first transition from being an individual contributor to manager entails clearly understanding the role of manager. Those just promoted from being excellent individual contributors to managers often mistakenly interpret that signal as their need to do more of what they did in their previous role to succeed in their new role, now as a manager. A manager plays a very different role in this function: Their main job is to get work done through other resources that report to them, without doing or redoing the work that these resources are doing or micromanaging. They also must provide the necessary leadership to the process, so that they have influence over their resources that goes beyond their legal authority to manage those resources (a’ la giving orders).
To achieve this managerial nirvana this incumbent must understand the four functions of managing: Leading, Planning, Organizing, and Setting up Controls, and embrace them by surrendering their desire to do the technical work that they were so attached to in their previous role. Each of these functions subsumes their own tasks, and there are rules that govern how these tasks get done in an efficient and effective way. If a new manager does not embrace this mindset they are doomed. If they do not understand and embrace this concept and practice it diligently in how they carry out their role, they soon become dysfunctional or worse, wreaking havoc amongst their ranks! Studies over the past 50 years have consistently shown that about 70-80% of the managers fall in this dysfunctional or incompetent category!
The second transition occurs when a functional leader (up to the ranks of a senor director) moves into a VP role and moves upward from there. This transition has to do with understanding the difference between running a functional area (engineering, sales, marketing, contracts, etc.) to running a business. The latter requires that the executive understand the forces that drive their business: Technology, competition, markets, global issues, regulatory framework, and things that go bump in the night—seeing around the bends!
In my coaching practice I find that those, who come to me from the state of unconscious incompetence and recognize it are far more likely to succeed in their development than those who come to me just once under the illusion of knowledge and go away in the same state. It is these latter “professionals” that belong to the 70-80% class that I mentioned above. So, it is up to you to decide which class you want to belong to!
Good luck!
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