Greetings!
"Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet."
~ Henry Mintzberg
McGill University
We've all been in some organization or job where we have experienced poor leadership or management ability and the impact that it has on the people and the business. As individuals we have learned from their mistakes and how not to repeat them. However, as business owners, executives and entrepreneurs, assuring that we protect our businesses means making certain that we have the right people in the right positions managing the day-to-day operations. We do this by looking beyond the technical abilities of the potential candidate to look at the human-being and what they bring to the table in terms of soft skills, leadership potential and the ability to communicate and motivate people. We ensure the success of the person so that the success of the organization is realized. This requires employing training and development opportunities so that the skills necessary for the role are learned, applied and realized; a recipe for business success.
Sincerely,
Tracy D. Holloman and Kevin A. Key
Managing Partners
|
|
"Who's Managing the Managers?" - A Lesson in Management Performance
So often people are elevated to managerial positions because of their technical ability to do their job, not because they have the ability to lead, or manage people and operations. Take Ron for instance.
Ron has been with a very large and reputable technology company for 23 years. He has good sales skills and longevity with the company and therefore, he was elevated to a managerial position. He manages a team of sales staff in Manhattan and with the restructuring the company has undergone over the last two years, he has acquired another team to manage in Long Island. Two weeks into reporting into Ron, the Long Island team quickly discovered that Ron really had no managerial skills and he lacked leadership skills as well. So how did they find this out you might ask?
Perhaps it was the first ever team meeting Ron scheduled for the Manhattan and Long Island teams in which he had the folks from Long Island travel into Manhattan for a 30 minute meeting. And while no one wanted to make waves, one sales representative spoke up letting him know that it took more than an hour to travel into Manhattan for the meeting and it will take more than an hour to travel back; surely there could have been more on the agenda to make it worth the Long Island team's while since it cut out of their time to prospect and work with clients. Could this have been a virtual meeting since there is plenty of technology that could have been used to facilitate the meeting?
|
