Developing management capability is at the heart of business growth and yet investment in this critical area is often treated as the poor cousin. At Beyond Performance we stand behind the philosophy that organisations only grow when people grow — this underpins everything we do.
Becoming a manager is about more than just taking on extra responsibilities, decision-making and allocating resources, it is about having the capability to nurture talent in all its forms so that people are inspired to do their best. When managers don’t develop their teams and themselves, businesses run the risk of stagnation or decline. When successful employees leave in droves due to the lack of management capability demonstrated by their immediate superiors, the impact on the bottom line is too high to ignore.
If ever there was a time to sit up and focus on building management capability, now is that time. With fierce competition, commoditised services, easy access to technology and growth rates in many organisations regularly exceeding expectations, often the only real differentiator between businesses is the human factor.
All too often we hear the desire to attain greater levels of engagement, recruit the best people, retain high performing talent and leverage the greatest asset on your books. However, more often, businesses stay focused on leadership, technology and innovation, leaving front line managers the poor cousins.
Let’s stop to consider this in your own world – with the use of a little Design Thinking (we are using this approach in much of what we do for our clients at Beyond Performance). Work with a colleague to uncover your management capability needs (and later you can see if they line up with those we think are fundamental to their success – as listed at the end of this article).
Empathise
Put yourself in your manager’s shoes. Define three profiles of typical managers in your business. Describe them as if to a marketer; their current position, their background and current position, their needs, wants, desires, frustrations and challenges as a manager in your organisation.
Next, consider how they currently develop their team(s) and the process they go through. Interview them perhaps and see if you’ve missed anything – don’t just assume you understand their world.
This insight allows you to uncover their emotions through the process, the obstacles and motivations. Dig deeper than just surface answers to explore the why and how.
Define
Try to reframe your findings into a problem statement by working through these three steps. Summarise your findings into:
“Our managers need a way to __________________________________________________
because _________________________________________________________________"
Ideate
Now the fun part! Take five minutes to consider as many radical ways as you can to meet the needs and support your manager group to develop their people. Share these ideas with your colleague and your test group of managers to get feedback. Don’t defend, just listen and interpret. E ncourage your audience to advocate their point of view. Reflect on the feedback and refine your thinking – create a new way of working.
Prototype
Once you have sketched out your new idea, create a quick version of it (at this stage it might be a framework of content and delivery mode) and get specific feedback from your audience:
Test
Once you’ve refined your thinking from the prototype, develop your idea into a real live version that can be piloted. Test that you have achieved your goals, met their needs and created change. Once you have started this process, you will soon find yourself back in the Empathise zone!
Good luck!
At the start of this blog post, we offered you the opportunity to see if your management capability needs lined up with those that we think are fundamental to their success? Our list of topics could be a whole book, so we’ve refined it for quick reference:
Management Development Programme
GOAL: (this is the problem statement)
| Self | Others | Business |
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*Management processes include:
If you want to talk about developing frontline management capability or our Beyond Fundamentals programme, just give us a call 09 414 3843.
We’re here to help.