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HOW TO USE THIS MANUAL
1.
Read through the manual at least once
(2-3 times is preferable).
Don’t try to learn or
memorise anything on your first
readings. Your brain will automatically
pick up an overview of the structure and
main content.
Your first impression of
the material is likely to be that most
of it is just common sense. You may be
surprised that there is no mention of
famous theories e.g.:
Theory X / theory Y
Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs
Herzberg’s
motivation/hygiene theory
Hawthorne effects
Belbin’s team
types, etc.
There are good reasons
for leaving out the theory.
Firstly, in order to
become an effective manager based on an
understanding of the theories would
require more time and space than is
available for this self-teach manual.
Secondly, and more
importantly, most of the theories are
difficult to apply in real situations.
Real-life people-management is about the
practical knowledge and skills that can
be applied to steer a potentially
volatile situation towards a
satisfactory outcome. It is all about
face to face behaviour.
Real people-management is
about adapting your behaviour in such a
way that it generates the right
behaviour on the part of the person
being managed
The best guide for
enabling you to give out the appropriate
behaviour when operating under stressful
circumstances is common sense.
That is why you will get
the feeling that you already know most
of the facts presented in this course.
That is the point. The purpose of this
course is to teach you strategies for
ensuring that you apply your innate good
sense whatever the pressures or
distractions.
2.
Tackle the elements one at a time.
The first section
contains a set of information elements.
These are designed to remind you of what
you probably already know about managing
people successfully.
These elements are:
Seven things you need to
remember about people
Specific
people-handling skills
Accountability
The importance of
taking notes
These elements are
presented in small easily-digested
chunks. How many chunks you can process
in one go is up to you. For most people,
learning, retention and application, ,
works best on the “little and often”
principle.
Taking
one or two chunks at a time is probably
better than trying to cram it all in at
once. After all, how long have you
needed to become a more effective
people-manager? A few more days is not
going to make matters any worse, and a
leisurely approach could entrench your
skills far more effectively than the
“binge” approach.
Particularly if you are
studying this course on your own you
presumably want to surprise your peers
and managers with your newly acquired
skills in behaving as an effective
people-manager. Make sure that you are
reasonably confident and secure in your
understanding of the information before
you progress. There are exercises and
suggestions associated with the
information elements to help you master
this material.
You will need to be
familiar with the information modules
before progressing to the application
modules.
The main section of the
course consists of a series of classic
people-management situations. In these
elements you are provided with an easily
learned set of steps designed to take
you to a satisfactory outcome in the
shortest possible time.
These are:
Delegation
Progress review
Performance
management
Behaviour
management
Follow up
Administering
praise
Administering
discipline (2 stages)
Responding to
unforeseen events/complaints
Introducing change
The most important thing
about the sets of steps is that they
work most effectively when you do them
in the right order. You may reach a
conclusion if you skip a step or change
the order, but the most likely result
will be that you will find yourself
taking too much time or going round in
circles.
You will find these
elements are quite similar in structure.
This is designed to aid your learning,
so that you can more easily acquire the
habit of behaving in the most effective
way. As you progress through this course
you will find that quite small
variations in procedure, behaviour and
phraseology can have a significant
impact on the outcome. As you work
through the material be aware of the
small but significant differences.
The steps for each type
of interaction are generic. The specific
content of each interaction that you
will have in real life is unique. This
means that there is an infinite number
of illustrative examples that could be
used to explain how the interactions
work. This in turn means that any
specific examples chosen stand a good
chance of being outside the direct
experience of the reader.
Although some real life
examples are included in the text to
illustrate certain points, you will find
it easier to grasp the rationale of the
process by fitting your own experience
and problems to the generic form of the
steps.
You will need to plan
and rehearse situations from your own
environment. While this course can
provide you with the steps needed to
conduct the interaction, only you can
fill in the detail needed for real life
application. There are worksheets
provided to help you construct and
evaluate your own practice sessions.
(These are under construction and will
be available shortly)
3.
Play with the material
Once you have worked
through the material you will know what
kind of verbal behaviour works most
effectively to achieve your goals. It is
good fun, and helps reinforce your
learning, if you play with the material
(not in a real-life situation,
obviously) and see if you can invent
ways of achieving the opposite of what
you want.
For example, you want the
person that you are managing to be
motivated to achieve what you want them
to do. You will have learned what kinds
of words and behaviour will achieve
this. What kinds of words and behaviour
would you use to make someone feel
unmotivated? If you are studying this
course with colleagues you could compete
to generate the worst possible examples
of management behaviour. The spooky
thing is that you soon realise that the
worst examples of people-management
behaviour you can think of are nowhere
near as bad as the examples you can draw
from real life.
Once you can spot bad
management practice, and say why it’s
bad, you’ve understood good management.
As you work through the
modules you may also notice that the
structure of many of the interactions
can be easily adapted to other contexts.
The techniques and skills are not solely
for use in a hierarchical management
structure, where authority is derived
from position. The techniques work
equally well in a matrix management
structure where authority can sometimes
be a little blurred.
The techniques are also
useful to be able for managing
colleagues, your own manager, customers
and suppliers. These techniques will
enable you to manage all those
relationships without having to rely on
the authority of your position.
Similarly, in a domestic
or personal context you can use the
techniques to influence friends and
relatives. But do beware; a personal
relationship is different from a work
relationship. The more you use
management techniques within a personal
relationship, the less personal and more
work-like it becomes.
Have fun. |
