If we had a potential resource available to our businesses that could turn inexperienced staff into confident achievers, help staff with little learning to become founts of all knowledge, and grow demotivated staff to become enthusiastic go-getters we would be shouting about it from the rooftops. But none of us seem to do that. It’s not as though we don’t all have access to such a resource! That resource? Our managers, of course. Potentially the difference between business success and failure, between staff achievement and perpetual frustration, between a job well done and a job hardly done at all.
Are we shouting this from the rooftops? No, very often we are not. It is astonishing how remiss businesses are when it comes to recognising and then telling everyone about this resource. The management resource. The business resource above all others.
Few non-management staff know much about management (unfortunately neither do some management staff, but that’s another story that we will look another time) and most who do have a lived experience of a manager, who may have impacted their working life, sadly, too often see it as a negative one. We remember bad managers. We know how they affected our working lives for the worse. How they made the job more difficult, less enjoyable, and how they made us see the management role at best as irrelevant and at worst as an impediment to our success in the workplace.
Perhaps good managers are invisible and that may be no bad thing as long as we don’t allow that cloak of invisibility to mask their worth to us. We should ensure that our staff, even if they don’t necessarily see their good managers as being good managers, recognise their worth too. Because good managers enable staff to be good at their jobs. They set them up to succeed, not by magic, but through good management, and everyone in the workplace should recognise this and at least to some extent know how they do it. It is not just people who want to be managers themselves one day who need to know about management, to be trained in how it works. Everyone in the workplace needs to know it. If for no other reason than because “How do I know whether I want to be a manager someday, if I don’t know what management is?” Or for that matter, “How do I know that I don’t?”
So, let’s get in there and learn about what good management should be. After all, if we run a business selling something, our staff would learn about what we sell, they would be trained in how to use it to make money for the business and meet the needs of our customers. And so, all staff would recognise, and crucially be trained in, the value of sales skills as a resource. The management resource? Not so much.
And what about management accountability? The fact that if all our staff knew what constituted good management our managers would be held to account if they didn’t step up to the plate? That’s a good thing, surely? Surely, we shouldn’t fear that?
No, all staff in the workplace need to understand the management process, the management role, that makes that workplace a positive and productive one. Let’s teach them about it, show them what good management is and inspire them to want a piece of the action themselves or at least to recognise how they can work with that resource – that powerful force – to enhance their achievement, maximise their productivity, keep motivated, and make it easy for them to be the best that they can be at whatever job it is that they do.
It’s all just a question of ‘bridging the gap’ between what we do day-to-day, and good management.
The Effective Manager Course Collection from Total Training Solutions
These courses are applicable to anyone who has responsibility for managing people and tasks (whatever their job title). So, if you have to manage a whole business, a project, a busy team or just yourself you will find something here for you. If not, give us a call!
Need a little more help with effective management in the workplace? We are here to help. Check out the highly rated Effective Manager Course Collection from Total Training Solutions.
Our Effective Manager training courses can help you with:
- Appraisals and performance management
- Absence management
- Workplace conflict and bullying
- Recruitment and interview skills
- Change management
- And much more
The courses can be tailored, so you can focus on learning the management skills which are most important to you.
