What is management and why do some make it so difficult?

What is management and why do some make it so difficult?

Management doesn’t happen unless there is a vision to aim for and that’s comes from the leader. It is possible for a manager to be a leader and a leader to be a manager but not all managers make good leaders and not all leaders make good managers. And while we are on the subject of leadership, I have seen (in some organisations and teams) better leadership in the more junior ranks than at the top of organisations and it’s usually this dynamic that is slowing the growth of businesses – the “I’ve arrived” mentality!

Every organisation needs a leader to set the vision, a manager to work out the steps to get there and a team to get them there.

It’s that simple, a manager works out the steps to get the team and the company to the leader’s vision. The vision isn’t just that of the leader. The whole team need to get involved with the company vision statement and then get started on the path, the steps.

In one of the businesses I led and managed one of the visions (yes you can have more than one, in fact you can have many as you like, I had a whole company one and challenged the heads of department to come up with their own which, when bought together, moved the business towards the whole vision). Anyway, one of the visions was to build one individual outlet from £1 million per year turnover to £3 million per year, in four years. 

Break the vision down

Just imagine what the team would have thought if I told them this:

“Wow, what’s he been smoking”?

“Yeah right”!

“Does that mean I’m going to have to work 3 times harder”?

…So, I didn’t include this figure in the vision statement. What I did do, and this is what we teach in the 12 Month Action Focused Leadership and Management Program, was to come up with daily, weekly and monthly targets which were easier to digest and then we implemented a training and development program to support the team (obviously we took on some more team members when we could).  

So why do some people make it so difficult?

Just image a football pitch – do it now, or even better draw one on a rough piece of paper now. You’ll have the rectangular pitch, the center line with the center spot where the ball is. The penalty box and the goal posts at either end. What’s the point of the game?

“To win”

OK, how do you win?

“You put the ball in the back of the net”?

OK, good. What happens if I move the goal posts to a different position. At one end one there could be on the goal line and at the other it could move to the sideline near the center line. 

What’s the point of the game now? It’s the same, to win, to put more balls in the back of the opponent’s net. And like in business goals change all the time. So, what happens when I move the goal posts out of the way. The game becomes pointless, there are no goals and with no goals there is no vision (or there might be a glimmer of one, but it’ll be impossible to reach). The player, the team members, the staff just go around in circles, they don’t have a target, their driving to somewhere new in a foreign country without a sat nav? They kind of know where they are supposed to be and hope for the best.

What is management and why do some make it so difficult?

So many managers are chasing their own tail and lose control and then they blame everyone else when it goes wrong. I strongly believe that if anything goes wrong it’s the managers fault, no one else’s! And if it goes right then that’s the fault of the whole team and should be celebrated. Someone once stole from my business which was my fault because I didn’t have the systems in place to prevent it, it was my fault – it never happened again! With another business we won the business of the year award and I was awarded the manager of the year award the same year (voted by customers and suppliers which made it extra special). That was my teams’ fault and we celebrated the fact. I may have been steering the ship in the right direction, but the team were the ones creating the energy and motion. 

Thankfully management and leadership can be learnt (which in my case was a good thing!). No one is born a leader. “A born leader” is a myth, no one is born a leader the skills are developed over time. 

The teams that sit the 12 Month Action Focused Leadership and Management Program learn these skills and develop themselves, their teams and the business a lot quicker than those that don’t. One day training course are great but don’t necessarily work, because there is no accountability for action after the training. 

But 12 courses held once every month for one year creates new habits and an action focused culture in the whole team.

And no, you don’t need to spend your whole training budget, our action focused program costs as little as £48.60 per person with 12 learners, your trainers deliver the sessions themselves and we can arrange a train the trainer session to help them hit the road running. If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly interested so if you’d like a breakdown of the courses and a little more information contact us here and we’ll forward our program overview information.

Thanks for your time and have a great day, wherever you are in the world.  


Thanks for visiting our "What is management" page, here's a link to our homepage. We also recommend the one minute manager book which could help you further in your quest to answer the question what is management. 

As well as lots of smaller businesses and organisations, below are examples of some larger organisations who have received training from our director of learning at Ultimate Leadership Training:


spring care

arches
Zeelo

branded
Gatwick School

ned
catch

Nimbus
CAB

Please contact us to discuss any training requirements you have, we either deliver for you or sell you the course for your trainers to deliver to your team