Managment Mistakes

I came across an excellent blog post written by Ryan Healy, "Nine Management Mistakes all you New Mangers Can Avoid: Brazen Careerist"

Ryan lists the top nine;
1) Doing too much work
2) Failing to realize what "work" is, now
3) Delegating the grunt work
4) Failing to ask for advice
5) Keeping an "eye" on employees
6) Failing to prepare
7) Being too nice
8) Pretending to have all the answers
9) Taking a break

The one that resonated with me is Failing to realize what "work" is, now:
"In high school and college, work consists of papers, studying and calculus problems. When you graduate to the real world, typical entry-level work means sitting in a cubicle, staring at a computer and putting together PowerPoint presentations or creating Excel documents. Then, all of a sudden, you’re promoted to manager and everything changes.
High School, college and entry level life are all about hands on, check off my to-do list type of work. Management work is completely different. It’s talking, it’s thinking, it’s planning, but it’s still work and it’s more vital to the bottom line. If you don’t turn that corner and come to grips with the fact that when you’re just chatting with someone about their weekend, you’re actually doing work, then you will fail as a manager, because this means you think it’s about you, when in reality it’s about everyone else."

I facilitate leadership and emergent leadership training for organizations - this topic has the most resistance from manager trainees. They feel that they were promoted because of their technical experience and if they just do that more people will follow their lead. Highly skilled technical individual are promoted to leadership positions and the same skills that made them technically superior does not translate well to the new manager position. These technically talented mangers just end up working themselves harder and allowing their team, they are supposed to be leading, to work less and not harness the power of team.
People skills and communications training are needed for all new managers within organizations. Have you seen this happen? what has your company done to prepare its leadership?

- Michael Cardus serves as an Adventure Consultant for Create-Learning Team Building located in Buffalo NY.