The rookie manager : a guide to surviving your first year in management PDF
Preview The rookie manager : a guide to surviving your first year in management
The Rookie Manager The Rookie Manager AA GGuuiiddee ttoo SSuurrvviivviinngg YYoouurr FFiirrsstt YYeeaarr iinn MMaannaaggeemmeenntt J T. S OSEPH TRAUB American Management Association New York • Atlanta • Boston • Chicago • Kansas City • San Francisco • Washington, D.C. Brussels • Mexico City • Tokyo • Toronto Special discount on bulk quantities of AMACOM books are available to corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For details, contact Special Sales Department, AMACOM, an imprint of AMA Publications, a division of American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Tel: 212-903-8316. Fax: 212-903-8083. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other profession- al service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Straub, Joseph T. The rookie manager : a guide to surviving your first year in management / Joseph T. Straub. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8144-7060-2 1. Supervision of employees. 2. Middle managers. 3. Executive ability. 4. Management I. Title. HF5549.12.S77 1999 99-33979 658.4—dc21 CIP © 2000 AMACOM, an imprint of AMA Publications, a division of American Management Association, New York. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of AMACOM, an imprint of AMA Publications, a division of American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Printing number 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 iv For my wife, Pat, and our daughter, Stacey, with all my love. CCCooonnnttteeennntttsss Chapter 1. Put on Your Manager’s Hat 1 Chapter 2. Manage Your Time 11 Chapter 3. Plan Your Day 19 Chapter 4. Lead Your People 33 Chapter 5. Build Your Team 47 Chapter 6. Make Effective Decisions 61 Chapter 7. Delegate Authority 75 Chapter 8. Hiring and Orienting New People 85 Chapter 9. Motivate Your People 99 Chapter10. Appraising Performance 111 Chapter11. Discipline, Grievances, and Terminations 125 Chapter12. Communicating for Success 139 Index 161 vi The Rookie Manager CCCCChhhhhaaaaapppppttttteeeeerrrrr 11 Put on Your Manager’s Hat C ongratulations on your promotion! It’s exciting, challenging, and perhaps a bit unsettling. Even though you’ve dreamed about and worked toward it for a long time, knowing that you’ve reached a higher rung on your personal success ladder natu- rally brings a touch of anxiety. A New Point of View It’s a big step up to the management level, and you may feel a little uncomfortable at first. Keep in mind, though, that culture shock hits everybody the first time he or she is promoted into supervision, so you’re not the Lone Ranger. People grow only by being challenged, and every manager who ever lived has felt like you do now, thought many of the same thoughts and shared many of the same concerns. There’s more good news, too. Someone believed you were quali- fied to handle this promotion. Someone had enough confidence in your judgment to grant you this opportunity to stretch your wings and reach beyond your former rank-and-file job. Somebody believed in you at least as much as you believe in yourself. So rest assured that you didn’t get where you are today by accident. You were most likely rewarded for the self-motivation, performance, and determination you displayed as a major contributor to the success of your organization. So while you’re thinking about your newfound responsibilities and the changes you’ll experience in the days and weeks to come, 1 2 THE ROOKIE MANAGER remember to celebrate the likely fact that you deserved your promo- tion. You’ve earned this new opportunity! If that weren’t true, you wouldn’t have it. The Roles of a Manager Management authority Henry Mintzberg has identified ten potential roles that you’ll be called on to play and placed them into three gen- eral categories. See Figure 1-1. FIGURE 1-1 The roles of a manager. Manager Interpersonal Roles Informational Roles Decisional Roles Figurehead Monitor Entrepreneur Leader Disseminator Disturbance Handler Liaison Spokesperson Resource Allocator Negotiator Interpersonal Roles Roles that relate to your relationships with others are considered interpersonal roles. They arise directly from your formal position and authority. (cid:2) Figurehead. Managers are the heads of their own divisions, departments, or sections, and this means they must routinely perform certain ceremonial duties. For example, they may be required to con- duct tours of their facilities, speak to service clubs and civic organiza- tions, and attend employees’ retirement dinners. (cid:2) Leader. Managers are expected to create and maintain a posi- tive and productive work environment for themselves and their employees. They play this role by attempting to improve employees’ Put on Your Manager’s Hat 3 performance, reduce conflict, provide feedback on performance, and encourage their employees’ growth and development. This leadership role will be explored further in Chapter 4. (cid:2) Liaison. Managers interact with many other people besides their superiors and team members. These people include peer-level managers and employees in other departments, staff specialists, and external parties such as customers, suppliers, and representatives of government agencies. Informational Roles Managers often have more information than their employees, which is partly because of their network of contacts inside and outside the organization. Informational roles relate to using and disseminating information. (cid:2) Monitor. Managers must constantly monitor the work environ- ment to know what’s going on. They collect information both by ask- ing questions and by taking note of unsolicited information that comes to them through formal means (such as meetings, memos, and reports) and informal means (the grapevine, rumor, and other unoffi- cial sources). (cid:2) Disseminator. Managers act as disseminators when they relay information to their employees that the employees may not receive by other means. (cid:2) Spokesperson. Managers are expected to speak for their work unit to people outside the work group. These people may include higher managers, peers in other departments, and various parties out- side the organization. Decisional Roles Part of a manager’s job is making choices. Managers may make deci- sions themselves (sometimes with input from others) or influence the decisions of others in the following roles. (cid:2) Entrepreneur. Managers play an entrepreneur’s role when they are exposed to new ideas and techniques that could improve their work group’s productivity or efficiency. The entrepreneurial 4 THE ROOKIE MANAGER role requires managers to initiate activities that will encourage their employees to use these new ideas and techniques to maximum advantage. (cid:2) Disturbance handler. When equipment breakdowns, strikes, scheduling problems, and other unpleasant surprises occur, managers are expected to develop effective solutions and keep their work groups moving forward. (cid:2) Resource allocator. Managers typically are responsible for deciding how scarce resources such as money, materials, time, and equipment will be distributed among the members of their work group. (cid:2) Negotiator. Managers often spend a good part of their time negotiating contracts with suppliers and bargaining with their peers in Godfather fashion for limited resources. This negotiator role demands that they have both the information and the authority to play it successfully. Management Skills Managers who hope to play the above roles effectively must also develop three types of skills: technical, human relations, and conceptual. Technical Skills Skills that are considered technical enable managers to use the processes, practices, techniques, and tools of the specific area that they supervise. For example, a manager who supervises accountants must know accounting. Although managers don’t have to be hands-on technical experts (some fields, especially in high technology, change so fast that this becomes impossible), they must have enough techni- cal savvy to direct employees, organize the work, communicate their work group’s needs to others, and solve problems. Human Relations Skills Managers with sound human relations skills are able to interact and communicate with other people successfully. They understand, work compatibly with, and relate to both individuals and groups.
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