- Knowing, Understanding and Managing your stakeholders:
According to my understanding of the subject one of the most important and yet neglected areas for a Manager is knowing your stakeholder. Because once you know your stakeholder and ask from them their expectation from you as a manager then & only then you will be able to do justice in your role and try and fulfill expectations which are in your control. 90% of managers deal with this problem through assumptions. Let’s remember that if a person or entity is in my stakeholder list that means he/she had some need which has to be fulfilled and those needs cannot be and should not be assumed. Second critical aspect is Understanding your Stakeholder, because only then we will improve the way we understand there ever changing NEED-WANT-DESIRE. Once we get the first 2 things right then comes managing their expectations.
- Demonstrate Role Model qualities:
All of us have some role models in life. I tell managers during any intervention that start picking up some role model qualities in day to day life. Qualities of Emotional Intelligence, Patience, Accountability, Belief in Self and Team, Strong Support of the team, Freedom and the list goes on and on. If a FTM starts inculcating some of these qualities in him then the whole question of Motivating Self and others goes away, because we are operating from a space of JOY.
- Improve Empowerment through Effective Delegation:
One of the most crucial and misused word in the managerial context is Empowerment and Delegation. Let me take you through it step by step. Delegation is different from Allocation, Delegation is when a Boss delegates his job to his juniors and allocation is the targets and goals allocated to an individual at the start of the year. So delegation is Boss’s job. Another angle to it is that Managers please don’t delegate task which you don’t like. Delegation should be done in such a way that the person in-charge if that task has the decision making authority but the responsibility is still yours. This will make the sub ordinate feel more empowered. Empowerment in the word itself talks about transfer of power.
- Give Constructive Feed Forward:
Adult Learning Principle quotes “Adults don’t want to be told they want to be heard”. This is a fabulous eye opener for all managers, let’s take this through an example, suppose I am a sub ordinate and made a mistake on the job given to me and my managers is pointing out the same mistake to me again, how will I feel? I am anyways switched off, we all need to understand this that once a person makes a mistake he knows already that he has made an error, a role of a manager is to listen to the person and feed forward so that he does not make the same mistake again. Feed Forward has the intention of looking ahead not pointing of failures of past.
- Business Acumen:
I tell managers in all interactions with them during an intervention. In this FTM role we need to think about the outcome in terms of Business. FTM need to start behaving like an entrepreneur. At the end of the day, organization, business and management is one of the very critical stake holders and there a single word expectation from us is Profit. My guess to achieve this, the person/manager will need to have keen business acumen for which you need to ask and understand the bigger picture, this is important because only then you can mobilize your team towards the right business direction.
One of the quickest example which comes to my mind is your ability to understand the impact of your work PQC (Productivity should rise, Quality should keep improving and Cost to stabilize). If we understand the mathematics of it the work that we do also gets very focused and streamlined.
I have written these points with a belief that the FTM holds a very critical role in any organization. I usually call it the Vada Pav syndrome, a manager is in the middle of top management and sub-ordinate. There are things that he can’t share with either of them, but we need to remember that in this vada which is in the middle of both management and subordinate is the ultimate Taste Maker.
