The Manager - Power of a Personal Brand - Cultivated Management Core
The Manager
THE
manager.
Edition 2
Quality Remarks & the Cultivated Management CORE
Hi and welcome to this week's Cultivated Management newsletter.
This week I was interviewed for Keith Klain's Quality Remarks podcast and defined the core elements of being a good manager.
Read on.
Management is about cultivating yourself. After that it's about 70% fixing the system and 30% people management.
This week I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Keith Klain - straight talking Quality specialist and all round sound guy.
Keith made it super easy to open up and chat about testing, life, management and my decision to leave NewVoiceMedia after nearly 9 years!
We chatted about the state of testing, why conferences have the same speakers year after year and how the testing world hasn't moved on much in the last few years.
We also chatted about the future of testing, how testers make good product owners and how to built rock solid agile dev teams.
And yes, I also managed to mention Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Alan Watts and James Clear.
I guess the podcast really is a great summarisation of the Cultivated Management philosophy of management. Head on over and give it a listen and let me know what you think.
The Podcast is over on Keith's website.
Where should I focus my time as a manager?
A question I often get asked about management is where to focus time. Many new managers are unsure of where to put their effort and time and focus. It's pretty tough especially if you've moved from being someone that makes things to someone that now manages :)
After focussing on yourself (remember - your management will never be more or less than you as an individual) - it's then time to focus on work. For me this means spending the majority of your time on improving the world of work for your people. This is about doing system improvement, relationship improvement and fixing how work flows through the system. Much of this work will need to be done with your team, but some will also only be possible by working with other managers - who should also be helping to improve the process.
My view is that about 70% of your time should be on making the system better. Some weeks that will be more, some less.
Most managers focus their time on people, but this is the wrong approach. People are effective but only if they work in a system (world of work) that supports them. Most workplaces are filled with friction, red tape and processes that hinder good work. So spending your effort on cultivated, training, coaching and growing your people is only effective if they have a thriving system to work in.
So I tend to focus around 30% of my time on people. This is usually in the form of One to Ones and coaching.
You may find you're the only manager in the business working in these ratios but your results will start to really shine. Your systems and world of work will be fun and enjoyable for your team, work will go out of the door and your people will be engaged and happy.
What you might find though is that this attracts criticism and your fellow managers may also not share your enthusiasm for helping work to flow through the business. They'll either catch up, get it, or be forced to try and achieve the same results - and this usually means they'll come and ask you how you manage.
So it's simple - spend the majority of your time on improving the world of work.
This Week On Cultivated Management
I haven't spent any time on the blog this week but I have a very solid editorial calendar lined up and I hope many of these new articles will resonate with you.