I’ve been getting my head around how I should be developing my skills in this new role. I’ve come to the realisation that there’s a fundamental difference between this role and all the other manangement roles I’ve had in the past. The difference is this: in all my previous roles, however many people they have been about managing, there has always been an element of producing something with my technical skills. I’m trained as a designer, so many roles involved managing people and designing something. I used to run a team of costumed interpreters, so then my role was managing the team and being out in public in costume (and managing the finance and IT, which are also technical outputs). In my previous job, I was managing a diverse team but also offering a technical output of volunteer management and universal access advice.
This role though has no (obvious) technical output. It’s product is a well managed team, who in turn produce the technical outputs. Obviously the better I understand the technical aspects of their roles, the better I can manage them. So part of my learning from this secondment is about understanding what they do, to a level that I can speak for them, and champion their point of view, for example, in meetings where they are not present.
But the bigger challenge is improving what I do myself, and with no technical output, that means improving my leadership skills. Luckily for me, there’s a new guide to doing exactly this that our HR department have put together, and I’m working through that at the moment.
The guide makes a distinction between the competancies required for management on one hand, and leadership on the other. What I find pleasantly surprising is that I score myself reasonably well on Leadership, and other feedback from my team and my peers supports this. Yes, there are leadership competancies I could develop further: though I consider myself to be quite innovative, for example, I’ve limited myself thus far to my own area, and not taken a more organisational view. I could also improve my networking to maintain and build support for my team’s work, and I could be better at identifying upcoming challenges.
But I’m more disappointed in the score I give myself for the management competancies. I score pretty badly, not just for my new role, but also for the role I was doing before, in planning and communicating the plan. Interestingly this is confirmed in feedback from colleagues. Last year, I had a free Ashridge Inventory of Management Skills consultation, in a pilot project for the Creative and Cultural Sector Skills Agency. It that I scored lower than I’d expected in “defines, reviews and communicates needs” and “develops and implements operational plans”. Also some of the feedback from that included “a more defined regular system of team meeting and reporting, to enable us as a team to know each other’s priorities”; ” a more defined approach to managing projects and reporting on them”; “keeping focussed and getting to the key point”. So planning, and communicating the plan is the area I must work hardest on developing during my placement.
