The new manager delivers a great insight into the role and responsibilities of managers. It is intended to provide a solid grounding in people management skills and is aimed at supervisor or deputy manager level. The new manager will provide delegates with a variety of practical skills, which they can implement immediately in their current roles.
Successful managers are first and foremost good interviewers. They have the ability to identify and attract talent. They know how to accurately profile the ideal candidate for a position and recruit people who can both fulfil the immediate job requirements and grow with it.
Teams carry out most tasks in modern business, so the ability to build and lead teams is a vital management attribute. Team leaders though must first and foremost be team players. It is vital that managers have the ability to work with others in a constructive manner and are able to recognise and react to factors that inhibit team growth.
The principle function of management is to ensure that the appropriate effort is directed to achieving the team or departments goal. Building and leading an effective team is also one of the most challenging aspects of the job for new managers. Leadership is a position not a job. Managers only become leaders when their staff choose to follow. All managers (especially those newly promoted into their positions) have their leadership tested by staff and are under constant scrutiny by staff peers and their own managers. Knowing how to win the respect of the team and to lead with authority.
Managers must be able to motivate! The ability to motivate and engage a team is at the very heart of what great managers do. Most staff come to work wanting to do a great job, however, in the normal course of their work, their levels of engagement (or motivation) can be affected by a wide variety of factors, both internal (confidence, domestic issues, aspirations) and external (environment, workload, relationships etc).
Successful meetings rarely just happen - they need clear goals, structure and rules to ensure that they are productive. This course has been designed for managers who are responsible for running departmental and interdepartmental meetings. They will learn to recognise the primary barriers to effective meetings and how to overcome them.
Supervising the work of others is the principal task of the team leader or manager. A supervisor must take responsibility for the output of their team. To do so, effective supervisors must call upon a range of skills to ensure that team goals and standards are met.
Delegation is a major part of a manager’s role in achieving performance goals through other people. It is, however, a skill that, in many cases, is poorly practised. On the face of it delegation should be simple, a matter of common sense, but given the increasingly complex nature of modern organisations the process of delegation can be fraught with difficulties, while the cost of getting it wrong can be very high indeed.
Effective organisations ensure that they have appropriate systems in place to manage staff absence. Unplanned absences affect quality, productivity and overall organisational effectiveness. Unmanaged, such absences can become systemic within the organisation and extremely difficult to reverse.
One of the most challenging issues faced by managers is how to deal with problem people and their difficult behaviours. In this course we will look at some of the most common problem behaviours faced by managers and will provide delegates with a range of strategies to deal effectively with them.
The ability to conduct performance appraisals is a key management responsibility, one that must be taken seriously by all parties. Regular performance appraisal provides the backbone for staff development across the year and provides an opportunity for both manager and staff to agree both the standards of work required and how they will be met.
In the modern workplace, the majority of learning is gained through experience. Formal classroom training is an important part of the development process. Coaching, however, has many advantages in terms of flexibility, relevance, individual focus and measurement of results. The challenge facing managers is that coaching is, in many ways, harder to deliver and because it is a less formal process much easier to forget about amongst the pressures and deadlines of running a business.
The aim of this first workshop in the programme is to help managers to explore strategic thinking skills in a practical and collaborative way.
The ability to anticipate and respond to change is crucial to all businesses, however, in many organisations the idea of change management is something that is paid lip service and even though the most well informed managers understand the need to embrace change, companies still pay a heavy price for their inability to do so.
Project management is becoming an increasingly important skill. As organisations change to become flatter, more customer focused and flexible, the people in those organisations must also change. Managers may now find themselves responsible for a series of projects rather than a department or process. They are judged by the success of these projects and careers are built or broken on a manager’s ability to deliver a specific result.
To some extent all managers are judged by the problems they faced and the decisions that they took, or rather how they handled the problems and whether the decision taken turned out to be the “right” one. This course aims to provide delegates with a range of tools to increase their effectiveness in both areas.