Tag Archives: learning

03-Planning the work of a team, 04-Managing a project team, feedback

Poor Managers Are More Costly Than You May Realize

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In this HBR blog, Monique Valcour identifies some of the key success factors in top managers. To sum up her thoughts in one impactful statement, “If you’re not helping people develop, you’re not management material.”

So what does this mean? It means that because candidates value learning and development opportunities above any other aspect of a prospective job, a manager’s role is more critical than ever. Skilled managers attract top candidates, retain and challenge them, and drive performance. Poor managers do just the opposite. The firm not only misses out on potential talent, but it also costs them a lot of money due to employee turnover and subpar productivity.

As most of us have learned, the majority of learning and development (roughly 90%) happens on the job rather than in schooling (not to knock Goizueta!) or formal training programs. An effective manager can benefit you in many ways – from mentoring and challenging you to providing constructive feedback and helping facilitate conversations. In many ways, a mentor is someone you can look up to and model yourself after. Thus, your own management style will, in turn, help to shape the firm’s future leaders.

Below are some characteristics of effective managers:

-Invested in coaching

-Someone you can respect and learn from

-Takes interest in your career development

In conjunction, here are some tips to becoming an effective manager:

1) Be transparent

2) Share detailed information about firm’s ongoing operations

3) Support internal networking

4) Have frequent conversations about career goals and interests rather than just once a year during annual performance review (I have found this to be very helpful in my own relationship with my supervisor)

5) When planning the team’s work, ask employees how they can contribute and what they’d like to get out of the project (this gives them ownership and helps them buy into it more)

6) Establish open lines of communication and provide regular feedback

Having a poor manager/undesirable relationship with a direct supervisor tops the list as the number one reason employees quit their jobs. Therefore, continual teaching and development should be a non-negotiable in every manager’s repertoire.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/if-youre-not-helping-people-develop-youre-not-management-material/

03-Planning the work of a team, 04-Managing a project team

Not So Linear Improvement

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Most of us are taking a hard look at areas that we perceive as weaknesses or need some additional improvement to round ourselves out. As we use various methodologies of pin pointing those areas for improvement we set in action a plan to learn, progress, and improve over time.

Given the 13 week semester, will we all progress the same amount if we all put in equal amounts of effort? David Brooks points out in his article, ‘Learning Is No Easy Task‘, that progress is rarely linear. Tasks yield results in different proportions, and being aware of this phenomenon is the first step to mastering the learning process.

Some learning progressions are logarithmic in shape yielding great advancements on the front end of the learning process; you make a lot of progress when you first begin the activity, but as you get better, it gets harder and harder to improve.

Conversely, some learning progressions are exponential in shape, yielding little progress on the extensive efforts put forth on the front end, but your progress multiplies quickly on the back end of the process.

Learning progress curves come in all shapes and sizes. Some are step functions and some are valleys where you have to go down before going back up to higher highs. Whatever the curve shape, the importance is to be aware of the shape so you can effectively change your mental and strategic approaches to successfully master the learning task.