The Hindu Business Line : Top skills for managers

Leaders are different from managers. Leaders deal with ambiguity, change and opportunity, and push the train tracks where they’ve never gone before, while managers create order out of complexity, and keep the trains running on schedule. Thus explains Manager’s Toolkit, from the Harvard Business Essentials series ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

Despite the above distinction, leaders must also manage, and vice-versa, the book adds. “To be effective, leadership cannot just be about inspiration and grand visions, but must also be about getting results. Managers must als o lead within their own spheres of responsibility.”

And to succeed as a manager, you need 13 skills, explains the handy volume. First is the skill to set goals that others can follow. When setting goals take care to avoid two mistakes, viz. having no performance metrics, and not aligning goals and rewards. Hiring is the second skill a manager has to be good at. “Hire a bunch of C-level individuals and you will preside over a C-level organisation. Even if you coach them and send them to expensive training programs, you are not likely to improve the tenor of your limit.”

Third comes retention, a skill complementing hiring. “If both are done well, they produce what every company desperately needs: first-class human assets,” advises the Harvard kit. “Whenever your employees leave, your company loses their knowledge and their (often expensively) acquired skills. When those employees go to a competitor, the loss is compounded.”

The fourth skill is delegating, a bedrock skill for managers, often neglected by the ‘overworked’ ones. “Effective delegators spend less time ‘doing’ and more time planning work assignments, organising resources for delegates, and coaching people who need help.”

A book, the reading of which, managers may well be advised not to delegate.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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