5 ........................Chennai Chapter Report 6 ... - National HRD Network

Ferdinand F. Fournies in his book
Coaching for Work Performance gives
an interesting example where he talks of a
situation wherein a boss 'knights' his
subordinate with the Excalibur and says to
the effect, 'I now pronounce you manager;
go thither and yon and do it", and the
subordinate jumps to his feet and responds
happily saying "Yes, I will go thither and yon
and do it". Then, the author talks about a
similar situation wherein the boss instead
of knighting the subordinate into a manager
says, "I knight you jet pilot; go thither and
yon and do it". Would the subordinate jump
up and willingly respond, or, would he say
something to the effect, "Are you kidding? I
wouldn't know how to start a jet, much less
fly one. And even if I manage to start it, I
would crash somewhere between thither
and yon and kill myself".
When it comes to managerial skills, there
seems to be an underlying belief that a
designation equips a manager with the
requisite skills. A possible moderating factor
could be that the person has been made a
manager because he already 'seemed' to
be playing a role. The crucial missing cog
seems to be in the fact that 'seeming to play
a role' and actually being asked to do it have
very different sets of expectations.
Developing others - A case for
managerial and HR
effectiveness
sense based iterative mode. The less said
of the other not so successful project
managers' operating mechanisms, the
better.
In 'The Leadership Pipeline', Ram Charan
and others call these two transitions as
passages in a career. The interesting thing
being that for each successful transition, the
person needs to un-pack and repack his
baggage in three areas - Work Values, Time
Application and Skills. For example, while
moving from managing self to managing
others, the person needs to move from just
looking at technical efficiency to planning &
delegation, from being a punctual employee
to making time available to subordinates and
priority setting and finally from looking at
spotless contribution technically to getting
results through others and success of direct
reports.
While large companies might invest in
Managerial Development programmes or
even MBAs, it is the other majority which
needs urgent attention. Things might have
worked out in other sectors (am assuming!)
probably because by the time a person
became a manager, he had atleast 14 years
of experience and atleast a kid or two. Thus,
he was probably able to leverage his 'life'
experience at the workplace. How about
those who were in college until 5 years ago
and are now managing others?! And most
importantly, they have absolutely no
exposure to the existence of behavioural
sciences in most cases.
– Naga Siddharth S
From my experiments, a programme which
eases the transition to managing others
needs to be one with a strong appreciation
of the concept of role, clarifying one's own
roles, leveraging role efficacy for performance
management, transactional styles and a
topping of situational leadership. Follow up
workshops every quarter for about two hours
seem to work magic.
However, at the level of the project
managers, a focus on performance
management through in-depth appreciation
of situations, role plays, errors, motivation,
behaviour based goal setting and
performance syndromes works out to be
more apt to help them develop a frame for
thinking, reflecting and relating to their
occupational expectations.
While the most obvious gain from such
exercises is in the realm of managerial
development and organizational performance
and effectiveness, my interest in the same
lies in the fact that developing managers to
manage themselves and their team members
is a stepping stone towards effective
devolution of delegatable areas of people
function to the line, thus allowing for a higher
role for HR in strategy and partnership in
organizational performance. This area is well
explored in a paper "Devolving HR
partnership to the line; Threat, Opportunity
or Partnership" by Susan Whittaker, et.al.(Jan
2003) where the authors observe that while
senior line management is quite ok involving
HR in other-than-routine activities, the junior
line managers' main concern in any such
devolution or partnership is that 'a lack of
support from HR during the delivery of such
service can detract from overall
effectiveness.'
In a typical IT setup, the transition from
Managing Self to Managing others occurs
usually after four years of experience after
a person has joined as a fresher from
engineering. During these four years, the
real 'smart kids' quite intuitively pick up the It is not uncommon to see many a hassled
relevant citizenship behaviours as well as HR manager having his frustration stem
critical success factors which drive from 'why can't the project manager
performance. When made a Lead for a understand such a simple thing' kind of a
group of say five to seven engineers, the theme. It is worthwhile recognizing and
person has his first taste of managing others. appreciating the fact that one cannot expect Being partners in developing others to
This transition is often a turbulent one for a pure techie to become a manager just with manage themselves and others around
many. The next transition occurs when the a change in designation and no formal them is a de-risked strategy towards higher
lead is promoted to a Project Manager after competency building (be it through an MBA partnership and devolution of the People
around three or four years. At this point in or something similar) in the ways of people function to the line. For me, it often seems
time, he moves to the next level of Managing management. This has more serious that much like the concept of Power
Managers. It is worthwhile remembering that implications when such managers grow to Enhancers, HR can achieve success in
a majority of such successful project senior positions in an organisation and are doing what they should be doing only when
managers have grown in 'designation' over gawky or plain defensive and skeptical while they can stop doing what they are presently
time and are basically core engineers and grappling with issues such as visioning and doing! And what better way to do this than
often run their people factories on a common forecasting or for that matter, restructuring. by developing others? H
The author is a HRD professional in a large Indian Technology MNC. E-mail: naga.siddharth@gmail.com
| HRD News Letter | April 2008, Vol.24, Issue:1 25