| FROM OUR EXPERIENCE |
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| Manager and specialist? |
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Two weeks ago I held a course on Personal Leadership for a group of young enthusiasts just starting their careers in HR – Next Generation from the HR Club. Due to the fact that all participants had remarkable profiles and were also very young, I was convinced that I would see a lot of clarity and coherence in their vision – a fresh one – about development and career.
To my surprise, during the training, I discovered that the goal I had in that course is similar with the one I have in 99% of the management development courses I teach: the fact that the role of a manager is dramatically different from that of a specialist and that being a good, perhaps even extraordinary specialist doesn’t imply any sort of remarkable management abilities, let alone any leadership abilities.
We had excellent and active debates regarding the difference between what makes you a good professional in a specialized job and what makes you a leader or manager worthy of appreciation.
I asked myself two questions: what is the critical difference between these two roles and why, in order to make things easier, do we have an acute tendency to assimilate the excellent performances of specialists with a potential for leadership.
What is the difference between these two roles?
Well,if a specialist is valued based on his ability to produce results through his own work, an efficient manager is the one that makes others produce excellent results with as little investment as possible in terms of time and energy. Even more, leadership abilities are associated with his capacity to create a long term relationship and influence people he is working with in a positive way.
Example: One of my colleagues is an extraordinary specialist. Through personal effort and dedication he has managed to re-create one of our courses. He worked for days, alone in front of the computer as well as with other collaborators based on the principle that states: I do my job, you do yours and as a team we all have a certain level of satisfaction. At the same time, he doesn’t want to become a manager, not at this moment at least.
Why? Simple! Although a very good specialist, he feels he doesn’t want the position in which his work and results have to be achieved through other people. He knows he doesn’t feel comfortable going through the long process of building a relationship with the people from his team, developing their abilities and keeping their motivation high so that in 6 months, let’s say, they can start producing results. The same results ( or poorer) he could produce by himself in two months! We all know that in the current environment, he would have been an impatient manager, extremely strict, a perfectionist that would have been tempted to be very hands on in solving situations which have not been learned by the members of his team. Do you recognize the style?
Well , why do we have the tendency to assimilate the abilities required by these two roles? Possible answers: because we are tempted, through a more superficial approach, to consider that a person that is experienced and good at what he does is a good man. We had participants that were promoted, that wanted to be promoted as managers because it was a step forward in their career and ever since then they have been spending their time at work solving their problems, they subordinates’ problems, doing the jobs other people should be doing and being under a great deal of stress due to the level of responsibility.
Deep down inside they regret not being a specialist anymore and they feel lost in the world of management and leadership but they find solace in the fact that it’s normal for things to be this hard when the responsibility is increased. Plus, through the same superficial approach, we think that a person who knows how things are done can also manage an implementation team. Well, this is rarely the case!
At Human Invest, one of our missions is to educate the market about this radical difference! We invest time and energy to create and implement development programs dedicated to “teaching” management abilities, programs such as Nextep. We gather examples, case studies and we debate the idea that a specialist is not necessarily a good manager as long as he hasn’t received any training on how to be a good manager. Because we are passionate, we’re very close with organizations that realized the fact that leadership and management are things that have to be learned and we implement this teaching process.
If you are reading this article on a short brake from management dilemmas that take time and energy, stop blaming yourself! It’s normal, obvious even that before you can perform as a manager you need to learn how to be one! We’re here to give you a hand!
Alexandra Georgescu
Trainer
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Human Invest is a Premier League company in the arena of training and
organizational development consultancy services, present on the Romanian market since 1998.
We are recognized for conceiving and implementing programs which offer managers an authentic experience towards improving their leadership
performances, and thus we support companies in becoming more and more engaged in delivering excellent services for their clients.
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