Managerial Leadership Practices: The nature of managerial work

Speaker A Brief introduction of myself, just so you understand my background. I spent over 30 years in nuclear power industry in Canada, in Ontario, and I realized that in Argentina you have in Balsay Cordova just a can do reactor. So there's some Canadian technology in Argentina and I hear it's working fairly well. So that's a great thing. I was a line manager, so a manager within an organization. I spent many years in HR within that organization. And then I had the opportunity to start working with Dr. Jackson. In 1995. Elliot was hired to come into our organization, ontario Hydro at the time, which is a 30,000 person organization, and implement Requisite organization. So he was the external consultant, nancy was a member of his team, catherine Casey was another member of his team, and I was the internal person that was assigned to be the project lead for that particular process. That basically took us between three and five years to implement reckless organization across Ontario Hydro and in specific Ontario Power Generation, which is a division of Ontario Hydro, a 10,000 person division. If you were to go back today and do an assessment and organizational assessment, you would find that Requisite is still well embedded within the nuclear power industry in Ontario. So what I want with the presentation, this is really the how to. So when we say this is managerial work, one of the keys for most organizations is to understand that a manager gets work done through others. A lot of times we give a manager a title for compensation reason. We say in order to pay the world, we're going to make you a manager. That doesn't necessarily mean that we get good managers out of the process. What we really have to do is understand a worker's role. And what we're trying to do here is say what is the work of a manager? Remember Sandy said that managers not only get to delegate work, they get to do work. So we're talking now some of the work that a manager actually has to do along with the delegation. And one of the keys to this is managerial planning. When you think of it as a manager, if you can delegate all your activities, basically you're saying that your staff is capable. You are. This is the work that we evaluating manager does to make your team successful, our group of work successful. So managerial planning is a whole involvement of your team. You're the one that has to decide that you should get involvement from your support. They're the ones that know the field probably better than you. You do not have to be the subject matter expert to be the manager. You have a team of resources, work done. You have to be that leader, that manager of that group. How you do that, you have to consider long term planning, short term goals, what your direction is, what are your accountabilities and what are your subordinates accountability so in judging who does what when, then you have to determine what tasks get done. I look at it as a hopper. If you understand, if you can put all your jobs, all your tasks within a hopper, and whenever the next task comes out of that hopper, you can assign it to any individual, then there's no need to have a manager. A computer could do that. It's a manager that has to decide when the next task comes out, what person is going to be most capable of completing that task, either from a capability point of view, from a development point of view, from a training point of view, from a coaching point of view. So these are all considerations that we expect of a manager. So it's not just completing the task, it's ensuring the task gets done appropriately to the proper standards. But it also means at the same time you're trying to develop your team, build the capability of your team. Another one of the tools as a manager, one of the key tools, and this could also be slide communication. Communicate, communicate, communicate. You cannot communicate enough. And there are many studies that say that prime form, the most valued form of information that a worker has is their manager. So we as an organization have to make that person trusted and respected. So we have to make sure that they have the right information in order to be successful as a manager. So setting the context, what's the purpose of the task? How does it align to the strategy, the overarching philosophy of the company? How does it align to the short term goals of the business? And how does it align to the individual being successful? Because as manager also want to do their personal effectiveness review. So again, setting the context, what is the big picture? And again, communicate, communicate, communicate. So there is a lot of work to do as a manager. And there's a great video from a British person and it's called Meetings, bloody Meetings. And it shows that in most organizations we have many, many meetings. What we're saying from a record point of view is try and control what those meetings are. There are purposes for meetings and you should, as manager, try and control those particular meetings. What we want is we want the manager to lead these meetings. We want them to understand what the purpose, the intent of the meetings. And there should be outcomes. I mean, it's nice to get a group of people together, but if you don't have a desired outcome and it's just a social activity, so there should be an outcome for particular types of meetings, of meetings that manager can go through.