Mmi leadership 4

Notes de l'éditeur

1. The problems you encountered as an individual contributor likely related directly to your particular job. However, your identity as a manager includes becoming a role model for your direct reports (and peers), looking at the world through the lens of your organization's overall objectives, and being held accountable for your decisions. Example: If your job is to sell advertising in a newspaper aware that one important advertiser decided to leave your clients portfolio, your response may be to just renounce at this particular client and concentrate your efforts to attract another powerful advertiser. You have faced the problem and come up with a viable solution. As the publishing company’s manager, however, you see that losing a client for another may be a poor solution. Your task is to see the bigger picture. Is there a way of re-negotiating the advertising contract with that particular client? Could your company offer a special discount for loyal clients? Can barter be common acceptable solution? As a manager, you step back to consider all your options and decide what is best for the short-term and long-term objectives of the company.
2. As an individual contributor, you define success in terms of your own performance—how many new customers you acquired, how well a new product you designed worked, and so forth. As a manager, however—someone whose primary responsibility is to get things done through others—you need to measure success differently. Example As your group's computer support technician, you might think that installing a new, functioning IT system signals the successful completion of your task. But if you were the manager, you would declare victory only after your whole group masters the new system and begins achieving measurable improved results from it.
3. Just as success needs to be measured in new ways for a manager, satisfaction can take a different form. Many new managers discover—to their pleasant surprise—that aspects of the job they worried about or dreaded are actually personally fulfilling. In the past, you may have been pleased with your own individual accomplishments, but now you need to find satisfaction from different sources. For one thing, you may be many steps removed from the outcome of your decisions and actions. As a result, your relationship to the outcome may be distant, ambiguous, or even unrecognized. You will rarely get the same instant gratification you got in the past with a successful outcome that was clearly your doing. Joke: Reaching the end of a job interview, the Human Resources person asked the potential new department manager: "And what starting salary were you looking for?" The new manager said, "In the neighborhood of $300,000 a year, depending on the benefits package." The interviewer said, "Well, what would you say to a package of 5 weeks vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, company matching retirement fund to 50% of salary, and a company car leased every 2 years - for starters, say, a red Corvette?" The new manager tried to control his excitement, but sat straight up and said, "Wow! Are you kidding?" . "Yeah," the interviewer shrugged, "But you started it."