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Guest post by: Jonathan Payne Become an Author

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One of the most difficult career transitions is the move into management. Most people move into a management role having served some time at the “coal face”. The advantage of this is that people in management are familiar with what happens lower down the ladder. But this advantage in itself can become a problem. A manager who knows how a subordinate’s job should be done is often tempted to do the job – especially when the pressure is on and the subordinate is not performing to the required standard. Some managers live by the dictum: “If you want a job done properly, do it yourself.”
Management needs to be seen as a profession in its own right, with its own skill set and training needs. Good managers are often people who have no idea how to do the work of their subordinates. They are not tempted to do it themselves and therefore focus on managing – which is what they are employed to do.
One of the key skills of management is empowerment. Managers should enable their subordinates to perform to the best of their ability. This cannot be done if the manager keeps doing the work for them. It is difficult for a manager to stand back and allow someone to make mistakes. But instead of doing the job, the manager must focus on training and empowering someone else to do it. In that way the manager is able to manage many people, which is not possible for managers who try to manage and do the work of their subordinates.
Managers manage. That sounds obvious, but in my experience it is the one thing that managers do not do. Perhaps it is because people are promoted to management on the grounds that they performed well at the technical level. The result is that businesses lose the services of a good technician and gain a bad manager. Unfortunately, it is assumed that a worker who performs well has the skills to manage –without any training.
The move into management requires retraining into a job that should be seen as entirely different from what the person has done before. New managers need to learn to stop involving themselves in what they did before and learn how to lead, encourage, organise and, above all, empower.

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