Chapter 5

Management quotient skills: managing your journey

Managing your career journey: your 45-year map

Not all managers are created equal. As a manager your role will change dramatically over the course of your career. Managing a team of five people is not the same as managing a global supply chain with thousands of people in dozens of countries. The rules of survival and success keep on changing, which means that you have to keep on changing and growing. Your challenge is that there is no rule book to tell you how the rules are changing. Historically, managers have had to work this out for themselves, and the majority have failed. This chapter lays out those unwritten rules of success and shows how you can manage your leadership journey.

Table 5.1 summarises the nature of your management journey – each transition and stage will be explored in detail.

Table 5.1 Your leadership journey

At this point, it is worth noting some consistent themes about your journey.

Success requires reinventing yourself repeatedly. What worked in your last role will not work in your next role. Do not become a prisoner of success. You have to keep changing, keep on growing and keep on learning. Enjoy the ride.

• Your level of control and ambiguity keeps on rising. As you gain more control, you have more choice and more options. You move from accepting the agenda to creating the agenda.
• The trade which started your career becomes less important. Instead, you have to master the arts of dealing with people and politics. You will discover that different sorts of people become more valuable to you. Finance and staff can be seen as the enemy who like to say ‘no’ early in your career, but later they become your vital guardians of order and control.
• Your time horizon expands. The manager’s watch has three hands: hours, minutes and seconds. As a team player, you focus on the second hand: today and this week. As a middle manager, you have to watch the minute hand as well: where you will take the team over the next quarter or next year. As a top manager, you have to watch all three hands: the hour hand is about your strategy for where you will take the firm over the next five years.
• Financial skills become more important: from managing a simple budget to managing a complex P&L you need to be financially literate to survive.

The best managers understand this journey and understand how each level has a different perspective. As a new manager, you have to understand the agenda and priorities of top managers: talk their language and work on what matters to them. As a top manager, you have to remember the perspective of team members and translate your grand vision into concrete ideas that they can understand and work on.

Use this map to coach other managers. If you are a senior manager and see a new manager struggling, this map will probably show you why. The new manager is not a poor manager: they simply need help to grow into their new role.

Each level has its own traps for the unwary, but the biggest trap of all is the failure to adapt. You not only have to raise your game, but you have to change your game.

Table 5.1 maps out what is likely to be a 45-year journey for many people: graduate and start work at 22 and retire to your fantasy future at 67. This is good news. It means you have plenty of time to learn and develop the skills you need to succeed. It is easy to focus on the wrong things, especially at the start of your career when each pay rise and each promotion assumes disproportionate importance. With the right time perspective, you can focus on the right things. Would you rather negotiate a 10 per cent increase in your salary or a ten-fold increase in your salary? Negotiating 10 per cent will look good this year, if you take on some tough challenges. Negotiating a ten-fold increase in your salary leads to a discussion about what are the right experiences, right training and right support you need to build your career in the long term. Investing in yourself is the best investment you can make.

To make sense of the 45-year map, we need more detailed maps of what happens at each stage of the journey. That is the focus of the rest of this chapter.

Stepping up: first-time and accidental managers

First-time managers are often accidental managers. They are appointed because there is a gap which needs to be filled in a hurry and you look like a promising individual. But no one has ever given you any training on how to manage. You are expected to know the rules without ever seeing them, and have the skills without any training. You are an accidental manager because you are appointed by accident, and you are an accident waiting to happen. Your first management role can be a brutal learning experience.

The major cause of failure is success. The curse of success trips up many people at the very first hurdle, when they are promoted from team member to front-line manager. This is the problem of the leader in the locker room. A good football player is promoted to manage the team. The player has succeeded by running hard, making tackles and passes and scoring goals. With promotion, he doubles down on his success formula: he runs harder and makes even more tackles and passes. And then he is fired, and is both angry and mystified. What went wrong?

The job of the team manager is not to run the hardest and to make all the tackles and passes. The job of the manager is to pick the right team, develop them, set the tactics and wave their arms on the sidelines. It is a completely different job, which explains why many of the best players make poor managers, while many excellent managers were journeyman players. As in sport, so in business: becoming a manager for the first time changes everything. The way you succeeded in the past is not the way you will succeed in the future.

Table 5.2 summarises the challenge of stepping up into your first management role. It shows that you have to reinvent yourself with your first promotion. Sticking with your proven success formula is not safe – it is suicide for your career.

The challenge of stepping up is fundamentally about changing how you relate to colleagues.

Change how you relate to colleagues

The critical transformation is from ‘how’ to ‘who’. As a front-line employee you will meet every challenge with the question ‘How can I do this?’ The management mindset is completely different. Instead of asking that, you have to ask ‘Who can do this?’

The shift from how to who drives a series of other changes. Instead of managing your own performance, you have to manage the performance of others. That means giving feedback as much as receiving it; it means giving direction and support, not just receiving it; it means learning the essential art of delegation. Many front-line leaders find it very hard to delegate (see Chapter 3 on delegating), because they have learned to trust themselves. A classic mistake is to delegate all the routine rubbish while taking on the toughest challenges personally. This demotivates the team, they never grow and it puts huge pressure on you to perform. If you do not trust your team with the tough challenges, then either you need a new team or the team needs a new manager.

As a new manager, all your relationships change dramatically. It can be hard to adjust. You face the daunting challenge of having to manage three very awkward types of people:

• your ex-teammates who may well have become your friends
• older colleagues, which seems like having to manage your parents
• professionals, highly skilled people who do not like being managed and probably think they could do your job better than you can.

First-time managers often veer between craving popularity with each group and becoming Attila the Hun, ruling by command and fear. The true currency of leadership is neither love nor fear; it is trust and respect. As a new manager, you have to earn the right to be trusted and respected, which is covered at the end of Chapter 4.

Adjusting to these new relationships means adopting a new mindset. Thinking in terms of hierarchy is unhelpful with each of the awkward groups above. Your ex-teammates will resent you, the professionals will actively or passively resist you and the older colleagues will be able to outsmart you if they want to. You need them on your side, but without being weak and seeking popularity.

The way to adjust is to think about everyone as being on the same team – which they are. As a team, each person has a different and valuable role to play. As a manager, you simply have a different set of tasks to perform from other team members: setting direction, managing towards goals, delegating work as required. Thinking like this means that you do not need to boss your team, nor do you need to be friends with them. You simply need to work together to get the job done. Once you know your role as manager, you can delegate everything else.

You do not need to tell the professionals and the older generation what to do. Instead, you can ask for their expert advice on how to deal with each challenge. As the manager, you do not need to be the smartest person in the room, but you do need to get the smartest people into the room and use their intelligence.

Inevitably, there will be times when the professionals disagree. Even when this happens you do not need to be the wise oracle who solves all the knottiest problems. As the manager, you can gather all the brains in the same place to discover the best solution together.

The best new managers discover the fine art of idle management. They encourage their team to seek solutions and take on challenges. Professionals will like being stretched, challenged and trusted and the older generation will appreciate being valued and trusted. Most people want to do a good job, so let them do it. Less management is often good management.

Into the matrix: leading from the middle

Whisper it quietly, but being a CEO is easier than being a middle manager. Middle management is the toughest role in management. It is easier at the bottom, and it is easier at the top. And it also used to be easier in the past. We will look at why it is so tough, and then show how you can survive and thrive in the middle.

First, it helps to understand what middle management is, because it covers a huge range of roles and ranks. As a front-line manager you manage team members, and you become a middle manager when you manage managers. Managing managers is a very different task. Some of the more obvious differences are:

• Managers expect more autonomy and less control from you. You have to be able to let go and know how to manage on an exception basis.
• Managers value you not for your technical expertise, but for your ability to help them push their agenda and protect their team.
• You become one more step removed from day-to-day operations, so you have to focus on how you will change things over the longer term. It is not enough to run the machine well – you have to improve the machine.
• Resource management and financial literacy become vital skills.
• You have to be able to engage with, and shape, top level management’s thinking and strategy.
• You have to build networks of trust and influence across the organisation to make things happen. Your colleagues co-operate and compete with you for limited resources. You have to learn the art of constructive politics.

So far, so obvious. But even these obvious changes are enough to trip up many people who have been promoted. Once again, the rules of survival and success have changed invisibly. Unless you can read the air and change with the wind, you will flounder. You have to become comfortable with budgets, accounting, strategy and influence, and you have to be able to talk intelligently with specialists from HR, IT, legal and elsewhere. You are no longer managing a narrow functional specialism – you are starting the journey towards general management. That means learning a wide range of new skills at speed.

Your personal reinvention goes well beyond learning new skills. You find the nature of work itself changes. This is where you find middle management is the toughest role in any firm, and where you find it is harder than ever before. The changing nature of your work is summarised in Table 5.3 below.

Table 5.3 The challenge of leading from the middle

Middle management combines the toughest aspects of managing at the top and managing at the front line. At the start of your career you have little autonomy: you pretty much do whatever you are told to do. The work may be hard, but at least you have clarity and certainty about what you are meant to do. At the top, everything changes. You have very high autonomy. You do not accept the agenda, you create the agenda. With autonomy comes much more responsibility and ambiguity. The priorities are trade-offs that are not clear until you make them clear.

Middle management maximises the ambiguity of top management and the lack of control of entry-level managers. In the middle you face competing priorities. There are always more initiatives and ideas than you can handle, while also having to cope with the day-to-day noise of management. You are not in full control of your destiny, because you do not set the agenda and you have to rely on your colleagues to make things happen.

It is in this highly ambiguous, competitive and political world where you have to learn the art of PQ, the subject of Chapter 4. Politics is seen as a dirty word because of politicians. But it is a vital skill. It is how you can make the organisation work for you, instead of you working for the organisation. It is how you master the machine rather than becoming a slave to it. In a world of distributed responsibility, it is the only way you can make things happen. Achieving this is more than learning a new skillset. It is also about learning a new mindset, as shown in Table 5.4 below.

To survive as a middle manager you have to adapt and evolve. But in many cases, survival is not enough. Middle managers are most at risk when it comes to reorganising and restructuring. Most reorganisations involve shuffling the deck of middle managers, which is taken as an ideal opportunity by top management to do some spring cleaning. By reconfiguring roles, they have the excuse to cull dead wood: that means you. Middle managers are often expensive, and they are dispensable because there are always many younger, cheaper managers who they can promote into your position.

The relentless logic of any pyramid-shape firm dictates that you live in an ‘up or out’ world: eventually you get promoted or you get fired. This is especially harsh on middle managers. Entry-level staff always have the option of starting again or doing an MBA. Top-level managers will either have the security of wealth behind them, or they have the visibility to go on to other things. In the middle, you cannot start again. Instead of the security of wealth, you have the insecurity of needing to feed your family and you do not have the visibility to hop easily into other firms. Who says it is tough at the top? It is tougher in the middle.

You have three ways of dealing with the survival challenge in middle management:

• get promoted
• survive
• escape.

Here is what is behind each option.

Get promoted

Plan A is to recognise the nature of ‘up or out’ employment. Instead of surviving as a middle manager, escape middle management and head for top management. This is easier said than done, because you will be surrounded by colleagues who are equally talented and industrious and they are competing for the same small pot of promotion opportunities. Here is how you can stack the odds in your favour:

• Join a firm or division which is growing very fast, which creates more opportunities for advancement.
• Have a claim to fame which resonates across the firm and with the CEO.
• Work on an agenda that has high visibility at the top of the firm and show that you support every last fad and half-witted initiative to emerge from the C-suite. Volunteer to lead initiatives which might lead to your claim to fame: leading an initiative from the CEO is a good start.
• Build your network of support and allies within the C-suite. Use them as your intelligence network to head off problems, identify opportunities and to manage messaging on your behalf.
• Put yourself at the centre of any restructuring or change initiative. You want to be part of the decision-making process about who and what is restructured. This may mean being nice to consultants as they have the ear of the CEO.

Survive

This is the toughest option over the long term. The longer you stay in post, the more you will be seen to be stagnating. You will be seen to be dead wood, which may or may not be fair. The perception may be false, but the consequences of perceptions are real: you will be in the firing line, especially if your salary has been gently increasing over the years until you are seen to be expensive dead wood.

As with the promotion option, you need to make yourself indispensable. Unlike the promotion option, this is unlikely to be in a line management role. It is more likely to be in a staff or technical area where deep expertise and knowledge of the firm is valued highly.

But it is not enough to be indispensable: you have to be seen to be indispensable. As with the promotion option, that means cultivating your network at the top. Over time, you will recognise the need to support and cultivate emerging talent. When they leap past you into top positions, they will remember who their friends and supporters were on the way up. You can be their trusted advisor who presents no threat to them.

Ultimately, survival depends on the whims of top management. Many middle managers discover too late that when you depend on one person you can depend on failure. Loyalty does not last in the face of two acid tests:

• Personal interest comes ahead of your interests – their survival comes before yours.
• Survival of the firm is more important than your survival.

To misquote the film Wall Street, ‘If you want loyalty, buy a dog.’ Too many middle managers become embittered when they discover that they have been let down by someone they trusted and relied on. Never rely on just one person, and always have a plan B, your escape route.

Escape

Even if you never use your escape route, it is vital to have one. Without an escape route you become dependent and disempowered. With an escape route you know you have options. This enables you to act with more courage and confidence in your current role. That has the perverse effect of reducing the likelihood that you will need your escape route.

Your escape route comes in two varieties.

First, you can escape to the same or similar role in another firm. As noted in Chapter 4 under Managing your career, although the grass always looks greener elsewhere, it is greenest where it rains the most. Moving firm may solve the immediate crisis, but does not solve the longer-term challenge of survival. You can prepare this escape route by building your network beyond your firm. You are likely to work in a specialism where people know each other, if only because colleagues move between firms regularly. Take time to keep up your network. Research on LinkedIn in 2016 shows that up to 85 per cent of jobs are found through networks, not through formal searches.

Second, have a life outside work. If you live to work and depend on work to fund your lifestyle, you become a slave to your firm. You can liberate yourself by having interests and options beyond work. These can be things which you can monetise by starting a business. You will discover that starting a business is a one-way career leap: once you have tasted the terror and freedom of working for yourself, it becomes nearly impossible to step back into the corporate machine where you work for people you may not like, trust or respect. Most people find that when they work for themselves, they work for someone they do like, trust and respect.

The changing nature of middle management

Middle management reveals just how far the nature of management has changed in the last generation. There has been a revolution, and the old guard of old-style managers has been on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of the barricades.

The principles of management were originally derived from the military, which was the only good example of the large-scale management of people in a dynamic environment. Large firms, like large armies, have divisions led by chiefs and officers of everything, with strategies to outflank and kill the competition, provided the front-line knows where to attack. This was male language for a male world of command and control.

Managers in the middle were like mid-ranking officers. Their job was to convey orders down the hierarchy and to send information back up the hierarchy. They had limited discretion and were expected to stay in line. But they got to join the officers’ mess: they had their own canteen, their own parking space, they might have access to the country club and the tea lady would pour them tea while ignoring all the more junior staff around them. They became members of a club.

Any middle manager who thinks their job is to pass orders down and information up the hierarchy will survive as long as the tea lady. They are both consigned to history. The perks of middle management have all gone. Instead, middle managers now have far more autonomy and responsibility with much more ambiguity. They have neither the certainties of front-line management, nor the control of top management.

To be caught in the hell of middle management is made all the harder when you can see, sniff and even touch the paradise of top management where your power, control and rewards grow dramatically. No wonder it is called the paranoia zone.

Reaching the summit: top-level management

Top-level management is about the scope of your responsibilities, not just the scale. Once you are managing an entire business, with profit and loss responsibility, you become a top manager. You are the monarch of the firm. This means you can be a top manager with just ten people in the firm you run. The nature of the challenge is the same as being CEO of a global firm even if the scale is different.

Stepping up is a huge transition, as Shakespeare noted when the dissolute Prince Hal becomes King Henry V on the death of his father. Falstaff, Hal’s drinking companion, was delighted. This was pay day: his best mate had become king and now the riches of the nation would flow his way through the new king’s patronage. At least, that is what Falstaff hoped when he saw Hal and greeted him as the new king. Hal responded not as dissolute Prince Hal, but as the new King Henry V:

I know thee not, old man.

Presume not that I am the thing I was,

I have turned away my former self.

Henry IV Part 2, Act 5, Scene 5

Henry V goes on to promise Falstaff a nasty exit to a waiting grave. Henry V knew that stepping up to the top meant complete change personally, and any old friendships and alliances simply were not relevant. For Falstaff it was brutal, and it is as shocking to watch as the blood-soaked endings of other Shakespeare plays.

When you step up to the top, remember to ‘presume not to be the thing that you were’ and be prepared to ‘turn away from your former self’.

When you step up, three things change fundamentally:

• The nature of your relationships within the firm changes.
• You have to take control.
• You become a role model, for better or for worse.

The nature of your relationships within the firm change

It is often said that it is lonely at the top. At one level, that is patent nonsense. Look at how any top manager works and they are meeting people non-stop. The problem does not appear to be loneliness: the problem appears to be lack of personal time to think.

But it is possible to be lonely in a crowd, as any train commuter knows full well. As a top manager you become lonely because there is no one you can trust completely. You find that everyone wants something from you. They want support for a new idea, they want some more budget, they want approval for a deal, they want relief from the latest round of cost-cutting. Every discussion is loaded. No one relates to you as a person – they relate to your position, power and patronage.

This can be highly unnerving. After 20 years working your way through the ranks, you get used to colleagues challenging your ideas, undermining you and questioning you. You become a top manager and suddenly you find that everyone finds your jokes are hilarious, your judgement is impeccable, you mention a half-baked idea and discover that someone has gone away for two weeks to turn it into reality. Throughout the firm you find things are happening ‘because that is what the boss wants’. You scratch your head and wonder how anyone thought that is what you wanted. You discover that you have to be very careful what you say and to whom.

Inevitably, you find yourself creating distance between yourself and your team. You have to remain objective. You do not want to have Falstaff-style relationships with your top team. But that leaves the problem of who you can talk to honestly and openly with your thoughts. Most top-level managers identify a few people they can trust: these are people who are outside the power structure of the firm and do not have a personal agenda that they are trying to push. These people might include an external coach, family members or experienced staffers you can trust in different areas such as finance, HR or planning.

Whoever it is, find someone or some people with whom you can share the burden.

You have to take control

At the top you are no longer taking the agenda, you are creating the agenda. You do not have to fit your own agenda into the wider agenda of the firm. You have to shape the agenda for everyone else to follow. With control comes ambiguity: no one is shaping what you can or cannot do.

As we have seen in Chapter 4, taking control is both vital and difficult. Just because you have the position it does not mean you have the power. If you fail to take control, you leave a power vacuum which others will fill. Every power baron in the firm will gleefully promote their own agendas. You may have the illusion of control because you are approving, altering or declining all the proposals that come before you. But the control is illusory because you have gone reactive. To be in control, you need to have your own agenda that you proactively push, and that your power barons have to react to. Be proactive, not reactive, to gain control.

Gaining control through having a clear agenda should sound familiar. This is the power of ideas, your idea, discussed in Chapter 4. But to gain full control, you need more than a big idea: you need the right people and the right money. These are the three parts to your formula for control-IPM:

• Idea
• People
• Money

Once you have your big idea, you need to get the right people in the right roles. This is where you have to be ruthless: the survival of the firm takes precedence over survival of the individual. If someone is in the wrong place, move them to the right place. Rationally, you want the right people doing the right things. Politically, moving your top team around in a restructuring shows that you are not afraid to act: it cements your power. And if there is anyone who does not fit with the future of the firm, you have to find the courage at act: move them out.

When you have your idea and people in place, worry about the money. Even as a top manager, you will have bosses to report to. You will either report to a board, or you will report to more senior managers who run a group of businesses. Either way, you will find that ultimately they will judge your success in financial terms. Your vision and your team is only as good as the results they achieve.

In practice, if you have the right idea and the right team, then the financial results will flow. If the financial returns are not good, then either you have the wrong idea or the wrong team. The only other possibility is that the firm has the wrong top manager. Stay on top of your financial performance before the board decides that it needs to replace the top manager.

You become a role model, for better or for worse.

Think back on all the top managers you have worked with. What do you remember them for? The chances are that you do not remember the year they valiantly beat the budget by 6.8 per cent. But you are likely to have vivid memories of what they were like. Some will bring back pleasant memories, while others will not. So how will you be remembered, and how do you want to be remembered?

At the entry level of any firm it is easy to find people who are cynical about management, gossip and joke about colleagues and customers and get angry and frustrated at setbacks. To act like that is to be human. But that is not what is expected at the top. At the top, you have to learn to wear the mask of leadership. You have to become the role model that others want to follow, and you want them to follow.

The way you act will be echoed and amplified throughout the firm. If you have low ethical standards, the rest of the firm will have them too. If you like pointing the finger of blame when things go wrong, then do not be surprised when you have a political blame culture in the firm. If you insist that people bring you solutions and not problems, you can expect problems to be hidden from you until they become crises which explode and threaten the firm. If you wonder where the culture of the firm comes from, look in the mirror.

None of this means that you have to become someone you are not: that is impossible. It means you have to dial up your strengths and dial down your weaknesses. Become the best of who you are.

Beyond the big three challenges of stepping up, there is one deadly mistake that many people make: failing to step up in the first place. If you never step up, you will never know if you could have made it. If you don’t ask the question, you don’t get the answer. Here is why people do not step up:

• They prefer the relative comfort of middle management.
• They think they are not ready to step up and do not want to push themselves.
• They do not know how to get the top job.

If you are hesitating about stepping up, it is worth reviewing why. Here is what is behind each of the obstacles.

Acquiring MQ: how to learn success

Managers are given very little help in becoming managers. Schools teach nothing about political skills and precious little about emotional skills. Arguably, they teach precisely the wrong intellectual skills: they ask students to work alone and produce rational answers to predetermined questions where there is a clear answer. Any manager who expects to work alone, producing rational answers to predetermined questions, is going to have a very short managerial career.

Schools – and business schools – are in the business of teaching explicit knowledge. The problem is that they never teach us how to think. They can teach maths, English, physics and double-entry book-keeping. But thinking simply does not exist as a discipline. It is assumed that if we can do algebra and write a grammatical sentence, then we can think effectively. The evidence of daily life shows that this is a mistake. Alienated youths on the street who resolve disputes by relying on a knife are in the same category as the defensive manager who resolves disputes by relying on authority: neither of them has the mental training to know how to resolve such everyday differences effectively.

The problem continues within organisations. Our research asked managers to pick their two most valuable sources of learning about management from the following list:

• books
• courses
• peers
• bosses
• role models
• experience.

Some 99 per cent of respondents failed to mention books or courses. The only person who really valued books was the only one who had not graduated from university. This suggests the entire leadership and management development industry is in danger of disappearing in a puff of irrelevance. For an author of a book on management, it is seriously bad news. The challenge is to make any book relevant, readable and practical.

Before discovering how to help people develop their MQ, it is worth looking at how and why current efforts fail. Many organisations offer good professional development in technical skills: helping people learn the trade or craft of their industry, be it law, accounting, bond trading, engineering or accounting. But, when it comes to learning IQ, EQ and PQ, potential participants suddenly discover they are needed elsewhere that day. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that the most common excuses were the following:

• They are too busy at work.
• Family or personal commitments.
• They are insufficiently motivated.
• Resistance from line managers.
• Insufficient culture of learning at work.

These excuses need a little translation:

• They are too busy at work = not a priority.
• Family or personal commitments = not a priority.
• They are insufficiently motivated = not a priority.
• Resistance from line managers = not a priority for the boss.
• Insufficient culture of learning at work = not a priority for anyone.

Lack of time never means lack of time: it means lack of priority. If the same individuals were offered a hot date with their favourite film or sports star and a million pounds, the chances are that they could shuffle their very busy schedules to make the date.

Management training does not quite have the same allure as a hot date and a million pounds for at least two reasons:

• Most management training is not very good from the participant’s perspective.
• Training assumes that the participant is deficient in whatever they are learning: this is a sign of weakness to which few people care to admit.

Our research shows that most managers learn from peers, bosses, role models and experience. This makes sense to most people. We see someone mess up and quietly make a note not to step on that particular landmine. We see someone else do something really well and, this time, we make a note to try to repeat the trick ourselves. Piece by piece, we beg, borrow and steal little bits of management DNA from the people and events we encounter. The result is that we build up our own unique management DNA that programmes how we behave under most management situations.

The process of acquiring DNA is highly effective. We do not learn the theory of what should work in general. We learn what works in practice in our particular trade. The investment banker learns to love risk. To civil servants, risk is like kryptonite to Superman: they will do everything to manage it away. The banker and the civil servant are learning opposite lessons and they are both learning the right thing. The practice of what works always trumps the theory of what should work. Practice beats theory every time.

But there is a dark side to this random walk of building your own personalised management DNA. The three major problems are:

• the wrong experiences
• the wrong role models
• the wrong context.

If managers learn from role models and experience, it is essential that they get the right role models and experience. If they get poor role models and poor experiences, they get poor learning. In every organisation there are a few bosses whose dark reputation precedes them: people have to work for them, but not many people want to. There are also the nightmare assignments from which few people are expected to escape unscathed.

The random walk of learning from experience can lead to management heaven or management hell, depending on what people and events managers bump into on their journey. There has to be a better way of developing management quotient (MQ).

This book helps your management journey by structuring and accelerating it. Instead of leaving you to learn from random experiences, the book gives managers the frameworks that you need to make sense of what you are seeing, experiencing and learning. For weak managers, frameworks are prisons: they mindlessly apply the same formula, regardless of the circumstances. They are process prisoners and the frameworks are the prison walls. For strong managers, frameworks let you climb the experience curve faster. Good frameworks are aids to thinking, not substitutes for thinking.

Learning to learn: your invisible success formula

The things you really want to learn are never documented, and nor are there any training programmes for them:

• How do I manage my boss?
• When should I step up and when should I step back?
• How much risk should I take and when?
• How do I deal with the awkward squad?
• How do I deal with this crisis, right now?

If there are answers, they vary depending on your context: the nature of your colleagues, your role, the culture of the firm and the country all change the answers. This book gives you some ideas to work on, but ultimately you have to create your own success formula. This is great news, in that you do not have to subscribe to some abstract, universal theory that can be replicated by a robot. It is also terrible news, because you have to find the answer. You have to manage your own learning journey. If you can do this, you will have discovered the secret of success. It will always be secret, because no one else can copy your formula: they have to create their own formula.

The instructions for finding your success formula are simple. Ask yourself two questions, find answers, repeat. And then keep on repeating without end. The two questions are refreshingly easy: WWW and EBI.

WWW means what went well. Ask yourself this question after every important meeting, call or event. The idea is to catch yourself succeeding. Most of us take success for granted. We assume that is how the world is meant to be. But reality is different: success is very hard to come by consistently. There are endless reasons why things go awry. And we cannot assume that our innate genius will put things right automatically. So, when things go well, reflect on why they went well and what you did to make them go well. The more you catch yourself succeeding, the more you will understand how and why you succeed. You will start to create your own success manual.

WWW is equally important when things do not work out quite how you expected. Even when things go wrong, there are probably some things you did well that averted an even greater setback. Again, catch yourself doing well and build your know-how and confidence.

EBI stands for even better if… Again, after any important event, ask what you could have done differently to get an even better outcome. The common alternative to EBI is WWW’s evil twin: what went wrong. Post-mortem discussions are occasionally useful, and many of our most vivid lessons come from messing up. As children, we learn the danger of fire from touching something hot, and then we do not make the same mistake again. But, to focus on the negative is a good way to lose confidence and to start the dreaded blame game in your team. If you focus on how to improve, you will improve. You can use WWW and EBI as a good way to debrief with your team. You can also use it in quiet moments by yourself. You will find that, even walking down the corridor, waiting for a train or while having a cup of coffee, you can make such downtime productive by reflecting on the day and asking WWW and EBI. Do this and you can coach yourself to success on your terms.

Employing MQ: uses and abuses

MQ is a simple framework to help you understand the management potential of you and your colleagues. It breaks management down into a set of skills that everyone can learn. These are the skills that managers need to make things happen through other people. By way of summary, here is a simple assessment tool to try on yourself and your colleagues. It tracks the skills outlined in each chapter, so you can refer to the relevant sections, where necessary. How many of the skills can you honestly say you possess at present?

Many of these skills will not exist in a formal assessment system, which is why formal assessment systems are so often a source of frustration. They help no one understand what is really important in an effective manager. Although management is everywhere, few people have dared to define it and even fewer teach it. You can learn accounting, finance and marketing and still not know how to manage. This book (and the assessment tool above) helps you cut through the noise and understand the critical skills and interventions every manager needs if they are to succeed in practice.

Decoding your success formula: your journey

In 1989 Freddie Mercury and Queen released their album The Miracle and sang, ‘I want it all and I want it now.’ Nowadays, we want more, and we want it faster. This is great news for the modern-day medicine men selling their cure-alls in a bottle. Except that nowadays we are more sophisticated and call the cure things like alternative medicines, holistic treatments or, for businesses, re-engineering, core competences, value innovation and co-creation. We learn the word, take the medicine and… nothing happens.

People and businesses have been taking quack cures not for decades, but for millennia. We have moved on from sacrificing sheep to the gods, but we still want The Miracle.

The good news for managers is that there is no miracle five-day course that will turn a disillusioned worker into a brilliant manager. You cannot succeed on just five minutes a day, even if there is a promise of your money back. The lack of an instant, universal formula for managerial success is good news for at least three reasons:

• If there was an instant formula, everyone would have it. You would have no competitive advantage against other managers and you would be left looking for another instant formula to make you stand out.
• If there was a single formula, management would be a very dull matter of mindlessly applying the same formula day in and day out. There are days when a simple approach would be preferable to the exciting crises of management, but few people would want to do the same thing the same way for 40 or more years.
• If there was a single formula, we would all have to conform to it like brain-washed zombies. Some managers already behave like brain-washed zombies. The rest of us value being who we are, playing to our strengths and carefully bypassing our (very few and minor) weaknesses.

So, we have to make up our own formula for success. We look, listen and learn from our own experience and from others. We copy, steal and adapt little bits of management DNA from everyone else. We copy what we like and hope to avoid messing up the way others mess up: we can all find enough creative ways to mess ourselves up without copying other people’s faults as well. Eventually, we build up our own unique management DNA, which works in our own unique environment. The perfect manager is as unlikely as the perfect predator: we are as dependent on finding the right context as the polar bear and the lion are.

As we go on our separate management journeys, we need something to help us on our way. This book, any book, cannot pretend to give the universal solution to all management challenges. But, used wisely, it can help you accelerate your learning from experience and, hence, your journey to success.

How to Manage does not give a universal formula for success. It does much better than that. It helps you decode your unique success formula.

Whatever your journey is, enjoy it.