I am excited to be going to Washington D.C. in early December to work with Lisa Haneberg’s on Developing Great Managers.
Click here to read about this brand new course that offers an innovative and succinct way to develop great managers.
I believe Lisa is on to a very important method of developing managers from inside an organization by developing management power hours – short 1 hour education sessions to inform, engage, and develop managers.
My role in the course is to offer 14 Management Provocations.
Here are 5 of the 14 Provocations I plan to share with Lisa’s participants:
Management Fear Factor and Finding Happiness – Have an ear for fear and an eye for anxiety in yourself and the people you manage. What role does fear play in management and how do you manage fear? What is the impact of fear on performance and performance feedback? Can we lessen fear with the new currency of authentic happiness and positive psychology?
Weave Paradox and Improvisation with Strategy and Planning into Management – Can you embrace positive uncertainty and work with ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity? Can you slide between strategy and improvisation? What comes next?…
Connecting through community and conversation – Have you succeeded in ensuring your organization is also a community? What is the role of community and how does it change the role of managers? Overcome distance and disconnection through community. What is your comfort and competence level with a co-created workplace?
Create your personal management brand through strength wedded with value to others – Quickly what are your top 5 strengths? When was the last specific time you used each as a manager? Who knows about your strengths? How do they know this? What is your personal management brand – the strengths you have that create value for others?
Embrace your ignorance – What don’t you know? How often do you feel compelled to use an expert model when an ignorant model might work better? Ignorance simply means not knowing. Stupidity on the other hand, is thinking you know when you don’t. It is okay to be ignorant, just don’t be stupid about it. In the 1960’s Marshall McLuhan said in the future we would learn a living versus earn a living – what living are you learning now? Are you comfortable dwelling in the Age of Ask?
What do you think? I would love to read any of your responses or to hear what you believe are some of the current challenges facing managers.
Do you want to hear about the other 9 provocations or Zingers?
Click here to learn more about this course sponsored by the American Society for Training and Development.
Photo Credit: Nice Hour Glass by http://www.flickr.com/photos/whoisstan/397907864/
Interesting 5 David. I especially like the questions on strengths and am highly intrigued by the “Embrace your ignorance”, I find often the best way to manage things is to manage things you know nothing about so you can focus on managing it, instead of getting deeply involved.
And yes, I’d love to read the other 9.
David – these look great and I look forward to hearing these and the others at the conference! Take a few moments to define or discuss what paradox and improvisation look like in the workplace. I have a feeling that many people get lulled into routines that neither is apparent (although both are surely present in some ways).
I like the way you stress the importance of strengths, particularly how they can be used to serve others. “How will you apply your strengths to make things happen.”
I also think we will need a few concrete examples of how managing by fear might show up – I am guessing that most managers manage by fear in some ways, but we might not see that this is what’s really at the root of it because it seems so natural and we were “raised” through our careers with the same methods.
Fun, fun…