Finding Your Management Style: What It Means to You and Your Team

By David Churchill

How you do you manage your employees? Do you know what impact your management style has on your team’s success? With an interactive and hands-on approach, two successful managers with Fortune 500 experience help you identify your current style, communicate it to your team, and achieve great business results based on your business philosophy, business principles, and decision-making logic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Churchill
• Release date: May 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9780692209097

Book preview

Finding Your

Management Style:

What It Means to You and Your Team

__________

David Churchill

Dave Oppy

Copyright © 2014 by David Churchill, Dave Oppy

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 978-0-692-20909-7

Dedication

To our families, from whom we took too much time while we learned the craft of managing ourselves as well as the managers with whom we worked.

To all those managers and employees who contributed to our learning, we learned as much from you as we hope you did from us.

David & Dave

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: What is a Management Style?

Humble Beginnings

A Rough Draft: The Four Lists

Common Management Styles

The Three Elements of a Management Style

Chapter 2: Putting Your Definition to the Test

Testing Your Definition in Three Steps

The Benefits of Understanding Your Management Style

International Impact

If Your Style Isn’t a Good Fit

Summing It All Up

Chapter 3: Building Out Your Management Style

The Four Components of Your Business Principles

Putting It All Together

Make Your Core Ideas Transparent

Chapter 4: Presenting Your Management Style

The PowerPoint Test

Analyzing the Results

Real-World Application

Keep Your Priorities Straight

SMART Performance Recovery Plans

Dealing With Disconnects

Chapter 5: Implementing Your Management Style

The Big 3 Objectives

Eliminate the Micro-Manager

If You Aren’t on the Same Page

Summing It All Up

Chapter 6: Time Management

Check Your Watch

Raising Awareness

Email: Friend or Foe

Summing It All Up

Chapter 7: When You Are The New Manager

Three Steps to Adjusting to a New Role

Managing Up: When Your Manager Has Not Read This Book

Conclusion

ADDENDUM 1: Questions to Help Identify Your Management Style

Preface

The execution of your management style is the single largest contributor to the outcome of your career.

While this entire book is dedicated to defining and explaining management styles, the very first thing you must know is how vital a management style is to the success (or failure) of your business and career. Your management style either motivates or demoralizes your team, and will make or break organizational goals depending on how skilled you are at managing the people and the resources around you. Successfully performing any job requires a set of skills unique to the position. Some jobs, like a manufacturing production line worker or an electrician, require training in order to properly complete very specific tasks. Others may require learning a set of design or theoretical skills, which are applied in a creative way like those of an artist or architect. Just like these specialized fields, we believe there is also a management skill set required to be a successful manager. These abilities are acquired by learning, both through educational background and through management experience itself.

Before we dive into the topic of this book, as authors we want to explain how our own backgrounds led us to want to share our knowledge. I, David Churchill, have managed teams of employees all over the world during my thirty-year management career. I have lived in Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as travelled extensively throughout Europe and Asia. From my first job as salesman for a financial company to my last job as a CEO of a start-up, I have worked with managers and led teams in sales, marketing, R&D, and manufacturing, managing businesses ranging in size from tens of millions to over one billion US dollars in annual revenue.

Throughout my career, I always particularly enjoyed selecting, promoting, and developing other managers by recognizing and building upon their unique strengths and weaknesses. In that process, I realized very quickly that although most managers knew they had some type of personal management style, none of them could articulate or even write down what it was when asked! Their management style is the single biggest contributor to their career success, yet they did not really know how to define it. My goal for this book is to help managers find their management style, and in doing so recognize their strengths and reveal any areas which might not work to their benefit. The book will teach you how to discover your management style as well as provide some tools and exercises to improve or adapt it to the benefit of the employees around you and your own career success.

I, Dave Oppy, bring over twenty years of experience as an HR business partner in the high-tech industry to the leadership and interpersonal concepts discussed in this book. I started my post-graduate career working in college student leadership development. After years of helping students discover and grow their leadership potential, I discovered my own future in the form of pursuing my passion for leadership development within a business environment. I completed a second Master’s degree in Labor Relations and Human Resources from Michigan State University and promptly joined the Chase Manhattan HR leadership development program. Later, I spent time as an HR Generalist at Hewlett-Packard participating in the organizational transformation of the culture during the eight billion dollar spin-off of Agilent Technologies, and later as a part of GE, learning the world-class approaches to leadership and management the company is famous for pioneering.

David Churchill and I met in 2007 while we worked as business partners for Agilent Technologies. We worked as a team to develop a leadership style and culture for the two thousand employees in our charge that was later leveraged across the whole company. This book expresses my lifelong passion for helping people grow their leadership and management abilities at all levels of professional development.

Your story may be completely different from ours because the paths through a career in management are countless, but there are common threads where all managers can relate, learn, and grow. Some companies —usually the really big ones — like Fortune 500 members General Electric and Proctor & Gamble, are examples of organizations with highly developed management-training programs expressly designed to build the management skills of their employees. Managers at smaller companies can acquire or strengthen specific skills by taking professional development courses in popular subjects like strategic planning and finance. But for the most part, managers’ skills are developed on the job as they are promoted through management levels and are learned through experience within their specific business or industry.

Tough business lessons are often learned through trial and error; a process of experimentation and experience following the basic line of thinking, If this solution worked well to solve a set of problems or issues I will use it again, if this solution did not work so well then I will do it differently next time. As a manager develops his or her management skills, the knowledge is applied in real time to achieve the best business results. The focus of this book is to give you a better understanding of the application of your existing management skills.

So what skills do managers need? A manager’s primary function is to invest the human and financial resources under his or her control to the maximum benefit of the company. Because of the broad range of backgrounds and experiences that make up the ranks of managers across industries, everyone develops their own unique approach to investing the human and financial capital for which they are responsible. We call the application of that individual perspective or approach a management style. This book will help you to develop an understanding of your current management style and how to improve it to the benefit of your career and the success of your company.

There are countless books written to help you improve your interpersonal skills, business expertise, finance acumen, or career management. This book, however, is aimed solely at managers (or future managers) who want to improve their ability to manage themselves and the people who work with them. By reading this book and following the exercises inside, you will develop an actionable understanding of your management style.

This is a practical, interactive book; completing the exercises will reveal how you actually work with the people around you today and how you can make that working relationship more effective and productive into the future. Plan to spend time testing and revisiting the exercises in the following chapters over the course of a few weeks in order to get feedback from your staff. Their involvement and input determines how much benefit you will get out of the concepts we present, so be sure they participate in the written and group exercises.

The book has no chapter on personality development, psychological evaluation or management how-to lessons. While these concepts can be very helpful and many books are dedicated to them, we are going to deal with the management skills you possess and use as they are today. The number one objective of this book is to make you a more effective manager of yourself, the employees, and the managers who work with you based on the management style you are already using. Our hope is that after working through these pages, you will walk away with a new frame of reference and tools that, one day when you least expect it, will help you deal with a management issue in a more positive and productive way.

Introduction:

How We Develop A Management Style

It is truly unfortunate that age and experience go hand in hand. Why? Because near the end of their careers, managers have developed the critical set of field-tested and proven skills that could have proven invaluable years earlier. Experiential knowledge gained over the years as a manager makes each of us a better, high-impact decision maker who drives positive business results. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to access this experience and knowledge earlier in our career so we could take advantage of it today?

As our careers progress, managers like us develop a set of conditioned responses to deal with the inevitable issues we face in the workplace every day. By using trial and error to find the most successful outcomes, these conditioned responses form the foundation of our business philosophy, business principles, and decision logic, what we call a management style. This book will provide insights into identifying your personal management style, as well as provide the tools to evaluate it impartially and then (should you want to) show you how you can improve. Some readers may feel validated by the lessons taught here and others may cringe a bit, but hopefully everyone will learn something new and find areas to improve. The end result will be a higher level of understanding of how you make decisions, better responses to the challenges of the business day, and more self-awareness about how you currently manage the employees and managers who work with you. The book will provide insight, tools, and methods to help you manage more effectively and more productively. We will also show you some ways to professionally enrich those you manage to create a team of people who are successful in their own roles as managers and leaders.

Start by asking yourself this question: how much time do you spend thinking about the business philosophy, business practices, and decision logic that form the basis of your management style? Wouldn’t it make sense to investigate and exercise your management style just as a baseball player evaluates his batting, catching, or fielding technique in order to improve it? As we move from the role of managing a single employee or manager to managing teams or multiple managers, there are even more complex and high impact decisions to make; isn’t it all the more important to know what parts of our management decision