Are You the New Manager?: Techniques, Guidelines, and Strategies for a Successful First Year

By Robert Blanck and Lee Bertrand

When you become a manager, you need proven strategies and advice to ensure your team meets expectations.

Two longtime managers draw upon their decades of combined experience in this guidebook to getting the job done during your first year as a manager. Whether youve just been promoted, been transferred, or started a new job, youll learn how to

establish an organized work environment;
create stability in the workplace;
write a code of conduct for yourself and your employees; and
organize effective meetings.

The authors also share case studies focusing on successful and unsuccessful managers. By applying lessons from real-life examples, youll be able to establish your authority, motivate underperforming employees, and appropriately reward superstars. When it comes time to hire and fire, youll also know what to do.

Use this book as a reference and refresher whenever you need to set performance goals, write a performance review, or hold employees members accountable. Stock your managers toolbox and prove that youre the right person for the job with techniques, guidelines, and strategies to manage your team.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475982435

Robert Blanck

Lee Bertrand began learning about management at his family’s dairy farm and excavating and construction business. He was a former Marine Corps officer, program director of the Bachelor of Science Program in Business Administration at the University of Redlands, vice president of a prominent bank in California, and dean of the Institute of Management Accounts’ Leadership Academy. Robert Blanck has worked as a manager in diverse environments, including manufacturing, aerospace engineering, university graduate degree programs, urban and regional planning, distribution centers, and private business consulting. Additionally, he has earned a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. For thirty years, he has watched successful and unsuccessful managers.

Book preview

Are You the

New Manager?

Techniques, Guidelines, and Strategies for a Successful First Year

Lee Bertrand

Robert Blanck

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Are You the New Manager?

Techniques, Guidelines, and Strategies for a Successful First Year

Copyright © 2013 Lee Bertrand & Robert Blanck.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8245-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8244-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8243-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013905626

iUniverse rev. date: 4/16/2013

Table of Contents

Authors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Introduction

Why this book

How to use this book

Getting Started

Step 1: Building a clean and organized work environment

Applying the 5S Principles

Summarizing 5S Principles

Step 2: Knowing the employees

Shadowing

Questioning while shadowing

Making on the spot decisions

Step 3: Using Open Door management

Describing an open door visit

Designing an effective open door approach

Step 4: Creating stability in the work environment

Uncompromising attitude

Creating a stable work environment

Correcting an environment of confusion and uncertainty

Understanding the root cause of an unstable environment

Step 5: Making the work area and employees mistake-proof

Describing Poka-Yoke methods

Using Poka-Yoke in everyday life

Incorporating Poka Yoke

Step 6: Writing a Code of Conduct for the Department

Reviewing a sample Code of Conduct

Providing for a dynamic instrument

Step 7: Selecting a management style

Describing various styles

Illustrating the styles

Assembling an eclectic management style

Step 8: Producing productive staff meetings

Preparing the first meeting

Creating meeting structure

Producing the meeting’s final product

Managing the meeting schedule

Listing meeting action items

Step 9: Writing the first set of Critical Success Factors

Defining a Critical Success Factor

Writing the Critical Success Factors

Teaching employees to measure their own efforts

Step 10: Discovering and evaluating group’s informal leaders

Discovering why informal leaders exist

Describing an informal leader

Ferreting out and neutralizing the informal leader’s impacts

Understanding the informal leader’s goals and attitudes

Getting the informal leader to acknowledge department leadership

Measuring Performance as a Manager

Checking first month of performance

Measuring the Critical Success Factors

Checking what should have happened and creating a repair list

Building a shock absorber attitude between the employees, the supervisor, and the customers

Planning for next year’s performance review

Setting up the accountability meeting with the supervisor

Checking the first six months and measuring the Critical Success Factors

Getting ready for the first formal performance appraisal

Establishing goals and accountabilities for the employees

Checking the first year of performance

Setting performance goals for the first year

Rating the first year by looking in the rear-view mirror

Repeating the first year again or starting a new second year

Keeping the supervisor on track and managing the supervisor

Evaluating the organization, division, section, or department – a better place because of the year you invested

Evaluating performance from a historical perspective

Adding Skills and Capabilities as a Manager

Coaching employee performance

Managing using diagnostic skills

Recognizing symptoms and prescribing treatment for a diseased organization

Defining a healthy organization

Planning to heal a diseased organization

Training the employees to recognize an organizational disease and then produce their own treatment plan

Conducting performance review meetings with the employees

Designing an employee performance review meeting

Anticipating the two different points of view

Recognizing conflict within the work group

Understanding why conflict exists

Seeing opportunity vs. danger

Recognizing the various levels of conflict

Keeping support staff supportive

Building relationships with support staff

Giving support staff an opportunity to contribute to the team environment

Finding humor in the workplace

Preparing the employees for bigger and better opportunities

Helping the employees build careers

Producing superior performers developing employees who will leave

Hiring new employees

Finding the right employee, or just filling the spot for now and hoping for the best

Interviewing process

Letting employees go

Taking disciplinary steps

Terminating procedures

Controlling unemployment benefits

Managing a process and a project

Defining Process Management

Defining Project Management

Summarizing Process Management and Project Management

Building a Career

Using a mentor

Getting a ticket punched in the organization

Finding career ladders and glass ceilings

Finding technical training – job performance enhancement

Measuring the value of education for the working adult

Networking and career growth

Using professional associations and memberships – purpose and opportunities

Networking within a professional association

Listing of a few professional associations

Discovering that a career ladder is leaning against the wrong building

Producing the plan

Getting organized – a preparatory step

Preparing a custom-designed resume

Completing the corporate financial research

Completing the corporate publicity research

Getting through a successful interview

Considering the key points in the interview

Stocking the Manager’s Tool Box

Applying strategic change

Facing the most difficult task – accomplishing change

Managing and being a change agent

Applying Lean Six Sigma and Continuous Quality Improvement

Defining Lean Six Sigma

Defining Six Sigma

Summarizing Lean Six Sigma

Observing an organization’s culture

Listing of the symbols of organizational culture

Studying the elements of organization culture

Looking at successful organizations

Measuring the seven practices of successful organizations

Evaluating a group’s effectiveness and maturity

Interviewing applicants for management positions

Measuring personal value systems

Conclusion

Appendix

Classic writings

Resource materials

Appendix A – Business and management journals

Appendix B – Business magazines and newspapers

Appendix C – Business and management books

Appendix D – Professional Associations

Citations

Authors’ Foreword

I have worked as a manager in many diverse environments including manufacturing, aerospace engineering, university graduate degree programs, urban and regional planning, distribution centers, and private business consulting. Additionally, I have earned a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. For thirty years I watched the actions and efforts of successful managers and managers who were failures. From these experiences I and Lee have assembled a set of observations that are common to those managers who were the most successful. This book provides the opportunity to share with you the principles that you can take on the journey to becoming a successful manager.

– Robert Blanck

My earliest experiences with management as both a follower and a leader began on the family dairy farm, and then through working in the family excavating and construction business. I gained experience as a United States Marine Corps Officer and with years of banking, while concurrently working as an Adjunct College Professor and as Bachelor of Science in Business Degree Program Director. These life experiences exposed me to various managerial styles with their related successes and failures; plus I had my own opportunity to succeed and, at times, fail as a manager.

Over the years, the working-adult business students in my courses posed real-world management situations that needed solving, and I, as the enthusiastic instructor, obliged by providing direct, no-nonsense advice, usually with great results. These work environments have benefitted me by helping me to refine my knowledge and understanding of effective management strategies. I used this insight as Dean of the Institute of Management Accountants’ Leadership Academy to develop and deliver leadership programs. All management experiences, whether as a leader or a follower, are opportunities for learning. May you learn from this book and use the knowledge and wisdom contained herein to succeed.

– Lee Bertrand

Lead or follow or get out of the way! – Thomas Paine

This quote by Thomas Paine was one of Lee Bertrand’s favorites. I place the quote here in honor of Lee and the hard work he invested in this book.

Acknowledgements

Lee and I want to acknowledge the following individuals who have contributed to the effort of shaping the content of this text:

To Ryan M Blanck, who as an English teacher holding a graduate degree in the field and is recognized for his contributions to the world of literature, labored over the drafts offering refinements to sentence and grammar structures. Thank you Ryan; you provided effort and suggestions to bring this text to its completed state.

To Dr. David Balch, thank you for years of friendship and sharing of teaching responsibilities at the University of Redlands. As an instructor, co-author of published articles of research in business management, and as an academic administrator you continually demonstrate the highest levels of teaching and administrative skills. Your unique course Humor in the Workplace provides fresh insights for managers in leading work groups.

To Vic Downing, President & CEO of Global Advantage Inc, a lifelong friend who introduced me to the writers David Gleicher, Jack Gibb, Richard Beckhard, Edgar Schein, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jeffrey Pfeffer to name only a few. My own philosophy of management emerged from our many hours of conversation regarding your work in building extraordinary business leaders. I am sure that you will see many common principles woven through the pages of this text. Thank you Vic.

To Randon Blanck for book cover conceptual design and illustrative development. Thank you Randy for your creativity.

To the hundreds of graduate students of business who have entered our classes and conference rooms seeking to improve their managerial and financial decision making skills. You brought thought-provoking questions, presented challenges, and then put into practice solutions created in our classrooms.

A special acknowledgement to my co-author Lee Bertrand, who lost his heroic battle with cancer just as this book’s final draft was being assembled. His vision and motivation kept the task of writing on course. This book is dedicated as a memorial to Lee and his family and for his tireless efforts in assisting young aspiring managers build their leadership skills and careers.

Dedication

The survival of an organization, its employees, its customers, it suppliers, its stakeholders, and its community rests on the shoulders of the managers and their minute-by-minute decisions. This book is written for the professional who sees the opportunity to be a manager as the greatest and most rewarding experience and challenge within modern business.

Introduction

In purchasing this book, you have expressed interest in learning about the function of management and the task of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling the work of others who report to you. This book describes the steps that, when applied, will establish high levels of employee productivity and morale.

Over a lifetime of work, personal experiences as a manager will give you a broad perspective, but now is the time to build skills. In most cases, managers use those experiences as a lens to review their past performance. They are critical of themselves and ask two important questions: Why did I do that? And, Why didn’t I do this? Often these experienced managers wish they could go back in time and counsel themselves to prevent career-altering mistakes and lost opportunities.

First rule of leadership: everything is your fault.

- A Bug’s Life

In this book you will in effect be time traveling because you will have two experienced managers observing and whispering advice through the words on the pages that follow. Two guys who have had significant successes, made mistakes, observed the successes of others and themselves, and compiled that information here for you to use.

In the Marines, they have a saying, Lead by the numbers until you understand what you are doing. The numbers are identified tasks of leadership and planning that work well; we provide them here for you to consider.

Once you have read and pondered this book, do not be a hesitant leader; seek to solve problems and resolve situations. Fellow managers, rivals and employees will place obstacles in your path and present complex problems; adapt and overcome them.

Why this book

We have written this book because people who are now in management need a how to do it book containing proven strategies and advice. This book can be thought of as a directory or a repair guide for getting the job done.

How to use this book

This book has sections describing the skills needed for a manager to be successful the first year. It should be used as guide for conducting a successful staff meeting, writing a performance review, setting performance goals, and holding oneself and others accountable.

The table of contents pages provides detailed listing of all