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Discover a Fundamental
Management Skills most Managers Lack
 There
are many resources on management skills; they range from
leading and building your team and its members to effective
communication.
Today I want to focus on an attribute that appears to have
been lost amongst the fancy management speak and that's
common sense.
The odd thing about
common sense is that it's really not that common at all. Consider the following
fine examples:
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On Thursday a company
retrenched 10% of their people. On Friday the CEO sent out an email that
said, "Just a reminder that today is our staff strategy meeting. So bring
your great ideas and positive attitude."
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I received a letter
from the Chairman of my bank that started off, "I'm pleased to announce that
the shareholders took the Board's suggestion to merge with Greedy (excuse my
creative license) Bank. There will be many excellent benefits as a result of
the merger." I discovered ONE lousy benefit; I would have access to more
ATMs - whoop-ti-do!
In the first instance you
would think the CEO would have enough common sense to have acknowledged the
previous day's retrenchments. She acted like nothing happened and all was well
in the world (well at least it was in her world, she was still safe in her
corner office). Employees read the email in disgust, they were already feeling
unmotivated, uncertain and scared for their own jobs and now were expected to
put on a big happy, pretend smile for the strategy meeting.
The second example is one
of assumption. The Chairman assumed I would be happy about the big merger, but
in fact I wasn't. I had fired Greedy Bank years ago for their poor customer
service so the last thing I wanted to hear was that they were now merging (read
‘taking over') the bank I have been a customer of for over 15 years. The other
aspect was that they had wasted time, money and paper on a letter that had one
lousy benefit in it.
In both cases it comes
down to one thing, the CEO and Chairman are paid big bucks to be competent at
their job. In both cases they lacked common sense and also failed on other key
management skills such as successful communication, maintaining and heightening
customer satisfaction to create loyalty and team building.
Consider your day-to-day
work and ask yourself if you practice common sense.
Click on the link to
discover other
management skills
that will take you to the next stage in your career.
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