Author: Richard Templar
Publisher: FT (Financial Times) Press, an imprint of Pearson Education (www.ftpress.com)
Published: May 2011
ISBN-10: 0-13-273310-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-273310-6
Formats:
Paperback
eBook (formats: EPUB; PDF)
Pages: 240
Prices:
Paperback: $15.19
eBook: $15.19
Book + eBook Bundle $21.84
How to Become a Successful Manager
To carve out a successful career for yourself in the IT profession (or for that matter, any profession), you must possess more than just the technical/technological skills associated with that particular profession. You must also learn how to manage others informally as you go about your daily tasks, as well as officially if you are ever promoted to a team leader, project manager, or higher management position. Equally importantly, you must know too how to manage yourself in a “variety of settings.” To help you out in each of these different aspects of management, I recommend you read the expanded edition of the book “The Rules of Management: A Definitive Code for Managerial Success.” Its author, Richard Templar, has also penned the international best-seller “The Rules of Work: The Unspoken Truth About Getting Ahead in Business.” Both of these books are part of the “Richard Templar’s Rules” series with examples of other titles being “The Rules of Money: How to Make It and How to Hold on to It”; “The Rules of Life: A Personal Code for Living a Better, Happier, More Successful Life”; and “The Rules of Parenting.”
Management books can often be “heavy going”, but this book is different because it presents its content as a hundred or so concise, practical rules (107 to be exact), all self-contained, with each rule taking up just two pages of the book. That means you can incorporate these “pearls of wisdom” into your overall management strategy whenever you have a spare moment! The rules have been organized into two sections – “Part 1 Managing Your Team”; and “Part 2 Managing Yourself.” To get an immediate feel for the book, let’s now take a look at four rules, with two rules covering team management and the other two rules coming from the self-management section of the book.
When it comes to managing teams, rule 6 is titled “Make Meetings Fun.” But before you jump to conclusions that adopting such a rule will only lead to mayhem in your enterprise or organization, Templar quickly stresses that “fun doesn’t have to mean silly or stupid.” Instead, he emphasizes that “fun means not being stuffy, allowing people to be themselves and to bring their own contribution. Fun means allowing people to share things that have made them laugh without being frowned on. Fun is about letting people tell stories or anecdotes that lighten the mood.” Templar issues the warning though that you, as the manager, must “know when to say, ‘Right, back to business.’” He then adds that “fun means being flexible enough to allow other suggestions as to where and how you all meet. Perhaps your organization has a great boardroom – could you meet there? Or outside if the weather is good.” Templar believes success in this particular aspect of management depends, to a large degree, on how managers view themselves. For instance, he asserts that “the confident manager – that’s you – can be flexible because you are relaxed and cool and confident. The stuffy manager is frightened, feeling insecure, and seeking a rigid approach to prop up a lack of self-confidence.”
Another vital aspect of team management is covered by rule 11: “Offload as Much as You Can – or Dare.” This rule is often difficult for some professionals to follow, especially when first promoted to a management position, as they are so used to doing everything themselves. Delegation is not something that comes to them naturally. When dealing with your staff, Templar suggests the following approach: “Give ‘em a job to do and let them get on with it. Check once or twice to make sure they’ve done it the way you want it done, and then next time just let them get on with it. Increasingly give them more and more to do, and stand back more and more from the people processes and concentrate instead on the planning processes. Build your team and then trust them to get on with it. Sometimes this will backfire and people will act up, goof off, do things badly – and hey, that’ll be entirely your fault because you are the manager and it’s your team. No, that’s serious; it is entirely up to you.” Fortunately, Templar reassures his readers that, by following his rules, you will “find ways to make sure it doesn’t happen – well, not too often anyway.”
From the perspective of managing yourself, two rules for me personally stood out from the rest. The first of these, rule 40, states “Enjoy Yourself.” IT professionals operate in a stressful environment characterized by tight deadlines, limited finances and resources, demanding users, and sometimes unsympathetic bosses. And fellow IT professionals too can often be hard to work with because of their personal “pet” loves and hates when it comes to technological considerations (in other words, they can be stubborn). Templar advises that “enjoying work is about taking pleasure in a job well done, having an inner smile, finding something to laugh about, and not taking it too seriously. (No, this does not mean you laugh at people or fail to do your job to the very highest standards.).” He adds however that “if you work in a place where serious and uptight is the norm, here is a secret just for you: No one knows what it is going on inside your head. No one. Just so long as the exterior is what they want, the inside can be whatever you want.”
The second of the “managing yourself” rules that appeals to me is rule 57: “Capitalize on Chance – Be Lucky, but Never Admit It.” Templar sums up this rule as follows: “If you keep your eyes open and your wits about you, there will be opportunities, chances, and bits of random luck. If you are quick and clever and enterprising you can catch the coattails of such moments and ride on the back of them. Such is luck. Grab it while you can because it is a fleeting thing. You can’t build it into a plan or a budget or a report, but it will happen all around you. In fact, the more you cherish it and nurture it and look for it, the more it will happen. We have to believe in luck or otherwise how could we attribute the success of people we don’t like?” However, Templar provides a warning in this rule too, namely, “don’t go building your career on luck; it doesn’t work like that. I’m saying we all get a bit lucky from time to time, and when that happens, you have to hang in there and go with it – and then keep quiet about it. You don’t always have to tell the truth – and all that false modesty sucks. If you were lucky, say, ‘It was a lucky break,’ but say it in such a way that people know months of careful planning went into it, years of research, decades of experience – because that, frankly, is the truth.” Templar concludes this particular rule with the following quote from U.S. President Thomas Jefferson that is worth remembering: “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
From the above brief look at just four rules from the book, it is readily evident that Templar has managed to write a book, though light and breezy in style it maybe, it nevertheless contains “gems of management wisdom.” When I first picked up “The Rules of Management: A Definitive Code for Managerial Success” and started exploring it, I was rather surprised to discover that, out of its 107 rules, only 37 were related to team management. My initial assumption was that it should have been the reverse setup – less rules about managing yourself and more about managing others. However, by the time I had finished reading the book, I came to the conclusion that Templar’s division of rules was correct, simply because if you can’t manage yourself successfully, then you’ll definitely fail abysmally trying to manage others.
One important point about the book. Don’t expect it to reveal any new, earth shattering revelations about management! As Templar himself readily says about his book, “you won’t find anything here you probably didn’t already know. Or if you didn’t know it, then you will read it and say, ‘But that’s really obvious.’ Yes, it is all really obvious, if you think hard enough about it. But in the fast paced, frantic, just-about-coping kind of life we lead, you may not have thought about it lately. And what isn’t so obvious is whether you do it. It’s all very well saying ‘But I know that already.’ Yes, as a smart person you probably do, but ask yourself honestly for each rule: Do you put it into practice, carry it out, work with it as standard? Are you sure?”
Even though you might not currently be in a management position, I would still recommend that you read Templar’s book. His rules about managing yourself have the potentially to significantly alter the manner in which you perform your work. Provided, of course, that you discipline yourself to implement the rules as often as possible. The bonus, of course, is that by doing so, you will then be in a much stronger position to successfully manage others whenever a supervisory role of some sort is offered to you.