Taking on Additional Responsibilities  "Worker" or "Manager" ?

If your relationship with your "mates" is more important to you than the challenge of developing your career to the level of your capabilities, then perhaps you should think twice before taking on additional responsibilities and perhaps progressing into a management role.  While there are a few who have been successful in competently straddling the worker/manager divide, most conclude, sooner or later, that they need to make a long-term decision as to which side of the fence they believe their future lies on.  Thankfully the modern management practices adopted by many companies have made crossing this divide less traumatic, but there is still at very least a psychological barrier to be hurdled in moving from a receiver of instruction to a giver of instruction.

Assuming you are comfortable with responsibility and have the basic management skills outlined in the previous section, coupled with the desire to persevere in the minefield of human attitudes and relationships, then there are some appraisals you should make before you embark on this particular journey.  Properly thought out, these appraisals should put you on a sound, but perhaps not the most apparently direct course, towards a position that extends your management capabilities to the level you aspire to.  If you cannot imagine at least the next stage that you want to reach, then perhaps you have not got the management potential you think you have.  (This last statement makes allowances for the fact that you may have  no or minimal exposure to management to-date.)

The first appraisal requires you to assess your own inter-personal skills and how you plan to practice and develop them, if you wish to climb the management ladder.  At the heart of good management is an understanding of people, because most management decisions involve people.  Understanding people even sufficiently to predict their actions in a relatively controlled work environment can be extremely difficult due to the different attitudes, abilities and experiences of every individual.  If you are not even certain how you yourself will act in such situations then you are fooling yourself if you think you know how other people will act.  Therefore one should logically conclude that at the heart of understanding people is knowing yourself.  If you know yourself well, and do not simply think you know yourself well, then your self-appraisal should be relatively straightforward and you should be able to quickly determine which strengths and weaknesses you should work on.  (If you do not know yourself well and do not seek the advice of others competent to assess you, then by the time you stop deluding yourself, you may have missed the opportunity to realize your true potential in another direction.)  It is generally easier to give objective instruction to someone who is not your 'buddy', but this is no excuse for rudeness or unnecessary abrasiveness.  On the other hand, aloofness does not foster a 'team-spirit' and does not necessarily infer a good but dispassionate manager. Improving written and verbal communication skills is simple in theory, but  'perfect grammar' will not give one authority if one has no confidence in oneself.  Learning how to smile may make you less intimidating but if you do not respect your fellow man or woman then your insincerity will still be clearly visible.  In other words, your appraisal needs to determine whether fundamental personal traits and the ability to effectively interact with others significantly limit your management potential.  You may think that if you act like everyone's friend you will overcome the 'discomfort' of other people's company, but most people are more astute in this area than possibly they themselves realize.  In short, if you do not enjoy interacting with other people, you should probably be seeking a 'technical role' instead of one which is going to repeatedly put your sincerity under scrutiny.  If you simply lack confidence in dealing with some groups of people, then instead of trying to avoid them you should gradually increase your exposure to them as part of your long-term plan.  If you want to quickly climb the 'management ladder', then it is useful to remember that the more you motivate others to progress their skills and the faster you can train your successor, then the easier you make it for your boss to promote you and perhaps in turn realize his or her own elevation in the corporate hierarchy. 

The second appraisal requires you to establish a primary long-term career goal and a realistic time-frame in which to achieve it.  This task may appear to be a waste of time without access to a reliable fortune-teller, if such a person exists, but it demands exercising the fundamental management requirement of making judgments.  No one who makes meaningful decisions is correct on every occasion, but good managers who monitor their performance in this area improve their judgment with experience and are capable of making more good decisions with less facts to rely on.  (Those who wait for every fact to be known before they make a decision, should be pursuing the vocation of scientist, or bureaucrat, but not that of manager.)  Exercising the initial judgment of determining an appropriate primary goal and time-frame, allows the aspiring manager to exercise another fundamental management technique of breaking long-term goals into clear secondary targets with easy to monitor deadlines.  (Those who rely on setting deadlines as they progress will eventually find out that it is easier to remain on course to achieve long-term goals by having pre-determined short-term goals because one is less likely to be diverted by short-term considerations.  As an example, if my ambition is to climb Mount Everest but I have not set out a schedule even to buy my ticket to Nepal, then there is a good chance that when I do decide to go that I may not be able to book the flight I want at short notice and that therefore I will have to book a later flight and delay all subsequent components of the expedition.  However, if I had set a date for this well in advance, then even if I had discovered that flights to Nepal at that time of year were booked out three months in advance, I would still have had time to make the booking or perhaps plan alternative transportation.)  Formal training and previous experience are certainly helpful in 'dissecting' long-term goals, but any aspiring manager should jump at the chance to spend time in a project planning department.  Here one not only learns about practical aspects of multi-task planning but also one learns how to determine the 'critical path' and associated deadlines around which future priorities can confidently be set.  (It should be noted that the determination of a realistic 'critical path' may lead to a revision of the overall time-frame for achieving one's primary goal.   However it is better to realize this at the beginning and devise a realistic plan accordingly, then to be disappointed en-route by the realization that your ambition is simply a fading dream.)

The third appraisal requires you to assess your ability in other supporting management attributes such as the ability to implement 'best practice' and efficiently and effectively delegate.  This appraisal, done properly, should allow you to build into your overall long-term objective the necessary secondary targets to ensure you have the broadest possible base to support a long and successful career as a manager.  If for example, you have never been a team captain or group leader, and have rarely been in the position of giving instructions to others, then before you take on significant management responsibilities for supervising others, it would be a wise move to plan to undertake some small clearly defined projects necessitating contributions from others.  Taking on the organization of the annual office party may not be everyone's idea of 'fun', but it could be a very useful exercise in building one's own confidence and personal authority among management, peers and juniors.  (If you do make a mess of it, at least you will hopefully have a holiday during which to prepare for the undoubted ridicule that will be aimed in your direction and to plan your next (ad)venture which with proper planning should re-build your management credentials.  Even if it doesn't, you are better off learning such lessons before your job depends on your skill in effectively delegating tasks to others and monitoring their progress.)  Other 'skills' such as professional ethics, customer service attitude, negotiating ability, cost-consciousness, commercial understanding, time-awareness, safety-mindedness and, where required, technical competence, can all be positively developed by properly constructed training programs.   This training, coupled with the gradual increase of practical exposure, will build your expertise and personal confidence in areas appropriate to the career you wish to pursue.  As with the previous appraisals, the sooner these attributes are assessed and integrated into a long-term plan, the sooner you will have both the expertise and the confidence to handle more responsible roles.  Many people believe they are smart enough or cunning enough to bypass the need for the development of certain skills they are weak in, but sooner or later this weakness will generally be found out and will leave them frustratingly short of achieving their ambitions.  If you are unsure whether the fact that you are rarely on time for anything indicates that you do not have sound time-awareness skills then you need to seek the advice of career professionals, or perhaps even 'professional advice'.  Generally though, the best person to assess your inter-personal skills, your planning/organizational abilities, and other management support skills is yourself.  However, you need to make the effort to examine your past actions and it is preferable to do this before you make a long-term commitment to a career in management.

Taking on additional responsibilities at work may be extremely rewarding but could turn out to be your worst nightmare if you are not comfortable with them.  Even if you are, this does not infer that you will handle them well, or be a good manager, but here are some ideas that may help:

Suggestions On Taking On Additional Responsibilities / Management 

Different people require a different balance of motivating incentives and pride-denting reminders, but the following thoughts will be obvious to most serious managers:

	Test your professional sincerity - a lie-detector test for every executive or government official, considering a role with responsibility for managing others, should be compulsory on the question "would you offer to resign if any members of your staff were found guilty of professional misconduct over a period longer than a year?"  In the event that this is not requested of you, ask yourself this question.  If the answer is "no" or "what has this got to do with my new job", then you should think seriously about whether it is the job or the power/pay/influence you want?  (Bear in mind that it is unlikely that justification on the basis of the latter alone will, in the long run, bring credit to yourself, your company or your profession.)
	Focus on critical targets - if you spend as much time thinking and talking about secondary objectives as you spend on critical deadlines, then don't be surprised if confusion reins, or staff go off at tangents, and your primary goals are not achieved.
	Practice condensing long-term goals or complex procedures into simple tasks - many small practical steps will generally get you where you want to go faster than one giant 'dream stride' as the simpler the task, the clearer the focus, and the more positive the likely response from others.
	Foster  an atmosphere where polite brevity is interpreted as professional best practice and mutual respect, not rudeness or mutual contempt - it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that a cordial and noisy office environment portrays contented and committed staff, but this can often mask a lack of direction  and application which is better assessed through analyzing performance and results.
	Regularly monitor projects that you delegate - delegation infers timely monitoring, not constant interference or abandonment.
	Don't persist with unrealistic goals - although one should always avoid changing one's goals en-route, failing to recognize when a goal is not practically achievable can be detrimental to the morale of all concerned.
	Document all important communications - this will be helpful both for yourself and the people you communicate with as no one's memory is infallible, and generally becomes more fallible with age.
	Test your genuine openness to the input of others - if you are the type of person that insists on driving in the outside lane of a motorway while inside lanes are free and traffic builds up behind you, then either you are not very intelligent or you are showing little understanding of the views of others, or both.  While differences of opinion will invariably arise, if your own reasoned thinking is blinkered to the point where the lives of others are endangered, then it would suggest that you are not a team player.  The primary issue in this example is not the legal speed-limit which one should always endeavor to adhere to, but the fact that others, for reasons of medical emergency or selfish desire, may wish to drive faster than you and whether it is in recognition of their basic rights, or simply common courtesy, you should not unnecessarily prevent them.
	Don't become pre-occupied with seeking popularity - consensus is generally preferable, but it is not a necessity.  A 'good manager' commands respect for unpopular decisions through considered but decisive actions in keeping with the company's stated mission and long-term plans. A manager who allows immediate popularity to override long-term goals by failing to make necessary but unpopular decisions, is unlikely to become a 'good manager' in professional business terms.
	Test your decisions against the premise that all businesses must make profits in order to survive and prosper - the more management responsibilities you have within your commercial organization, the more profits you are directly or indirectly generally expected to contribute.  The level of those profits may in turn be used as a measure of your practical value to your company.  (If the assessed profits fall below the level of your own remuneration package, then you should perhaps be looking for another job, if not another career.)
	Regularly test your management objectivity - a simple means of doing this is to mentally reconstruct your month-end or year-end figures and examine whether, with the benefit of hindsight, you would have made the same decisions, particularly those regarding personnel.  This may appear at first-sight like a pointless exercise, particularly for those whose companies or departments are highly profitable, but someone who has 'inherited' a position where profits are taken for granted, may be developing bad habits in respect of personnel administration.  Hopefully if you start regularly testing your management objectivity early enough, you will not arrive in a situation where your department or company is making a loss and you have no clear idea as to how to remedy the situation with your job intact.

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