Stepping up to Management

As people ultimately fuel growth, developing your own talent is a competitive strategy for the digital age. Our QA point of view is that modern managing is more challenging, as staff expect more sensitive and empowering line management, line managers who understand their expertise and role, proactive supporting of change as roles vary as technology is adopted, and coping with strategy that varies more as organisations lean into uncertainty and fragility. All in the context of more demanding customers and more complex organisational ecosystems.

For modern line management to be successful, all managers need to open their minds to embrace and integrate with the rapid evolution of the workplace and work practices. They also require a balance of skill sets covering people, team, digital and business. Integrating, developing, and applying these skills and behaviours in their own unique business context, is how managers and leaders create value.And yet as easy as this is to write, it is not easy to be such a manager, not least when you are just stepping up into the role from a more specialised or novice perspective.

In this context, making the first step up to a management position is both a daunting challenge and an exciting opportunity. The transition from individual contributor or subject matter expert to having responsibility for engaging and motivating people, teams and stakeholders and driving performance of others as well their own, requires a new skill set and behaviours. It involves valuing experience as new situations are encountered and resilience developed A successful transition takes time and support and planning. The first 90 days are often crucial in building the ability to connect with people with a confidence that allows for adaptation and refinement.

What can Stepping up to Management do for you and your organisation?

As time, effort, money, and personal ambition/reputation are all invested in a decision to step up to a management position, it makes sense to protect this investment. Ensuring that new in role managers are supported and receive regular feedback on their progress, during this transition, can create a good manager for life; a person who is professional, reflective and a learning manager.

This programme supports staff by focussing on the skills and behaviours that will help them be successful in their role. It provides a structured plan to help them transfer their learning to their workplace and their team. For some people, the learning can serve to refresh the fundamental skills required to win in a digital age.

Our approach to your spending time learning

We do not overload learners with too many ways of thinking about managing. We use an organising framework that will stand the test of time. Managing can feel an overwhelming subject, with as many opinions on it as there are managers. We clearly direct the learner to ways of behaving that set them up for success through confidence and reflection in and on action. We provide a safe place to explore the emotions around the transition, so they can be shared with, and worked on, with their own line managers and peers.

Returning to work energised with practical and considered ways of manging the transition and performing are central to aim. Throughout the course, we pause to allow learners to think and record what it all means. Learners walk away, not with a hurried plan they are not committed to, written at the end of the course. Instead, they own well-thought through approaches to translating the learning into their workplace, because they are built upon throughout the course, with professional facilitated help.

Breakouts, where the likely first steps of managing well are related to in-depth, in relationship to context serve a way of learning from peers. Learners think deeply about their transition, what it means to them and their organisation that has chosen them as ready to step up.

What’s included?

Included are sessions that clearly articulate how the learning can be translated into different contexts and different roles. Managing is positioned and explored to extract the role of the context, which allows learners to gain insight into what can make a difference in their context. As much as the theme is managing, relevant connections are made to other related concepts that connect with managing. These related concepts can be organisational structure, leadership. Stakeholders and performance. Which related concepts are referred to depends on the unique context and experience of the learners.

• Apply the fundamental people, team, digital and business skills that will help them to transition successfully and add real business value.
• Utilise a detailed transition plan to support their journey and accelerate transfer of learning to the workplace and the team.
• Demonstrate what effective management and leadership looks, sounds, and feels like in the digital age.

Our learning is geared towards people wishing to link managing to performance in ways that highlight the challenges of being more proactive, as technology disrupts and persuades us to work in different ways.

Learning how manage for the first time in each learner’s specific context, means the target audience comes from those with less experience or needing a refresher in the digital age. We deeply understand people attend with varying motivations to learn that we accommodate through skilled facilitation.

There are no pre learning or pre-requisites. Learners are purely asked to come with their limited experience, and their understanding of their unique context.

Throughout learners are asked to complete a QA Leveraging Learning Log (LLL) so that learning is translated into relevant opportunities for growth – personal and organisational. Unique to QA, the LLL is a key part of our teaching and learning strategy that ensures learning flows back into the workplace with effort of course, but without wasted or un-co-ordinated effort.

The course takes an active stance on influencing and persuading to ensure it is practised in professional and productive ways in the workplace. It includes by way of example:

• QA’s Winning in the Digital AgeFramework
• Stepping up to Management in Context / Leveraging Learning Log
• Exploring Leadership and Management
• Team Development
• Team Roles (Belbin)
• Digital Tools
• Developing your Transition Plan Part 1
• Situational Leadership
• How People Learn
• The Manager’s role in Development
• Coaching Conversations
• Motivating self and others
• Developing your Transition Plan Part 2
• Setting goals and managing performance
• Delegation
• Providing Feedback
• Supporting Change
• Developing your Transition Plan Part 3

We look forward to running these events to make a difference to your learners and your organisation.