London Business School’s Management and Strategy expert, Professor Birkinshaw, explains in his most recent analysis; how good management today reflects in making space and giving employees the opportunity to shine and experience the spotlight.
“Becoming a better Boss: Why Good Management is so difficult” is London Business School’s Strategy and Entrepreneurship professor Julian Birkinshaw new book; where he aims to point out how managers today are enabling employees to step up.
Professor Birkinshaw comments: “We know what good management looks like, but exercising this knowledge can be an unnatural act for humans. We often hear about the bad bosses but what are the good bosses doing? They’re inverting the lens, taking a step back, letting go and giving credit to their employees.”
He outlines three ways to make employees feel empowered:
1) Giving credit to others- to value and recognize their achievements and try to find ways to develop their work
2) Letting go - delegating and giving up power, sharing information and tasks and letting employees make and be accountable for their own mistakes
3) Self- control – prioritising time and multi-tasking with the right mix and good balance of long-term and short-term priorities, this depends on an accurate judgement of the right dose of analysis and intuition
By following the Business Management (http://www.london.edu/programmes/mba.html) practices of top Scandinavian insurance organisation, If Insurance, Professor Birkinshaw carried out an analysis, and found out that these changes had a positive impact on employees’ performance and satisfaction, which in turn impacts the company. Lotta, one of the company’s team leaders, excused herself from team meetings, which enabled her to dedicate a couple of hours a day to focus on improving team-work. Furthermore, the company runs a workshop to get the feedback from employees on sales tactics.
Professor Birkinshaw affirms: “Giving employees more influence by asking for their feedback and allowing Lotta to work more closely with her direct reports and encourage peer-to-peer coaching, meant that the company saw a positive impact on employee satisfaction and performance. They achieved this through letting go and giving credit to others”
The Professor adds: “They’re obviously linked, but giving credit to others involves downplaying your ego, letting go involves downplaying your involvement. They’re flipsides of the same coin, but the underlying factors that shape them are different.”
The Professor affirms that this book goes beyond redefining management and says: “it is about rethinking the role of management. It is about understanding your employees, your organisation, and yourself more acutely, and treating these components as they are, rather than as you would like them to be.”
