What does it take to become a better manager, and can a book help? Olga Anishenkova explores The Manager’s Guide to Self-Development, examining its practical exercises, reflective approach and emphasis on personal responsibility, while considering its strengths and limitations as a resource for leaders at every stage of their careers.
Book: A Manager’s Guide to Self-Development
Author: Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne, Tom Boydell, Joan Keevill, Kevin Roe and Jean-Anne Stewart
For a long time, I have held the belief that any learning experience is ultimately what you make of it. No matter how perfectly it is designed, if you’re experiencing it while your deadlines are burning, your much-anticipated holiday is approaching, or while anything else is occupying your attention, the learning intervention will probably have little to no impact on you. Unless you decide otherwise. I think each of us has a choice to either passively attend… well, life; or to focus our attention on what’s going on around us and take an active part. The issue is that many times we default to the first choice. Or maybe the issue is that we forget that we have a choice.
It is an invitation to be intentional about one’s growth as a leader
The “Manager’s Guide to Self-Development” is not really a conventional book, it is an invitation to be intentional about one’s growth as a leader (in the broad sense of the term). It has prompts and activities to reflect on and improve desired qualities.
Diagnosing yourself
The book is structured in four parts, with the first one being the introduction to the authors’ understanding of leadership and management. The second part is a diagnostic tool to determine your self-development plan and goals. It is based on a framework developed by John Burgoyne and Roger Stuart (1976) called The 11 Qualities of Successful Managers and Leaders. Chapter 5 offers two ways to set learning priorities and goals.
The third part of the book are all the activities that the authors suggest to developing any of the 11 qualities, and the activities usually contribute to more than one quality. There are 56 activities. The last part, which was added in the seventh edition, includes notes for facilitators, acknowledging that activities can be used in corporate leadership development initiatives, apprenticeship programs, and more similar applications.
The multi-tool management book
The way it is designed makes the book is incredibly versatile. I think it’s important to start with the framework of the 11 Qualities of Successful Managers and Leaders, since it helps decide which activities to prioritise. The 11 qualities fall into three groups:
- Basic knowledge and information:
- Local knowledge
- Professional knowledge
- Skills and attributes:
- Sensitivity to events
- Critical thinking skills
- People skills
- Emotional resilience
- Initiative
- Meta-qualities:
- Creativity
- Mental agility
- Learning to learn
- Awareness of self and others
There are short explanations of each quality for added clarity on what is meant.
Once you’ve familiarised yourself with the qualities and maybe done the self-diagnostic assessment to create your learning plan, you can move on to the practical part of the book. With 56 activities to choose from, you’ll be busy for a while if you want to.
All activities follow a similar structure: a short contextualisation, then a step-by-step guide (sometimes, different approaches are offered), and a follow-up section with extra resources on each topic. Most activities include a practical part where you have to go and do something and a reflection part where you need to think about what you do or how you do something or ask someone how they see you.
Activities for development
I was genuinely impressed not just with the number of activities featured in the book, but also how accurately they seem to address the qualities that they’re designed to support. On the surface, they look simple, some of them take only two pages of the book. And yet, they might take weeks to complete if done purposefully. Each activity is an introspective journey. The authors ask questions that you may never have thought about before or avoided altogether.
Since I am a learning practitioner, I particularly appreciated that the authors included a “Learning to Learn” activity (#53), which starts with the words “Learning how to learn is not easy and is, perhaps, the ultimate leadership and management skill.” For someone in L&D, that’s flattering to see in a management book. This activity then goes on to ask you questions about things you have done that you are proud of, and then to think about what you did to accomplish them, to finally ask how did you learn to do what you did. Being the learning geek that I am, I did find the resources in the follow-up section a bit scarce and shallow… But then, this is a management book, and this is only one activity.
Use and dive deeper
The book provides really excellent prompts for action and reflection. However, because there are so many activities, a few of them felt somewhat shallow to me. For instance, there’s an activity to develop critical thinking, and it consists (in a nutshell) of picturing opposing views on a subject. While valid, it is clearly insufficient.
Ideally, whoever reads this book will look for additional resources after having tried the suggested activities. That’s not to say that the book will only appeal to new leaders: there’s value to be found even for seasoned professionals who are open to reevaluating why and how they work the way they do.
Olga Anishenkova is a Learning Specialist at Atlas Copco Group
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