Developing Managerial Skills

Catalog description

Managers can sometimes get a bad rap as bureaucrats and naysayers. Think about it: Doesn’t it seem as if “leadership” gets all the love? And yet, managers make the (business) world go ‘round. Being a great manager can change your own life in powerful ways, but its greatest net positive is in the way it changes those around you, helping to give their lives and careers growth, meaning, and impact. Inasmuch, management is an art, a science, and to paraphrase organizational thinkers from Aristotle to Drucker, “a noble discipline.” Developing Managerial Skills covers the wide, exciting, and occasionally daunting gamut of activities comprising that noble discipline. We start at the very beginning, exploring what it takes to assemble a great team through best practices in hiring. Our curriculum then progresses through building a strong culture, making hard decisions with limited information and navigating crises, and the techniques that help you bring out the best in people, so you may bask in their reflected glory. We also explore the ways managers themselves can manage their own careers. (TL;DR: We learn what it really takes to get promoted.) Underlying all of this is the premise that management is good – and hard. And utterly worth it. After all, when you’re an individual contributor, your days and decades are all about maximizing your own impact. That’s fine; and it is the right role for some of us. But when you become a manager, you are only as successful as your people and the environment you have constructed to help them grow and flourish. It’s all about us.