Management & Leadership Lessons For Millennial Managers

Imagine your organisation being led, at all levels, by ‘winning’ leaders. Imagine your organisation growing all your leaders inhouse. Imagine your organisation recruiting the right staff all the time.

This website will offer you methodologies from the great paradigm shifters of the last forty years ( Drucker, Welch, Collins, Hamel), along with ideas from modern thinkers such as Holly Ransom, Jeremy Hope, Rita McGrath, and Linda Hill in an easy to absorb way. The methods will have a profound impact on your organisation and on your career.

I am constantly updating my  Winning Leadership: A Model on Leadership For The Millennial Manager” – Toolkit (120 page PDF whitepaper + e-templates).  It is the updated version of my management book published in 2011.

The eight behavioural traits of successful leaders

As a result of a leadership think tank it was pointed out that it is imperative to separate those leadership behaviour traits that need to be in your DNA from those skills that can be learnt. In the thinktank we came up with eight behaviour traits that need to be in your DNA and fifteen skills that can be learnt.

The good news is that behaviour traits can be changed if the leader is committed.  It takes up to twelve weeks working on one behaviour change, every week, until the “penny drops” and it becomes an automatic response.

The eight behaviour traits of success leaders are:

  1. Integrity and honesty (Hard wired in their DNA)
  2. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” (Hard wired in their DNA)
  3. Abundance of positive energy (Hard wired in their DNA)
  4. Self-awareness and self-regulation (Exposure to best practice can improve performance)
  5. Decision making and risk taking (Exposure to best practice can improve performance)
  6. Ability to excel in a crisis (Hard wired in their DNA)
  7. Seeing future opportunities (Exposure to best practice can improve performance)
  8. Learning agility (Exposure to best practice can improve performance)

To read more access either David Parmenter’s: Winning Leadership (a serving Leader) – Toolkit (110 page whitepaper + e-templates) or his short form   Working guide: How the Millennial Manager can be a ‘Viking with a Mother’s Heart

15 skills millennial managers need to master to be successful

As a leader, there are fifteen leadership skills to master, and this mastery can be achieved by all leaders who are committed to learning and have a mentor or two supporting them.  I have broken these skills up into two groups, people orientated skills and personal skills.

People skills 1.    Communicating and influencing
2.    Recruiting and promoting
3.    Develop and maintain stakeholder relationships
4.    Selling and leading change
5.  Provisioning for the team
6.  Engaging others
7.  Valuing results and empowering your team
8.  Valuing a work life balance
Setting direction skills 9.  Have a vision of your legacy
10. Define the mission, vision, values and strategy
11. Working with the organisation’s critical success factors
Execution skills 12. Embrace abandonment (letting go of the past)
13. Champion of innovation and excellence
14. A focus on execution
15. Using your mentors and your safe-haven effectively

To read more access either David Parmenter’s: Winning Leadership (a serving Leader) – Toolkit (110 page whitepaper + e-templates) or his short form   Working guide: Winning Leadership: A Viking with a Mother’s Heart

I have written a series of mini-toolkits for the Millennial Manager

30 smarter ways of working: This mini-toolkit covers how to make work fun, smarter work habits, better communication and making innovation a daily activity. To read more

Attracting and recruiting talent: This mini-toolkit  covers explores how to become a team of choice, the importance of a succinct advert, the value of staying the distance in the recruiting marathon, and the importance of a successful induction.

Getting performance bonus schemes to work: This mini-toolkit  explores the foundation stones CFOs and controllers need to be aware of if they are involved in designing a performance bonus scheme or to fix the current broken scheme.

Selling and leading change: This mini-toolkit  explores the work of Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan in The Three Laws of Performance and John Kotter’s Leading Change. It covers the importance of Harry Mills’ “self-persuasion,” sets out an eight-stage process that will help you implement change and offers guidance on delivering persuasive presentations.

Techniques to adopt from the lean movement: This mini-toolkit  the history of the lean movement, Toyota’s 14 principles and their relevance to your organisation, Gemba Kaizen, Jim Collins’ five step model, how to get to the root cause of a problem and how to post-it re-engineer inefficient routines.

The hidden costs of reorganisations and downsizing: This mini-toolkit  will hopefully make the reader aware as to why they need to be very vocal and take steps to prevent these costly mistakes.

Time is on my side yes it is:  Many of us today have frustrating long commutes, are constantly sleep deprived, are addicted to responding to Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram as well as binge watching a box set or two.  To make matters worse now, once in the office, we are subjected to far too many meetings, scheduled across the day that go nowhere quickly.  Everyday pressures of modern life leads us toward the belief that we cannot cope as there is not enough time in the day. I believe my research on the topic will help you reclaim time.  Read this extract from my mini-toolkit  “Time is on my side, yes, it is”.  Then, buy the full mini-toolkit .

What you need to know before undertaking a takeover or merger: This mini-toolkit  explores why so many takeover and mergers, which have been based on perceived synergies and cost savings, fail, and if involved in one, why you need to move on before reality strikes.

Winning leadership: a Viking with a mother’s heart. This mini-toolkit  covers the eight behaviour traits of leadership (four of which are hard wired at birth) and the fifteen leadership skills to master (8 people skills, 3 setting direction skills, and 4 execution skills)

Wisdom from the great management thinkers:  This mini-toolkit  covers the lessons from Peter Drucker,  Jim Collins, Jack Welch, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, Gary Hamel,  and Jeremy Hope.

Should I Stay of Should I go?: This mini-toolkit  covers  planning the future, maximising your potential in your current organisation, getting prepared for the decision, self-improvement and choosing the right job offer.

Winning Personal Habits: This mini-toolkit  covers creating behavioural traits that will make you a better person and leader, using neuro linguistic programming to achieve greatness, building a safety net and maintaining effective relationships.

The 10+ Major Performance Management Traps For the Millennial Manager to Avoid

Over the forty years I have been observing and studying performance management, I have come to the conclusion that the major performance traps are so much part of the DNA of management that they are common in most organisations. Organisations need to challenge the status quo in the following areas:

  1. Operating without a unified and widely understood set of critical success factors that should drive priorities throughout the workplace.
  2. Working with poorly thought out performance measures all of which are incorrectly termed Key performance indicators.
  3. Using large strategic planning processes and annual budgeting to stifle performance.
  4. Retaining staff, processes and reporting that no longer fit the organisation rather than adopting Peter Drucker’s abandonment
  5. Starting projects without a group-wide understanding of how to sell and lead change resulting in too many stalled or failed projects.
  6. The belief that management can organise training, minimise recruitment failures and develop talent without the direction and oversight from a well-resourced HR function.
  7. Creating barriers to innovation instead of unleashing “every brain in the game”.
  8. Time poor” practices that are followed by management and then replicated by the up and coming rising stars.
  9. Using ill-conceived, unfair and dysfunctional performance related pay schemes that are detrimental to the long-term wealth of the organisation.
  10. Allowing growth in the layers of management ending up with executives whose only purpose is to attend one meeting after another.
  11. Sourcing senior leadership positions from outsiders who are brought in to the organisation because of a lack of leadership development of the in-house talent.
  12. Undertaking takeovers and mergers in the misguided belief that they will add value in the long term.
  13. Using re-organisations to remove unwanted senior management– which in the process disenfranchises all staff and weakens the organisation.
  14. The propensity to rely on error prone systems built in spreadsheets by well-meaning but misguided staff.
  15. Using late monthly reporting to monitor performance when you need daily weekly information to create change.

What to do next to improve your skill level as a Millennial Manager

  1. Read my article on leadership in an era of distraction
  2. Buy the leadership toolkit called Winning Leadership: A Model on Leadership For The Millennial Manager” – Toolkit (120 page PDF whitepaper + e-templates).
  3. Read the articles on this website
  4. Acquire my “The Leading-Edge Manager’s Guide to Success”
  5. the full working  guide on time management
  6. Visit The Definitive Drucker site
  7. Visit Jim Collins website
  8. Visit Tom Peters website

What makes a good leader

“What makes a good leader?” I was asked across a dinner table. To answer this you need to understand what makes a serving leader. How do you obtain the qualities and character that make people want to follow you over the top of the trenches? I have been exploring leadership for some time. As a disciple of Peter Drucker I have read most of his work, and I have spent much time interpreting the exploits of modern-day leaders such as Jack Welch former CEO of General Electric and comparing their styles to historic leaders such as Sir Winston Churchill, Horatio Nelson, and Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Some articles to help you with your management and leadership

Extracts from my management book