Management Mentoring and Leadership Development

At the management level of an organisation, it’s very easy to get sucked into a cycle and spend all your time fighting fires, just to maintain the status quo. This comes completely at the expense of business development, an essential top-down process that requires management to drive it. In order to break this cycle, you must focus on the core principles required to develop your leadership.

The most crucial aspect of leadership is to have the structure and discipline required to bring your team forward with you. This structured leadership is entirely top-down, and requires rigid and strong management topography to execute. The best current theories hold that the key principles behind this require focus on vision, involvement, measurement, and planning.

Acquiring a clear vision is crucial to good planning for the successful leader. A business mentor or management consultant can help you hone the skills needed to map strategies at multiple levels, identify and define problems, plan programmes, determine output and lead your team forward to achieve your goals.

Management consultants are there to guide managers into becoming effective leaders, not to railroad them into doing things a different way. This means that a mentor will work with the manager to ensure he or she remains in complete control of the team. Indeed, close involvement with the team rather than an approach of distant dictatorship (which causes nothing but misunderstandings and resentment), is essential to good management.

Managers should use a variety of approaches to draw out the best results from their teams. These can include mentoring, establishing clear behavioural boundaries, decision matrices and other solutions to keep the entire team informed and involved at all levels of decision making. Giving responsibility back to the team will ensure amicable solutions to problems and prevent management burn-out. A management consultancy will show how to develop appropriate strategies in these areas.

But all of these ideas are impossible to implement without measuring their success and building on what works best. Good leadership development will lead you to reflect on past decisions with techniques such as scorecards, binary problem definitions and statistical validation. These techniques help link managerial or financial decisions to the effects they have on team dynamics and ultimately the success of a company.

Mentoring from a management consultancy does not end there. Self-reflection should be an on-going process and managers should not demand this from their teams if they are not prepared to undergo regular, honest appraisal of their own performance. In this way managers will maintain contact with their teams in the most effective way possible. Choosing the right tools for this process is something with which a good consultancy will be able to help.

Ultimately any management development must be done with a careful view of the situation, which a strong consultancy will help you to develop. Always remember that change must be led from the top of a business, and you’ll stay on the road to success.