It’s not enough to promote someone from their position as an expert in their field to manager so that they know how to manage their teams.

How many employees have one day been promoted to manager without being asked their opinion? Without first having been prepared for their new position?

This way of doing things is very often brutal and leaves no choice but to improvise. So promoting people because they are technically the best is not the right approach.

A delicate balance

Management is a job in itself, meaningful, rewarding, hard, demanding and tiring.

Our conviction, having held this position and having coached managers, is that we need to take the time to prepare the people who are going to occupy and embody this position.

Management must be understood in terms of the posture and the managerial gesture that the person who embodies it must constantly readjust in an optimal relationship with the teams.
In other words, the manager has to adapt regularly, on the one hand to manage contradictory instructions from management, and on the other hand to manage the operational difficulties of his or her team members and manage the sometimes difficult relationships, emotions and moods. The list goes on. Unfortunately, managers don’t have the time to acquire these new skills.

The manager’s tool

What we call knowledge, gestures and managerial posture develops over time. The acquisition of new skills specific to the role (to name but a few): communication, coordination, federating, leading, taking decisions, bringing people together towards an objective, etc. (skills that are more behavioural than technical) can only be acquired over time.

Management is above all a relational profession. Technological tools are not going to solve the difficulties inherent in the job. We need to ask ourselves the right questions:

• What do they need to manage their teams well?
• How should they be supported?

There are a number of tools and techniques available to help organisations prepare their managers. Preparing them to understand the complexity of managing men and women in an organisation can be a great help. But be careful not to multiply the different approaches, which are all equally interesting.

A holistic approach

In our opinion, the essential need is to BE a manager. As we said earlier, management is an inherently relational profession. Being a manager means above all thinking about the relationship with the people you manage. So it’s a constant readjustment of posture and gesture. That’s why we believe that managers should first get to know themselves, to understand what makes them people in their own right, with feelings and emotions.

Understand your own strengths and weaknesses and see how you can use them in your relationships with your teams. Self-knowledge is essential when considering the relationship with others. The manager must understand that the quest is not the tool, but that the best tool is him or herself. From that moment on, he or she will take charge of his or her own progress as a manager.

What kind of training is best?

The classic approach to training consists of listening to someone talk for several hours. We recommend an approach based on a managerial journey with real-life situations. This is not a passive approach, but an active one, in which people are put in a position to do something, in a formula that alternates between active listening and more participative methods.

In fact, the fact that there are more and more scenarios to encourage reflection and observation means that the learning is richer and more relevant. For example, by working in a group, you can multiply what you learn and make it easier to understand the managerial process. This is even truer for young managers.

As we have already discussed, what we need to consider is HOW to BE a manager.
Above all, managers cannot convince themselves that they can manage others if they cannot manage themselves.

Our program manager  is based on the knowledge of Being a manager, and is used to equip managers with the tools they need to manage the complexity of human relations.