Management as profession

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge”

Stephen Hawking - English Theoretical Physicist (1942 to 2018)

“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got”

Popular saying variously attributed - Henry Ford (?) – Albert Einstein (?)

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• I have finally arrived at a time of life when I am free to focus on what fulfils me – and that thing is Business Coaching – and specifically the development of managers to the point where they rightfully perceive themselves as Professionals. These are the people that really make things happen in an organisation. You may develop the most advanced and profound Strategic Plan, but it is the effectiveness and efficiency of your key managers that will make the difference.
• To get them over this line, my coaching programme mainly aligns with The Leadership Pipeline model. The coaching methodology I employ, which is used extensively in the business arena, is known as the Solution Focused Approach and is very well suited for this purpose and fits in well with Ram Charan’s teaching philosophy.
• I have had an extensive corporate career and have run my own Coaching and Mentoring business for nearly twenty years. I meet at least five new businesses each month, and I continue to be shocked that the underlying prevailing view continues to be that managing people to get results is basically and fundamentally an intuitive process!
• While many, if not most, companies offer management training courses, the learning points covered are, almost always, left to the trainees to implement. If it was as simple as attending a course (or reading a book) then one would expect proficiency levels to be much higher.
• I have attended many management courses and read even more books on the subject over the years, but I always come back to one font of management knowledge i.e. Ram Charan (and his associates).
• He initially studied engineering and then went on to do an MBA and Doctorate at Harvard Business School before entering the world of consultancy.
• Ram Charan has worked with a wide range of international organisations including General Electric, DuPont, Novartis, Tata Group, Verizon, Procter and Gamble etc with a primary focus on strategy, leadership, and transformation.
• In his book, “The Leadership Pipeline” he clearly describes five levels of management:

1. Leading Others
2. Leading Leaders
3. Leading a Function
4. Leading a Business
5. Leading an Enterprise

• Charan emphasises that these “passages” as he calls them, “cannot be mastered in a day or by taking a course”. The core concepts of Skills, Time Applications, and Work Values are generically common to all levels, but have significantly different implications for each.
• His teaching philosophy focuses on Practicability, Incisive Questioning, Talent Development, and Disciplined Execution. Overall, his Leadership Model is ideally suited to underpinning a management / leadership coaching programme. In general, the coaching process is widely acknowledged to be highly effective with a significant ROI, far exceeding that of conventional training. With this as background, I invite you to consider the impact on your company if as little as 5% of your managers were to achieve Professional Manager status.
• NOTE: The first edition of “The Leadership Pipeline” was published in 2001. This was followed by the second edition in 2011 and the third edition in 2024. The third edition has the postscript “Developing Leaders in the Digital Age”. This latest version has been comprehensively revised to take due consideration of business trends up to and including 2024.
• Talk to me

General

• There is no specific duration attached to this programme. Experience to date shows that the process typically takes between three and five months to be completed.
• The sixty-minute sessions are scheduled on a weekly basis at a rate of £155 per session.
• The client is invoiced for sessions completed on the last day of each month and payment is due on presentation of such an invoice.

     NOTE: If you are living in Africa, you may be eligible for a discount for this programme.