For many of us our career journey to leading and managing people has seen us work our way up from technical expert; being great at the trade or our craft and being promoted to the manager because of our expertise in the doing. Promoting from within is great for business, allowing career growth and development, succession planning, skill and knowledge retention. However, ensuring we provide these technical experts, now people managers with the right training and support in how to lead and manage becomes critical. Sadly, I’ve seen too many technical experts fail in their people manager roles because they weren’t set up for success, because they didn’t have the right tools, support networks and training to thrive in the next phase of their career journey. Being successful in our role from a technical perspective doesn’t automatically mean we will be as equally successful managing people; a completely different skill set is required.
I’ve just finished running training for a team of people managers, the majority of who have come from a technical background and are now leading and managing small teams. Many of them have come from trade backgrounds, promoted into management roles. The training I delivered was based on using DiSC as a tool to help them understand themselves and their management style, to then support them to manage their people and build high performing teams.
Bringing together a team of Managers who are based all across Australia in regional branches is no easy feat. Finding a date that suits everyone, factoring in travel time plus the cost, the challenge of bringing them out of a small branch increasing reliance on the team members left in the branch, would make you think twice about holding this training in person. The easy option would be to say we’ll deliver this training online. To this businesses credit, they persisted and as I observed the interactions between the managers during the training and as they shared meals together at the start and end of the couple of days, the hidden value add and benefit of the conference was the peer to peer learning and connection that occurred.
People Management can feel like a lonely space at times; dealing with people problems, questioning if you are saying and or doing the right thing, not knowing what you can and can’t say, feeling out of your depth, trying to adapt your style to suit your team member because what one team member needs from you is completely different to how the other team member likes or needs to be managed.
Bringing together this team of people managers and creating a space for them to learn together from each other and build connection was where the real growth happened. Sharing stories of where things had gone wrong, or where they had previously handled people management poorly and what they had learnt from those experiences coupled with what they learnt about themselves from the DiSC tool, a safe space to be vulnerable was created. That light bulb moment of we are in this together, what I’m experiencing is not isolated and my fellow branch managers are in the same boat. One moment that has stuck with me from the training was observing a conversation between two branch managers who hadn’t previously connected and interacted, they were brainstorming and workshopping how to handle a people management scenario as part of the training. Hearing them share how they would each approach the scenario and then realizing based on their styles, they’d each approach it in a very different manner and how each approach would impact the potential outcome was a light bulb moment for each of them. Hearing them talk about when this situation arises in their respective workplaces in the future and how they would pick the phone up to each other to bounce the scenario around before jumping in to handle the situation was demonstration of the peer learning and connection that had occurred.
Throughout the course of the conference, there were multiple times I observed similar conversations, both in the training and casually over dinner, outside of the formalities of the conference. People sharing their experiences and learnings; the good and the bad, what they’d do differently next time. Realising that they weren’t on this people management rollercoaster alone.
Bringing your team together for training isn’t just about the training delivery and I am often asked how can I keep the training alive once everyone is back in the workplace, when we go back to being “busy” with our day-to-day tasks and the training resources get put in the bottom desk draw.
If you are considering running training for your team, here’s what I encourage you to consider:
- What am I trying to achieve with the training? What do I want the training to solve for?
- Is an off the shelf type training versus a tailored / customized training program best for the intended audience?
- Is online or in person best; this will also depend on the audience. If they are not familiar with sitting in front of a computer for long periods of time, in person might be better for their operating rhythm. If connection and peer learning is key, my opinion is this is better done in person.
- How interactive is the training; is it just theory based or is there opportunity to put the theory into practice.
- What support, tools and resources are there to keep the training alive once everyone is back in the workplace? How can the training be integrated into how we do things at the business.
If you want to ensure your technical experts now people managers are set up for success, supporting them with training is critical. There are many ways training can be provided, and it shouldn’t just be in one format or a tick the box exercise. I encourage you to consider how you can lean into peer to peer learning and connection with your team.
Have you had a peer to peer learning experience you’d like to share? Or have a question or comment about peer to peer learning and connection. Leave me a comment, share your experience or ask a question so we can learn from each other.
