The New Zealand Institute of Management was established 60 years ago to help managers develop their skills and to provide easy access to the latest and most relevant international management research and experience.
Today NZIM has more than 6000 individual and corporate members and delivers around 500 management development programmes year. It is still dedicated to building individual and organisational management and leadership capability.
NZIM’s learning programmes and professional qualifications framework recognises members’ level of management skill and experience, and its mentoring programme helps them tap into and utilise the experience of other successful leaders and managers.
The Institute has now used its access to the world’s best management research to distil and create practical management model that defines the critical development targets for today’s managers.
By using the model, managers can match their current skill level and experience to their ongoing learning and development needs. And NZIM mentors can use the model to assess their protégé’s needs and so guide them more effectively. The model also helps NZIM link its learning programmes to specific management development areas and provide management development framework.
The model focuses on four key groups of attributes:
• Management
• Leadership
• Organisational development
• Governance.
It is based on the work of many international best management practices authorities, but particularly on the long-term research of independent researcher and author of the best seller Good to Great, Jim Collins; the Konosuke Matsushita professor of leadership at Harvard Business School, John Kotter; and the professor of business administration at the University of Michigan, David Ulrich.
The first two attributes, management and leadership, are effectively opposite ends of the same spectrum.
A manager is an organiser of business – someone who is responsible for directing and controlling the work and employees. leader, on the other hand, is someone people follow – an individual who guides or directs others. Management and leadership are intertwined in most management roles, so to be truly effective managers must understand and develop both their management and their leadership attributes.
Management
The NZIM model identifies six target areas for developing capable managers regardless of their level of experience. These are:
• Build management toolkit by understanding and studying management principles in theory and practice.
• Understand your organisation well to operate effectively within it.
• Understand the external factors that impact an organisation and sometimes trigger the need for change – competitive activity and stakeholder needs, for example.
• Develop general knowledge of the range of business disciplines in the organisation to communicate effectively with other managers. For example, finance, marketing and information technology.
• Build at least one area of expertise to become recognised as specialist, thus reinforcing individual value to the organisation.
• Develop broad range of personal management skills in order to communicate and work effectively with other people – such as presentation, time management and report writing skills.
These six core management development targets will add continuously to manager’s credibility, personal success and value to an organisation.
Leadership
Leadership is an essential component of effective contemporary management.
The NZIM management model breaks leadership down into three core personal development targets: leadership ability, skill and behaviour. Each competency is further broken down into six subsets of leadership attributes that help managers identify areas of development need.
Leadership ability, for example, is about earning the right to be recognised as leader in an organisation.
In turn, leadership ability is about being able to create and communicate clear vision for action; being comfortable with ambiguity in order to keep moving forward; focusing on developing others to keep building the organisation’s capability; thinking strategically to sort the wood from the trees and point in the right direction; being self aware to identify reality and make effective decisions; and having the intellectual capability to handle all of this.
Leadership skill, the second core target, is about operating as an effective leader.
The first two components are broad management expertise and the ability to communicate effectively. Both skills are directly linked to the capable management attributes outlined in the first section of the model. Political astuteness is also an essential leadership skill, as is experience of life outside New Zealand, the ability to build and sustain relationships, and people management expertise – skill that enables leaders to align people with vision and implement it effectively.
Leadership behaviour is the final core target for developing leadership skill. Managers who act as leadership role models are highly credible, and people listen and follow. Leadership behaviour attributes include having high personal expectations and high expectations of others; being positively persistent and not giving in; demonstrating high levels of honesty and integrity to create trust; creating an effective personal work/life balance to avoid burnout; the ability to engender trust in others; and, finally, to be credible – the last two of which are outcomes of the first four behaviours.
Organisational development
Developing and building capable organisation is the model’s third critical management attribute. Managers can’t, in today’s world, simply define plans, agree objectives and then manage people to achieve those objectives. Talented employees are generally too well educated, have attractive choices and don’t even need to stay in New Zealand. So managers need to be aware of and competent at handling three key organisational development factors – culture, engagement and organisational change.
The way people behave in an organisation, the culture, can make it either more capable or dysfunctional. Managers must be able to identify the core behaviours that underpin an organisation to strengthen its ability to achieve its strategic goals. These can, in turn, be incorporated in the organisational performance feedback system to build culture that is aligned with strategy and enhances overall capability.
Understanding what it takes to apply and gain full engagement from people in the organisation is also critical. People choose how much of themselves they will commit to an organisation. To grow and compete effectively in today’s world requires people to think of new ideas and innovate. Creating an engaged environment is the way to achieve this and needs to be part of the manager’s toolkit.
Thirdly, capable organisations need to manage organisational change. And capable managers must understand and apply successful methods of implementing change. There are, according to extensive international research, specific stages of change management that must be addressed sequentially to achieve successful change outcome. The NZIM model describes these as guide for the successful manager implementing organisational change.
Governance
The fourth and final attribute in the model is capable governance. Governance, again according to the dictionary, is having political authority, in other words being responsible for directing the affairs, policies, and economy of state, country or organisation.
The model offers five key areas of governance responsibility – strategy, ethical values, policy, monitoring and review, coaching and support of the chief executive.
Members of board or trust are responsible for ensuring the organisation has clear and relevant strategy and direction.
A board or trust is also responsible for ensuring the organisation has clear underlying principles by which it will measure difficult
