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Area of Mastery – Management & Leadership
Lessons For Millennial Managers
Imagine your organisation being led, at all levels, by ‘winning’ leaders. Imagine your organisation growing all your leaders in-house. Imagine your organisation recruiting the right staff all the time.
This website will offer you methodologies from the great paradigm shifters of the last forty years ( Drucker, Welch, Collins, Hamel), along with ideas from modern thinkers such as Holly Ransom, Jeremy Hope, Rita McGrath, and Linda Hill in an easy to absorb way. The methods will have a profound impact on your organisation and on your career.
I am constantly updating my “Winning Leadership: A Model on Leadership For The Millennial Manager” – Implementation guide (120 page PDF whitepaper + e-templates). It is the updated version of my management book published.
The eight behavioural traits of successful leaders
As a result of a leadership think tank it was pointed out that it is imperative to separate those leadership behaviour traits that need to be in your DNA from those skills that can be learnt. In the thinktank we came up with eight behaviour traits that need to be in your DNA and fifteen skills that can be learnt.
The good news is that behaviour traits can be changed if the leader is committed. It takes up to twelve weeks working on one behaviour change, every week, until the “penny drops” and it becomes an automatic response.
The eight behaviour traits of success leaders are:
- Integrity and honesty (Hard wired in their DNA)
- “Love thy neighbour as thyself” (Hard wired in their DNA)
- Abundance of positive energy (Hard wired in their DNA)
- Self-awareness and self-regulation (Exposure to best practice can improve performance)
- Decision making and risk taking (Exposure to best practice can improve performance)
- Ability to excel in a crisis (Hard wired in their DNA)
- Seeing future opportunities (Exposure to best practice can improve performance)
- Learning agility (Exposure to best practice can improve performance)
15 skills millennial managers need to master to be successful
As a leader, there are fifteen leadership skills to master, and this mastery can be achieved by all leaders who are committed to learning and have a mentor or two supporting them. I have broken these skills up into two groups, people orientated skills and personal skills.
People skills(1-8)
1. Communicating and influencing |
2. Recruiting and promoting |
3. Develop and maintain stakeholder relationships |
4. Selling and leading change |
5. Provisioning for the team |
6. Engaging others |
7. Valuing results and empowering your team |
8. Valuing a work life balance |
Execution skills(12-15)
12. Embrace abandonment (letting go of the past) |
13. Champion of innovation and excellence |
14. A focus on execution |
15. Using your mentors and your safe-haven effectively |
Setting direction skills(9-11)
9. Have a vision of your legacy |
10. Define the mission, vision, values and strategy |
11. Working with the organisation’s critical success factors |
To read more access either David Parmenter’s: Winning Leadership (a serving Leader) – Implementation guide (110 page whitepaper + e-templates) or his short form Working guide: Winning Leadership: A Viking with a Mother’s Heart
Some of the Published Articles & Chapter Extracts
Winning personal habits |
Winning work habits |
Key management skills |
Selling and leading change/ innovation |
Leadership |
Ways you can destroy wealth |
Tips for the millennial manager
1.The 10+ Major Performance Management Traps For the Millennial Manager to Avoid
Over the forty years I have been observing and studying performance management, I have come to the conclusion that the major performance traps are so much part of the DNA of management that they are common in most organisations. Organisations need to challenge the status quo in the following areas:
- Operating without a unified and widely understood set of critical success factors that should drive priorities throughout the workplace.
- Working with poorly thought out performance measures all of which are incorrectly termed Key performance indicators.
- Using large strategic planning processes and annual budgeting to stifle performance.
- Retaining staff, processes and reporting that no longer fit the organisation rather than adopting Peter Drucker’s abandonment
- Starting projects without a group-wide understanding of how to sell and lead change resulting in too many stalled or failed projects.
- The belief that management can organise training, minimise recruitment failures and develop talent without the direction and oversight from a well-resourced HR function.
- Creating barriers to innovation instead of unleashing “every brain in the game”.
- “Time poor” practices that are followed by management and then replicated by the up and coming rising stars.
- Using ill-conceived, unfair and dysfunctional performance related pay schemes that are detrimental to the long-term wealth of the organisation.
- Allowing growth in the layers of management ending up with executives whose only purpose is to attend one meeting after another.
- Sourcing senior leadership positions from outsiders who are brought in to the organisation because of a lack of leadership development of the in-house talent.
- Undertaking takeovers and mergers in the misguided belief that they will add value in the long term.
- Using re-organisations to remove unwanted senior management– which in the process disenfranchises all staff and weakens the organisation.
- The propensity to rely on error prone systems built in spreadsheets by well-meaning but misguided staff.
- Using late monthly reporting to monitor performance when you need daily weekly information to create change.
3.What makes a good leader
“What makes a good leader?” I was asked across a dinner table. To answer this you need to understand what makes a serving leader. How do you obtain the qualities and character that make people want to follow you over the top of the trenches? I have been exploring leadership for some time. As a disciple of Peter Drucker I have read most of his work, and I have spent much time interpreting the exploits of modern-day leaders such as Jack Welch former CEO of General Electric and comparing their styles to historic leaders such as Sir Winston Churchill, Horatio Nelson, and Sir Ernest Shackleton.
2.What to do next to improve your skill level as a Millennial Manager
- Read my article on leadership in an era of distraction
- Buy the leadership Implementation guide called “Winning Leadership: A Model on Leadership For The Millennial Manager” – Implementation guide (120 page PDF whitepaper + e-templates).
- Read the articles on this website
- Acquire my “The Leading-Edge Manager’s Guide to Success”
- the full working guide on time management
- Visit The Definitive Drucker site
- Visit Jim Collins website
- Visit Tom Peters website
4.Extracts from my management book
- Characteristics of meaningful measures- Chapter 10: Key Performance Indicators
- Delivering Bullet proof presentations- Chapter 6: The Leading Edge Manager’s Guide to Success(not found)
- Selling Change to the senior leadership team- Chapter 2: The financial controllers and CFO’s toolkit
- Locating a Mentor- Chapter 6: The Leading Edge Manager’s Guide to Success(not found)
David Parmenter can help in 3 ways:
1. David Parmenter’s implementation guides with E-templates
If you want to access the latest thoughts of David Parmenter on implementing Quarterly Rolling Forecasting, buy his implementation guide which is constantly updated and is a comprehensive (120 pages) guide. If you want to implement a planning tool, buy his implementation guide(110 pages). Both of these guides come with electronic templates to get your implementation started. At the time of acquisition, David reviews, updates the guide as appropriate, and emails them to the purchaser.
3. E-templates from David Parmenter’s best-selling The Financial Controller and CFO’s Toolkit Book
You can purchase all the electronic versions of the book templates. Once the paypal notification has been received the templates are emailed with 48 hours.
2. David Parmenter’s ‘Expert’ articles
For areas which are not covered by an implementation guide, David Parmenter has written a shorter (20- 30 pages) ‘Expert’ Article to help you make progress. They can be read and absorbed in an hour. All you need to do is purchase them via the PayPal link and they will be emailed to you with accompanying useful E-templates within 48 hours. To buy multiple guides access the special deal.
Dear David,
I wanted to write and say thank you for the positive impact you have had on my own financial career and journey. I first came across your work at a CIMA workshop on KPIs in the early 2000’s. It was held in London. I think it may have been at the CIMA Institute HQ.
I was truly inspired that day not only by the content delivered but the way you delivered it. Since then, I’ve purchased your books, updated editions, etc. and have applied many principles. Without a doubt, the inspiration and the application of your ideas/concepts have given me success, and that success has allowed me life experiences that I would not have thought possible.
I always recommend your books to my peers, finance staff, and those going through graduate programs, etc and enjoy the benefits. The faster month-end close and post-it session to get there has been a particular favorite of mine. It gets the foundations right for the next stages in a Finance department’s evolution.
I’ve thought about writing something like this for many years and showing my gratitude. Today I thought I’d just be kind and get on with saying thanks. All the best.
— David Stuart Finance Director Holker Group
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