Good managerial performance is basically acquired through experimentation since, although there are many bibliographies in this regard, academic training does not incorporate enough hours and content into its programs so that professionals with adequate academic training to become managers emerge.
Academic training prepares professionals and not managers, since the emphasis is placed on equipping the student with the specific technical knowledge that the profession demands, thus reaching only part of the professional training, the part intended to provide it with adequate tools being missing to be a leader.
Many of these situations are related to the manager's non-technical demands, that is, they are related to the skills related to interpersonal relationships with his team, that is, they are related to managerial behavior, that is, to the way the manager leads to his team.
It will then be necessary to define what is meant, for the purposes of this development, by manager.
This is the case of the seller specialized in laparoscopic surgical instruments who was appointed sales manager. From that appointment, his technical function, for which he was trained and trained and did very well, which is why he was promoted, dramatically stops doing what he did and now has the difficult task of "managing" a team of vendors to sell according to the guidelines and guidelines that he is going to define to achieve the results that the manager surely defined together with his superiors.
In a word, he will stop doing what he knows directly, which is to sell, to enter a new function that is quite different and that consists of getting others to sell in the pre-established quantity and form.
Before being appointed manager, his result and therefore his success basically depended on his own sales management, now it depends on the successful management of other salesmen that he will lead. He was made a manager and now has skill demands that are far from his previous specific technical skill, which was that of an experienced laparoscopic surgical instrument vendor, now he has to lead a team of people who depend on him.
That is to say that his management will move away somewhat from what he knows and has done in recent times, and he must incorporate new skills, that is, he must learn to be a leader, that is, he must learn to manage his team with which he must learn to be a manager.
In other words, before it was a team of salespeople, now it must manage a team of salespeople, with all the implications that “managing teams” has, which are made up of people with visions, personalities, abilities, morals, ambitions, etc.., different, these characteristics being influential in the performance of each one and therefore of the performance of the team and finally in the performance of the manager.
All this new complexity must be managed by who until very recently was a very good seller of laparoscopic surgical instruments, this being the most visible skill that he exhibited and that led him to be appointed manager, but this will not be the skill that now weight it will have in its new management, since it will have to incorporate other skills.
These skills, in addition to the eminently technical, may be that he has them innate, that he has learned them in other activities, but what is certain that he did not acquire them in his academic training and also did not have to display them while he was a successful salesman.
In short, being a manager is nothing other than managing teams to achieve the objectives, that is, for that definition, manager is someone who has personnel in charge, whatever the name of the position: director, manager, boss, supervisor, manager or housekeeper. House.
