Why the title  ”The Accidental Manager”

I chose this because over 20 years in supporting business development and crisis management and from my personal experience, we did not make a decision in our mid-teens “I will be a business manager”, then go to university and study management.

We generally start our working life thinking I want to be a farmer, a builder, a mechanic, an economist, a doctor, or an accountant. All these professions and trades require a significant level of study and trade skill development to achieve the skills required to be great at our job. In my experience, because we are good at our job, we become managers in the business. If we work in the corporate sector or in a field where we are able to take time out to study, we can enrol in a Master of Business Administration to gain some of these skills. However, if we are in a trader (metal fabrication, carpentry, electrical etc), and we are good at our job, we tend to through encouragement from family, friends and customers we decide to start our own business this avenue can be limited.

As we work to develop our business, we generally do not have time to study at university to get our MBA, so we continue to develop our managerial skills in an ad hoc by the seat of our pants basis. This tends to result in some failures and some great outcomes, but it is inefficient. This is because as we operate by trial and error, this takes time and takes us away from our core business, that is satisfying our customers by delivering a quality product within a budget and a specific time frame.

This is what I mean by accidental managers, we do not make a deliberate decision to be a manager but happen to fall into the role by accident (the accident is by choice, but not planned years before hand so we can develop the management skills over a period of time).

To address the gap in skills, and we all have skills gaps regardless of our training background, there area number of pathways a manager can take, we can enrol in an MBA university or education institution, this can be time consuming and expensive, we can take up reading management text books and journals, this can be a bit dry and boring, we can enrol in short modular courses again run by a number of education institutions, we can attend management forums or workshops (these include online presentations, ted talks and youtube videos) and we can become part of a management network to share experiences. There are other ways, but these are probably the most common.

From my experience each development activity has their pros and cons. My own personal experience has been a combination of the above. I studied agri-business management when I left school, but there were elements of the management skill sets missing. I have read extensively, both management textbooks and management journals, I have completed 2 degrees in economics, attended workshops, participated in management network groups. I have not done an MBA, because I felt at the time that enhancing my analytical skills with a master’s in economics was more important than what I would have achieved by completing an MBA.

The pros and cons:

• MBA, comprehensive outline of management tools and techniques, the ability to have peer to peer discussions, still needs some experience in application and can be expensive
• Reading, boring, time consuming, difficult to have peer to peer discussion on topics, it is cheap, and we can get a variety of opinions and techniques, but it can be difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff if we do not have some experience
• Short workshops, these can be great (if some management tools are provided as part of the program), as there is opportunity to have peer to peer discussion, and we can select specific topics. The quality of the content will be determined by the capability and experience of the presenter (outcomes from workshops can be time wasting rubbish or gaining a great understanding of specific management practices and tools). Generally suitable for time poor business owners, and prices can vary
• Online presentations, like workshops are great, but again suffer from the same faults of workshops. The great thing about online material is that it can be accesses whenever.
• Management network is the last outlined and is a great way to share experiences and solve problems, it is also a platform to bring in expert advice to assist in developing specific skill sets. Depending on the model, pricing will vary

The important thing to takeaway is that great managers have a skill set that understands the balance between people, money and resources and can maximise the outcome potential of these three parts of the business