Management Level 3
Manage Personal and Professional Development
This focuses on planning, measuring and assessing the progress you make in work as you develop your skills. Through this you will develop your understanding of the skills you need for your job role and reflect on your own knowledge and skills. You will identify objectives through development reviews with your manager and will monitor your progress towards achieving these objectives.
Planning your development within your work role is important as it helps you make sure that you are working towards your organisations performance requirements.
Through appropriate discussion at your workplace, you will agree personal objectives with your line manager that will improve your performance and help you to keep your skills and knowledge up to date. You can measure the progress you make to see whether you are meeting your objectives.
You will produce your own development plan, which will identify the activities and processes needed to advance your career prospects within your organisation and to enhance your performance within your work role.
What you will learn
· Be able to identify and agree performance requirements of own work role
· Be able to measure and progress against objectives
· Be able to identify gaps in skills and knowledge in own performance
· Be able to carry out and assess activities within own development plan
Be able to identify and agree performance requirements of own work role
How to identify and agree performance requirements of your own work role
In your workplace, your individual performance is very important to help manageyour team to achieve its targets. Further, your individual performance and the performance of your team will help your organisation to meet its overall goals and objectives.
Through discussion with your line manager, you will have the opportunity to identify and agree your work role performance requirements. Your line manager or human resource department will provide you with documents that will give you an accurate overview of what is expected of you and what tasks you are expected to undertake in your work.
Your job description
Your day-to-day tasks will be listed in your job description and its contents will tell you what your employer expects of you at work. This information can help to identify your performance requirements.
Your line manager may use your job description to agree what is expected from you in terms of your performance. This is likely to happen in one-to-one meetings between you and your line manager, at supervision meetings, or perhaps more commonly at staff appraisals. These appraisals are sometimes known as performance development reviews (PDRs).
You should also reflect on the terms and conditions contained within your contract of employment to identify requirements of your job role. These terms and conditions can have an impact on the way you carry out your role and will include details of your holiday entitlement, what to do if you are unable to attend work due to illness and the number of hours you are expected to work each week, under normal circumstances.
Person specification
Being aware of the skills and knowledge you currently possess and those you need to successfully fulfil the requirements of your job role, can enable you to identify any knowledge gaps that you may have.
You may be in possession of a person specification, perhaps issued to you by your human resources manager when you initially applied for your current position. This document will list the essential or desirable skills, attributes and knowledge necessary to successfully fulfil your job role and will help you to identify any knowledge gaps.
The format of your person specification may look similar to the table below.
PERSON SPECIFICATIONJob title: Team Manager
Department: Finance
Location: Southport branch
Requirements / Essential / Desirable
Personal attributes / Good communication skills
Well organised
Good timekeeping
Meeting deadline / Work as part of a team
Work on own initiative
Speak Welsh
Knowledge/ qualification / GCSE English Grade C or above
GCSE Maths Grade C or above
RSA Word and text processing
Knowledge of:
-employment law
-SAGE accounts / Team Leading Level 2 NVQ
Conflict Resolution training
Experience / Controlling payroll
Maintaining financial documentation, e.g. ledgers, profit and loss / Some team leading experience is desirable
Once employed by your organisation, you may have realised that you do not fulfil all of the criteria featured in the desirable section. There may be gaps in your development you have identified. You can use this as a basis for discussing training needs with your managers.
Quality standards
Workplace procedures can help to ensure that everyone works to the same standards of quality. Procedures can be described as a set of step-by-step instructions for everyone to follow. This means that everyone should be working towards the same standards when they carry out the same tasks.
Here are some examples of working towards high quality standards:
· Exercising effective leadership – as a manger, you should monitor processes and examine ways to improve them. It is important to communicate the need for continuous improvement and offer praise to team members when appropriate.
· Communicating objectives effectively – your SMART objectives should always be developed with quality in mind. It is very important to communicate your organisations objectives and your departmental or teams objectives to everyone on a regular basis. Objectives previously devised may have to be reviewed and perhaps rewritten, as internal and external influences affect the way things get done.
· Encouraging a holistic approach – it is important that you are enthusiastic about developing yourself – perhaps through training activities – in order to work to the standards expected of you. Similarly, your team members may benefit from training to meet quality standards. Aim to develop your own communicative skills and encourage regular feedback from your team members. It is also important to involve your team in the decision-making process and the introduction of new procedures, so that they feel that their opinions are valued. This will enhance morale and motivation, in turn helping to achieve the expected standards of quality.
· Resources allocation – to ensure quality standards are met and objectives are realised, it is important that resources are monitored and controlled. Usually resources can be identified as:
o Time
o Money (finances)
o Equipment/materials
o People (i.e. human resources)
· Processes – quality of output depends on you and your team having knowledge of your job content, work systems and process. Knowledge of your organisations policies and the procedures you work with can help you to minimise the risk of mistakes being made by you and your team.
It is important that the whereabouts of your policies and procedures is communicated effectively to the team, to minimise the risk of errors. Just telling your team members where to find these is not enough.
The content needs to be shared, discussed and periodically reviewed to ensure quality standards are met. Similarly, performance to date should be discussed and reviewed regularly.
You should evaluate your approach to dealing with these aspects of your work to identify whether you would benefit from further development of some of your skills.
Your development needs should ideally consider an approach to ensuring that your customers or service users receive a high standard of quality at all times. It is important, therefore if your customers’ expectations are to be satisfied and sustained, that you make yourself aware of the quality standards your organisation works towards.
If you are to develop yourself to become an effective manager, it is important to identify and understand the policies and procedures that have an impact on your job role.
Be able to measure and progress against objectives.
Your organisation will help set itself objectives and goals that it wants to achieve in order to be successful. To help the organisation achieve these objectives, teams and departments will have their own objectives to work towards. Because of this, each individual in the team plays their part in ensuring that the team is successful.
Ways that measure progress against work objectives
Examine the following techniques that can help to identify and measure progress.
Performance development reviews (PDRs)
Also known as a staff appraisal, this process involves a discussion between you and your manager, which should take place every six or twelve months. Your current and previous performance is reviewed and future training and development needs are identified and agreed between you and your manager. These development needs can be translated into personal objectives to enhance your performance and, ultimately, that of your organisation.
The PDR enables you and your manager to reflect on your recent performance and to identify a pathway for future development. It is a two-way process that will give you the opportunity to request future training activities that you think will develop yourself further.
The PDRs that you take part in with your line manager and the supervision meetings that you attend will help you identify and agree personal objectives. It is important that both you and your line manager agree personal performance objectives, which reflect the content of your job description, as these will enable the progress you make to be monitored and measured.
Ideally, you should feel that the process motivates you to continue with your cycle of continuous professional development (CPD)
Monthly supervision meetings
These meetings will feature a discussion between you and your manager to examine personal objectives that have been set and agreed for you. The process will look at what progress you have made over the previous month and set targets for the following month (your overall personal objectives will be broken down into smaller step-by-step targets, to ensure that you are progressing well in your work role). This will also help identify whether any additional guidance is needed to ensure you meet those targets.
Continuous professional development (CPD)
CPD is a vital part of any job role and enables employees to keep up to date with the latest ideas and changes taking place in their industry.
Devising SMART objectives
When your personal workplace objectives are agreed it is likely that your manager will refer to the acronym SMART. This is a series of steps that ensure objectives are realistic and achievable. If not, you could become demotivated. This is because a badly designed business objective may not measure the progress you are making. So, make sure you can measure the outcome of your objective, for example, you have reduced the number of accidents by 10 per cent in a given time period.
Objectives should be SMART, which means that they are:
S Specific
M Measurable
A Achievable
R Realistic
T Time-bound
For example, ‘conduct four staff supervisions by March 31st 2012.’ This is a SMART objective because it relates to a specific target (conducting staff supervisions), it is measurable (there are four staff appraisals), it is both achievable and realistic and is time-bound as it needs to be completed by a specific date.
By devising SMART objectives, the activities agreed for your development will not only be realistic but achievable, but the progress you make towards achieving your personal objectives will also be measurable. This will enable you and your manager to establish how successful your progress along your development pathway is.
Be able to identify gaps in skills and knowledge in own performance
Your job description informs you of the tasks you are expected to undertake on a day-to-day basis. However, your organisation will focus on providing a quality product or service to ensure that it successfully meets its customers’ expectations. This means that your role, and the role of everyone else who works in your organisation, is equally important and needs to be continuously developed to meet the challenges of your industry. The mix of skills and knowledge that the employees possess in your organisation will, collectively, contribute to successful outcomes and the achievement of business objectives.
Knowledge and skills required for own work role
To enhance the quality of the product or service that your organisation provides, you and your team will need to identify any gaps in your knowledge and update your skills.
The role of the manager / team leader
Imagine that you take part in a leadership survey. One of the questions asks you what personal skills and effective manager/ team leader should possess. How do you think you would respond?
By being aware of your own performance as you work towards your personal objectives, you may be able to identify gaps in the skills and knowledge you currently possess. You may find that some aspects of what you do would benefit from improvement.
You and your team may also work towards key performance indicators (KPIs), which establish targets that have to be achieved within a given time frame. It is important to be able to achieve these targets.
To be able to identify whether or not your skills and attributes would benefit from improvement, you may initially reflect upon what your workplace is likely to expect from a good team leader. For example, your workplace may expect you to:
· Have good interpersonal skills (verbal skills and non-verbal skills – these skills may include use of tone when speaking, words used, eye contact and use of facial expressions)
· Be an effective communicator, show respect, be polite and offer feedback
· Be a problem solver and monitor the work from your team
· Be effective when dealing with relationship difficulties (such as conflict situations)
· Be a good listener, act decisively and avoid favouritism within the team
· Manage time effectively (for example keep a diary)
· Set objectives, goals and targets and plan the work of the team
· Be comfortable using information technology (where appropriate)
· Be able to process information effectively and prioritise tasks accordingly