Secrets of Success in Management: 20 Ways to Survive and Thrive

AUTHOR: Andrew Leigh

If you had a viable crystal ball, what might it reveal about succeeding as a manager in today’s challenging environment? When the mist has cleared, would it perhaps point you towards specific industries, new vibrant companies or maybe entire geographical regions where your chances of success would be the greatest?

Succeeding as a manager has never been fraught with so many potential dangers and bear traps. For example, a few years ago a nice slot in the City of London must have looked fairly enticing. Today, being a manager of a financial services company, let alone a bank, must now feel fairly vulnerable.

The Secrets of Success of Management offers 20 Ways to Survive and Thrive, without mentioning specific industries, particular companies or world regions to direct your career towards. Instead, it offers the essence of management, distilled wisdom if you like, that falls into three main areas:

• Manage Yourself
• Manage Others
• Manage the Organisation

One can argue about these three categories, but the point about the book is to present some of the essential skills that a new or experienced manager really needs to master as part of taking on an exciting and sometimes difficult role. For instance, in Managing Yourself, any potentially successful manager needs to understand the importance of emotional intelligence and how to develop their own. Or, in Managing Others, as a manager you are unlikely to succeed unless you can show some degree of leadership, or know how to manage your team.

In the wider of the entire organisation, whatever kind that might be and in whatever industry, Managing the Organisation means you have an influence beyond your particular job and start to have a larger impact. So for example, how you manage time and goals, make decisions or inspire meetings, can be like dropping a stone in a pond, creating ripples that spread ever outwards, building your reputation and helping you thrive.

Why are there just 20 management topics in this book on how to succeed as a manager? Well, they stem from both personal experience of being a manager over many years, including starting my own company, but they also draw extensively on what others have identified as key factors of managerial success.

Of course, one can also debate whether one particular topic is more important than another, but the 20 chosen ones are hard to argue with as important for first surviving and then thriving. If, for example, you make good decisions, understand how to manage change, grasp the essentials of persuasion and influence, you will almost certainly seriously enhance your chances of success as a manager.

Not everyone though will want to read all 20 chapters, nor is it entirely necessary. Instead, it is important to pick those topics likely to do the most to enhance your chances of success in the management role. Naturally, you can simply pick the ones that appeal most and read them.

But the book also offers a unique on-line diagnostic tool specifically designed to help you the reader analyse which chapters would be most useful for mastering your role and why. Along with that comes selected further reading, based around your choice of topics.

No one said being a manager was easy, but Secrets of Success in Management is about giving you the best chance to survive and thrive.

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