The Barefoot Manager Programme includes 3 Courses: Self management, Team management and Organisation management and includes videos, reflective questions and activities for you to apply in the workplace.
Self Management
Self-management provides contemporary insights on management style so you can master the art of managing yourself and improve your effectiveness when you manage others. You will hear from experts, reflect on your own experiences and share your thoughts with other learners.
The first section of the course focuses on how you can learn to manage yourself better through a combination of planning and understanding your management style and its impact on others. The purpose of a personal development plan is highlighted and the process to construct one for yourself is introduced. In addition, you will be shown how your management style impacts others.
You will explore a range of issues such as how control and power affect the development of good working relationships, the importance of trust in the workplace and tips on delegation. A variety of management styles will be introduced along with easy to apply frameworks to develop your particular management style and enhance your decision making. Work by influential authors such as Douglas McGregor, Victor Vroon and Ken Blanchard are featured. Finally, the development cycle for how we learn will be shown and you’ll have the opportunity to craft your own personal development plan.
Team Management
Being a manager means achieving objectives, goals and targets THROUGH and WITH people – you simply can’t accomplish what needs to be done on your own. Therefore, team management is an essential part of being an effective manager.
The first section of the course focuses on the eternal subject of motivation. You’ll be introduced to the concepts of empowerment and the role of self-efficacy beliefs in motivating your team. The importance of employee welfare and rewards will also be highlighted.
The next section of the course takes a brief look at the issues of equality and diversity and how they’re becoming increasingly important factors for effective team management. The third section of the course will delve into the issues of individual and team performance and how to both explore and deal with performance related issues including performance management. This section closes with introducing the idea of you can adopt a coaching approach to your management style when appropriate. Finally, the basis for success is having the right people on the bus so the last section details best practice for how to recruit and select team members.
Organisation Management
As the sections on Self-Management and Team Management showed, effective managers know how to manage both themselves and their teams. They understand that getting things done primarily relies on organising, motivating, communicating and developing people – three the five basic operations articulated by Peter Drucker in his classic book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1974).
In the last section on Organisation Management, Drucker’s other two basic operations – setting objectives and measurement – are explored as key factors in creating an engaged and successfully functioning organisation. In order to set objectives and measure results, you need information and you need to understand who you’re setting objectives and measuring results for – your stakeholders. This course focuses on these two issues of having the right information for your key stakeholders.
In the first module, the focus is on understanding the differences between data and information and how best to collect both in order to improve organisation performance. In the second module, the role of stakeholders will be examined including how best to conduct stakeholder analysis and management. Meeting stakeholder needs and developing a plan to meet those needs are essential components of effective organisation management.
