[MUSIC] Now that you've learned about the influences on the manager role and why manager's responsibilities have increased, let's take a look at why the manager role is so necessary. In this lesson I will describe how managers are vital to the success of an organization. And we'll discuss how your perspective as a manager affects your teams performance. So we've been talking a lot about manager roles and all the different responsibilities that managers have. So let's spend some time talking about why we even need to have managers in the first place. So I ask people this a lot. I ask managers this a lot, I ask employees a lot of the time. Why do you have a job [LAUGH]? Why do you even exist in an organization? Most people would say, I have a job to make money, I have a job to get vacation or whatever. And I always like to remind people that, no, you have a job because you work for an organization, and your organization serves a purpose. Every organization that exists, exists to do something, serve something, produce something, right? But the organization in and of itself exist for a reason. As a manager, you are charged with ensuring that the organization meets its goals and achieves success. If the organization is not successful, then nobody has a job, right? So as a manager, you're put in place to make sure that the company thrives and the way that you do that is you have employees. And your employees are the resources that managers have to ensure that goals are met, okay? So organizations exist for a purpose, managers are in place to ensure that organizations achieve that purpose, and they do so by tapping the skills and behaviors of their employees. The way that I like to think about this in sort of a visual, is that the organization will set up a goal, right? You might recall in module one we talked about the goal of making $10 million, right? That's an organizational goal. Now let's say there's several departments within this organization. There's a sales team, a marketing team, a technology team, support team and finance team, right? So we have these teams. Now each one of those teams contributes to the organizational goals. So, then those become department goals, right? And the managers of those departments are charge with achieving the departmental goals. If every department achieves its goals the organization will achieve their goals. So then within each department, each manager must look at the resources of his or her team, and look at each employee, and determine what does each person on my team need to produce so the department achieves its goals so the organization achieves their goals, right? So managers set individual goals to drive department goals to drive organizational goals. That's why we need mangers. We need manager who will look at the team that they have and figure out how to maximize performance in order to drive the success of the organization. I really have found that there's two choices available to managers, and one is what I call an owner philosophy, and the other one is a blamer philosophy. So let's talk about them as they work together or contrast with one another. Managers who have an owner philosophy, they accept responsibility for team performance. In contrast, blamer's blame poor performance on circumstances. So if, again, if my charge as a manager is make sure that the organization is successful, then I have five people who report to me, then my job is to make sure that those five people are rocking it, right? But what happens is a lot of times with the blamer philosophy, someone who kind of points the finger, they don't see themselves, their role as the manager, as having influence over these employees, but we do. And when we talk about accountability in our future lessons we're going to really, really boil that down for you, right? But first it starts with recognizing that if you assume a responsibility of manager then your job is to make sure your team is performing. Owners have a clear plan for performance. Blamers don't see that they directly influence employees and outcomes. They sort of sit outside sit outside of it and think it happens to them. Owners are creative in their solutions to make sure that they achieve goals. Blamers wait to be told what to do, right? Well, nobody told me, so I didn't get it done. Owners are like, wow, I had five ideas so I'm going to work on it, I'm going to get it done, just a different perspective. Owners are recognized as a performer and mentor of other performers. Blamers don't really challenge themselves or others to be creative. They just sort of wait. And lastly, owners drive organizational success and blamers inhibit organizational success and don't drive employee performance. So these are two perspectives, because I really have seen, with all the coaching I've done, managers tend to sit in one camp, right? They tend to either think that they are creating the success of the organization and they want to make it happen, or they think that success really isn't up to them and it's just based on circumstances. So I'm going to invite you to think about which one of those resonates more for you and do you like it, do you choose that for yourself? The truth is we learn from other people, right? And so if you work in an organization where really everybody's all in and everybody's really focused and everybody sees how they contribute, then that sets a culture of performance that creates that for everybody. If there's an organization where nobody accepts ownership, then I can see how that's just as easy to fall into. I just want to point out to you that they're both available to you, regardless of what the culture is, right? So, either way, you get to decide who you want to be as a manager and how you want to see yourself, how you want to define that. Answer that question why do we even need a manager? Well, we need a manager to help the organization thrive. That's why we need you, right? That's good news. There's a lot you can do there to help yourself. I've put this slide in here because I thought it was powerful for you just from a reflection perspective. And here's a key question for you to consider as a manager. As a manager, are you doing all that you can or are you waiting for someone else to decide, take action, change and make things better? Do you really believe that you're doing everything you can or are you waiting, right? That's a great question to recognize whether or not you are really all-in in this reason why your role exists. Or are you sort of pushing off some of the responsibility? There's always something else we can do even if it's just in our conversation with our employees. So even if you work in an organization that's kind of a hot mess and there's a lot of problems, just recognize that one-on-one, with the people you work with, there's always something you can do. So it relates to, in summary, as it relates to why we have managers, we have managers to drive the success of the organization. And the perspective that a manager holds about his or her role impacts his or her performance, and his or her team's performance. Perspective makes such a difference. And you can choose to try new perspectives and practices, despite the current culture that you work in, despite the environment that you're in. So much of what you're going to learn through this course, I'm hoping you can practice, just try some new things, to see if you can get some better results. In our next lesson, we're going to talk about coaching in the manager role and how those come together more, to have a cleaner perspective on how coaching really, really drives performance.
