People Management Responsibility: Building a High-Performance Team

Leading a small team is often the first step up the career ladder and for many women it represents a big step from being a sole contributor to delivering through others. With increasing levels of seniority, people management moves from managing people in relatively stable environments to managing them through particular challenges such as organizational change and crises. While acknowledged repeatedly by the interviewees as being core to their success, people management was only mentioned as a critical job assignment in two cases. In all other situations, it emerged as a secondary feature to other critical job assignments such as running a large manufacturing plant abroad, executing large-scale organizational change or turning round a failing operation. This is not surprising, as senior managers are expected to deliver results by harnessing the energies of the team they are leading. People management presents its own challenges, but once mastered, the team should act as a source of support rather than as the main challenge to be tackled. Since effective people management is so crucial to being able to deal with almost all of the other critical job assignments in this book, I have decided to devote a separate chapter to the topic even though it did not emerge as a stand-alone critical job assignment during the interviews.