Having technical smarts isn't enough to manage either the staff or the function.
I once supervised a strong performing technical compensation analyst who was eager to work his way into a management role. This fellow was a whiz at spreadsheets, data analysis, and survey modeling. When you needed a number, you knew whom to ask.
However, he was not so good at explaining compensation matters to internal clients and often experienced stumbling difficulties with personal interactions when required to deal with contentious issues. Relying primarily on his technical background he was all about the black-and-white numbers with those he dealt with, even when the landscape turned grey, and the client needed new thinking - an alternative approach.
The career challenge this fellow faced was being able to morph from an objective in-the-trenches technical analyst into a broader, more visionary, and subjective role, one that required a comfortable understanding of the "big picture."
The challenge was too much for this fellow and he was not promoted.
Job Growth
A long time ago, when I was a Compensation Analyst myself, I worked on a lot of spreadsheets and job evaluations. When I became a Compensation Manager I dealt with fewer spreadsheets and fewer job evaluations, because someone else helped. Then, when I became a Director of Compensation one of my subordinates was assigned to the spreadsheets and job evaluations. I remained accountable but was able to assign the responsibility elsewhere.
Thus, the higher I rose the hierarchy the broader my vision of compensation needed to become, moving from looking straight down my nose at the desk in front of me to over the employee's heads and onto the horizon and beyond. Which meant that, as I dealt less with compensation details on a day-to-day basis, the required tools and competencies of my role changed. My role became part of management.
The process of managing Compensation usually consists of two levels:
- Manage the staff: You have subordinate employees whom you are responsible to lead. This means hiring, firing, assessing performance, making staff pay decisions, assigning work, training and developing and in general making sure that your employees get their work done in a proper fashion (done right and on time). Your own manager should be measuring you at least as much as a leader of employees as for the individual contributor role you used to play.
- Manage the function: In addition to the above, here your responsibility is to lead the compensation function; to take control of the company's reward programs and either administrate them or convert them to better support business objectives. Here lies the responsibility for vision, persuasiveness, and higher-level personal interface.
If your role is administrative in nature, to keep the ship afloat and maintain what's been done before, you can manage the staff without having to manage the function. Vision will not be expected of you. On the other hand, I've seen bad managers who were good at the vision part, but hopeless when it came to people skills (their staff and clients).
The harder task is to lead, to have the perspective and the confidence to drive the function forward. It means taking reasonable risks, being able to defend and justify your recommendations and being able to influence senior leadership to move in the general direction you espouse.
And by the way, having great technical skills in no way guarantees that you'll have similar success with management skills. Workplaces are littered with the false dreams of those unable to adapt to a new set of required competencies.
Likely we've all seen folks who can “talk the talk” but cannot “walk the talk.”
I, Manager
The point is that, whichever role you find yourself in, being an effective manager requires that you focus on the people side - your employees and your clients. It means that, to a large extent, you need to separate yourself from those technical tasks that you personally performed earlier in your career. You should delegate detail work to subordinates while you deal with the broader issues and more direct interfaces with clients and management.
It will entail you learning a whole new set of skills - management skills.
But some folks don't like to leave their spreadsheets and survey analyses behind. These are those who fail to fully embrace their management responsibilities but continue to play an individual contributor role - as if their title remained an Analyst, not a Manager or even a Director.
The Brits would ruefully shake their heads; poor form, poor form.
Chuck Csizmar CCP is the founder and Principal of CMC Compensation Group, providing global compensation consulting services to a wide variety of industries and non-profit organizations. He is also associated with several HR Consulting firms as a contributing consultant. Chuck is a broad-based subject matter expert with a specialty in international and expatriate compensation. He lives in Central Florida (near The Mouse) and enjoys growing fruit and managing (?) a clowder of cats.
Creative Commons image "Friday cat photo," by jim_mcculloch
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