It is hard for me to believe that more than twenty years have gone since I began teaching at Graduate Business Schools in Malaysia & the region for MBA students becoming a true professional manager. At that time, although I knew much about what effective managers did & what they were like, I knew little about how they became that way. My teaching style was straightforward: encourage students to speak for themselves about their experiences of learning to manage and lead. They allowed me to chronicle the triumps & tribulations experiences.
I observed they often express surprise at how stark the transition from individual contributor to manager or CEO actually is, and they tell me how relieved they are to learn that others have experienced through the varied intellectual and emotional challenges they confront in their new positions. First-time managers have to unlearn the deeply held attitudes and habits they had developed over the years when they were responsible simply just for their own performance.
In sharing his professional experience, former Chairman of Media Prima & Kuala Lumpur Airport Services, Atty Dato' Seri Abdul Mutalib Mohamed Razak, who is currently the Chairman of Kerjaya One Plt, said “Prior to a managerial promotion, most people work as ‘does,' or individual contibutors : their primary responsibility is to perform specific tasks in, for example, sales, engineering, operations, logistics, or financial analysis. Their contribution depends primarily on what they do personally, drawing upon their own specific expertise and actions.”
He rationalised, “Managers, on the other hand, must see themselves as responsible for setting and implementing an agenda for a whole group. To use an orchestra anology, they must move from concentrating on one task, as an accomplished violinist does, to coordinating the efforts of many, like a conductor. To set the agenda for a whole group and to motivate and inspire others to accomplish that agenda is much more complicated than most people anticipate, particularly in flat, fast-moving organisations.”
As former Senior Editor of New Straits Times Press, Mr. Philip Mathews remarked, seeing himself as a network builder and a leader was a fundamentally different way of looking at who he was and what he was supposed to do. “It meant learning to frame problems in ways that were more broad, holistic, and long-term. It meant learning to cope with the stresses associated with entirely new professional identity.”
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