How to Judge Whether a Person Has Management Potential?

Who has more management potential? Most people face the choice between management and business. Many want to try management, some enter the management track, but their development is not smooth. Enterprises rack their brains and spare no expense to cultivate managers for expansion and development, but their biggest confusion is, among the masses, who has more management potential? I have been engaged in talent evaluation for thirty years, and I can say I have seen many people, including outstanding managers, average managers, and some unqualified managers. I have been observing and summarizing how to judge whether a person has management potential. 1 See whether a person has the ability to grasp work priorities and has a clear work approach Grasping priorities means being able to quickly summarize complex surface phenomena into clearly structured characteristics, grasp the root of things, the key to problems, and determine the focus of work. Management involves complex environments and objects; the wider the scope and the larger the scale, the complexity increases geometrically. So "grasping priorities" is the first ability a manager must have. Managers with weak ability to grasp priorities often show a lack of opinion and work approach, wavering, indecisiveness, and not applying effort to the right points. They may be very hardworking and diligent, and team members follow them around constantly, but basically it is busywork because there are no results or achievements. The ancients said, "If the general is incompetent, the troops are exhausted," which refers to this situation. Over time, team members will lose confidence in the manager, and at this point, the manager must be replaced. To judge a person's ability to grasp priorities, first look at whether their thinking is structural, whether they can summarize and classify complex things, and then judge whether their classification standards and principles are correct and consistent with the direction of problem-solving. The former is easier to judge but often overlooked; the second requires certain industry or management experience to judge whether their classification principles are accurate and feasible. I have served as the chief examiner for competitive recruitment in many units. Generally, candidates are given 3-5 minutes to introduce themselves and their understanding of the target position. Some candidates, halfway through the time, are still introducing their work experience in a running account style. I basically make a negative judgment on such people. Obviously, their ability to grasp priorities is poor. For managers, this ability can be a one-vote veto. If you want to become an excellent manager, you need to train your structured thinking ability, which simply means the ability to summarize, generalize, and conclude. Ordinary people focus on logical thinking, emphasizing continuity and fluency. Managers need stronger structured thinking ability. 2 See whether a person has a strong goal-oriented and result-oriented consciousness Result orientation, also known as goal orientation, is the most prominent thinking characteristic of outstanding managers. Management is to achieve goals, and it is the team or organization's goals. A manager who cannot achieve expected goals is definitely not a good manager. Excellent managers are people with a strong sense of goals. Result-oriented consciousness means starting with the end in mind, highly focusing on and concentrating on goals and results, directing the team or organization's core resources and strategies toward achieving the goals, and all actions must be highly contributive to achieving the goals. Such managers give the external impression of clear goals and strong execution. The reason goal orientation is particularly important is that many people have goals when they set out, but on the way, they often forget or deviate from the goals, or are attracted by new and curious things, or because they encounter difficulties, setbacks, hardships, or grievances, they give up the set goals. Excellent managers are very cautious when setting goals. Once the goal is established, they will move forward unswervingly, unaffected by any interference, until it is achieved. The biggest obstacle when professional and technical talents transition to managers is the establishment of result-oriented thinking. Because long-term technical work trains their technical thinking. The thinking of technical personnel and management personnel is fundamentally different. Technical personnel's thinking is linear, from start to end, that is, deriving results from known conditions. Once known conditions are missing, they cannot derive results, and they become anxious. Bringing this thinking into management, the most typical manifestation is that they will demand many conditions from their superiors because in their thinking, only when conditions are sufficient can results be obtained. When results are not achieved, the reasons they give are that the conditions provided by superiors are insufficient, or the environment changed, or the opponent was too fast, and the responsibility is not on them. Managers, on the other hand, have result-oriented thinking, starting with the end in mind, considering what conditions are needed from the goal, and then actively finding ways to create conditions to solve the problem. Technical thinkers often passively wait for conditions to mature. 3 See whether a person has the ability to quickly discover patterns and predict results In today's rapidly changing era, the environment managers face changes rapidly, requiring managers to make quick judgments, which is commonly referred to as having the ability to respond quickly and adapt flexibly. Quick and flexible response is just a behavioral manifestation. What is the ability behind it? Actually, it is that managers are good at and quickly discover the operating rules of things and can accurately predict the development results of things. If they cannot grasp the operating rules of things and make accurate predictions, they are prone to making wrong judgments, affecting the achievement of management goals. Careful observation makes it easy to find that in the same enterprise, why some teams have a fast pace and high efficiency, while others have a slow pace and low efficiency. Behind this, in nine out of ten cases, the reason is that the leaders of these two teams have differences in their ability to discover patterns and predict results. Managers with weak ability in this area, in order to make correct judgments, need to do a lot of investigation, research, reference checking, meetings, and discussions. The decline in the team leader's decision-making efficiency brings down the entire team's work pace and reduces work efficiency. Some people call this ability intuition, that is, the ability to judge without thinking, and consider it an innate ability. From superficial observation, people with strong intuitive thinking seem to make quick judgments in emergency situations without thinking. When we deeply analyze their decision-making process, we find that their brains actually store basic principles, rules, and related concepts about the operation of things. They extract them very quickly, making us not feel their thinking process. People with strong ability in this area have a common characteristic: they have a wide range of knowledge, and this knowledge is stored in their own way after being organized, so it is fast to extract and process. To develop this ability, one must strengthen learning, not simply memorize knowledge, but learn in a way that is easy to remember and extract. This ability can also be cultivated, relying on the effective accumulation of knowledge and experience. Excellent managers have strong dialectical thinking characteristics in their thinking. 4 See whether a person has a big picture and overall view Some people quickly rise to grassroots supervisory positions after starting work. They are ambitious, very hardworking, perform well, have strong execution, and complete tasks well. But when they reach middle management, despite working hard and diligently, their performance tends to decline. They either struggle to hold on or are replaced. I have analyzed many such people and found that they have a common problem: insufficient overall view. Overall view refers to the ability to comprehensively, systematically, and prospectively look at and think about problems, and to grasp the trends and rules of development from the whole. People with an overall view generally stand higher, can overlook things from a height, have a broad vision, can see the whole picture, have few omissions in thinking, and make fewer decision errors. People lacking an overall view often only focus on the immediate or local point, but often lose one thing while attending to another. They find it difficult to understand the company's and superiors' strategic intentions, either executing simply or executing with distortion and discount. Students often ask, "Teacher, can the overall view be improved? How can I improve my overall view?" I give an example: "Do you watch the News Broadcast? Do you like watching it? Do you persist in watching it for a long time?" If your answers are all YES, at least your overall view will not be too bad. People with an overall view have a strong sense of history. They often analyze the development and evolution rules of things from a historical perspective. People with a sense of history have penetrating power in looking at problems, can see the future, and thus have foresight. Self-centeredness, selfishness, and small calculations are important factors restricting a person's overall view. To cultivate an overall view, one must put down the small self and selfishness, put personal interests aside, and then the vision will become broader, and the overall view will improve. The overall view determines a person's level, and what determines a person's overall view is their ambition. 5 See whether a person has the ability to break through conventional thinking Having the same problem-solving thinking logic as most people belongs to conventional thinking. Solutions and common practices that most people can think of are conventional methods. First, it must be affirmed that if an idea or method becomes conventional, it shows that this idea and method have a certain effect on solving problems, at least in the past, otherwise it would not become conventional. However, when new problems arise or new elements in problems increase, conventional ideas and methods begin to fail, and the effect becomes worse and worse. It is necessary to find a new path to effectively solve problems. Breaking through convention means that when facing complex and thorny problems, managers often propose unexpected viewpoints, strategies, and measures with unconventional ways of thinking, and this idea and method are effective and can truly solve problems. There are two basic signs to judge whether one has broken through convention. One is novelty: what others have not done, or no one in the known circle has thought or done this, which is the basic point. But not all new ideas can be counted as management breakthroughs; they must also have the second characteristic, effectiveness, that is, this method is much more effective than other known methods. A truly high-level breakthrough often achieves miraculous results, meaning the idea is ingenious, grasps the key link and leverage point, has the power of four ounces moving a thousand pounds, small input, large output, solving one problem and a hundred difficulties disappear, which is admirable and amazing. Breaking through convention is not being unconventional for the sake of being different. We cannot forget that the fundamental task of management is to face facts, solve problems, and achieve goals, so effectiveness is the first principle. Breaking through convention also has a bottom line, which is the bottom line of law and moral ethics. Those practices that step on the red line or play on the edge are not breakthrough thinking but a fluke mentality. Breaking through convention means not taking the usual path. From the thinking characteristics, it has the characteristics of reverse thinking and divergent thinking. Those who love thinking, are good at summarizing, and do not blindly follow have stronger ability to break through convention. Breaking through convention is based on deep insight into the rules of things and human nature, and it is fundamentally different from opportunism and playing petty tricks. Breaking through convention requires an open mind. A closed person who is highly self-protective cannot improve this ability. 6 See whether a person has the ability to create communication platforms Communication ability is very important for members in a modern open society. Everyone is constantly improving their communication ability, and managers are no exception, only with higher requirements. But what people usually call communication ability mainly refers to interpersonal communication ability. Most communication training courses on the market are also designed to improve managers' interpersonal communication ability. For an organization, the greatest value of a manager is to make correct decisions and point out the direction of progress and victory. Therefore, the manager's intentions, thoughts, and decisions must be accurately understood and thoroughly executed; otherwise, the manager's thinking advantages and judgment and decision-making advantages are meaningless. So, for managers, interpersonal communication skills alone are not enough because the efficiency and scope of interpersonal communication are limited. After the organization scale expands, they must have good management communication ability to manage the organization well. We call this ability the ability to create communication platforms. The larger the organization scale and the higher the management level, the higher the requirement for this ability. Even today, when organizational flattening and team miniaturization have become popular trends, this ability requirement is also getting higher because your communication is not limited to within your team; external communication will increase. When your decisions involve many departments, many regions, many management levels, and many people, interpersonal communication ability alone is obviously insufficient. The so-called communication platform, simply put, is to establish communication mechanisms, channels, and systems. Within a formal organization, there are certain communication channels, mechanisms, and systems. But when you make a new decision, the original channels and mechanisms may no longer work, or their efficiency and effect cannot meet your requirements. At this time, you need to create new communication platforms to smooth the flow of information. When creating a communication platform, you must first understand who needs to be informed of your decision, how long the chain of these objects is, what the weaknesses of the existing channels are, and what method can be used to break through, and make this communication a mechanism. For example, weekly meeting systems, morning meeting systems, joint meeting systems, etc., are all good management communication platforms. Unfortunately, many managers do not have a deep understanding of this and do not recognize the communication value of meetings. Of course, they must be effective meetings. To make meetings effective, meeting management skills are needed. Communication platforms are by no means limited to conventional meeting methods. Managers must also be familiar with various management communication tools, including modern mobile internet communication tools such as WeChat. In reality, few people are strong in all six aspects. Most people may have strong advantages in one or several aspects. Therefore, when building a leadership team, it is best to combine the above six abilities. About the author: Su Yonghua, Chairman and President of Normstar Group. Ph.D. in Psychology from East China Normal University, Postdoctoral in Management from Fudan University. Special expert at the Cadre Examination and Evaluation Center of the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee. 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