Mind Tools for Managers

Chapter 15Develop Situational Awareness

Although the techniques for being a great boss apply widely across different firms and industries, we don't want to suggest that there are any universal truths about how you should act. Good management is situational, which means that the right thing to do depends on the particular needs of the people we are managing and the specific circumstances we are facing. For example, you need to manage introverts and extroverts in a subtly different way, and your style of management in a crisis will be different from your style when times are good.

In this last part of the book, we therefore shift toward a more outward focus. We describe a range of tools and frameworks that help you navigate your way through the wider organization and the world beyond. If you have a good understanding of this external context, you will be able to make better choices in terms of how to focus your own attention and how to prioritize the time of your team members. You will also impress those above you, which can only be good for your longer-term career prospects.

This section is about improving your overall commercial and strategic awareness. We could put an entire book together on this topic, but in the interests of space, we focus on five particular techniques.

Every business needs a strategy, by which we mean an explicit set of choices about where and how to compete. Strategy is how a business translates its mission or purpose into practical operational choices. ...