Self-Assessment of Managerial Skills Assignment #1 Part 2

LIBR204-17
Tim Trevathan
Assignment 1, Part 2

Assignment: Prepare a written comparative analysis of your performance on the management skills
assessments based on the readings. Design a graph, table or chart showing the before and after results of each
management skill assessment and provide brief written insightful comments with each

Having the done skills assessment at the beginning of the class from

http://college.cengage.com/business/griffin/fundamentals/3e/students/assessment/index.html

Textbook Site for:

Fundamentals of Management , Third Edition
Ricky W. Griffin, Texas A&M University

Assess Your Management Skills

Assess your management skills by answering each of the questionnaires below that test how effective you will be as a manager.
These assessments will give you immediate insight into how you might approach various management situations and how you
can work to improve your management skills in the future.

Skills of Effective Managers

Self-Awareness
Belief and Values Questionnaire
The Strategic Manager Quiz
Goal-Setting Questionnaire
How is Your Organization Managed?
Diagnosing Poor Performance and Enhancing Motivation
Managing Diversity
Assessing Your Mental Abilities
Managerial Leadership Behavior Questionnaire
Using Teams
Understanding Control
Defining Quality and Productivity

 Skills of Effective Managers

 Self-Awareness

 Belief and Values Questionnaire

 The Strategic Manager Quiz

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 Self-Assessment of Managerial Skills Assignment #1 Part 2

The outcomes from a before and after snapshot of taking the survey left me with a more complete

application of library management theology and library specific issues. In reviewing the components from

Management Basics for Information Professionals (Evans and Ward, 2007), my scores came out in the top-tier

brackets of the surveys in all categories. This can be accurate based on my perception but can also have

inaccuracies based on other’s perception of me and my leadership style. Having been self-motivated and

working in work groups that had autonomous features to them while meeting to obtain group results, the factors

that contribute to the Type ‘A’ organizational structure of past beauracratic environments as well as working

independently being self-employed have created some drastic swings in skill-sets as well as a chasm of skills

that would have been developed in newer environments in the 1995-2005 time frame that I was self-employed.

The score ranges are as follows:

10-23 You feel that essentially you have all the skills of an effective manager.
24-36 You are uncertain as to whether you have all the skills of an effective manager.
37-50 You do not feel that you have all the skills of an effective manager.

Your score was 13.

Based on your score:

You feel that essentially you have all the skills of an effective manager.

Skills of Effective Managers

Once the evaluation was done in post effort evaluation is occurs to me that I do not have an objective

standard to work with. My management experiences of being managed as well as managing have ranged as

widely as the environments they were conducted in. In seeing that older structures from past government and

government-like private industry management structures compelled me to become more entrepreneurial to

compensate for the lack of ‘voice’ I had in decision-making processes and the contribution to eventual

outcomes. Since top-down management structures that micro-managed or ineffectively managed effort without

expecting any results of typical of these environments, it gave me a passionate desire to work and be in

management environments where I succeeded or failed based on my own best efforts. The evolution of skills to

include building trams as a self-employed person to build out a national matrix of regional recruiters to service

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 Self-Assessment of Managerial Skills Assignment #1 Part 2

needs of national clients who had locale specific or management specific needs that were localized came in to

play at some junctures in emerging market-places like Florida, but for the most part, the ‘road-warrior’

requirements of consultants hopping on a plane to go the where the work or project was anywhere in the

continental United States took away many local requirements.

Your score was 63.

Based on your score:

You are in the Top quartile; you feel that you are extremely self-aware and open to feedback from others.

Self-Awareness

The development of my management style as a national recruiter for clients such as IBM Global, Oracle

Corporation, Hewlett Packard Global Services, Compaq Computers Professional Services Division and many

others led to volumes of requirements that forced using leveraging techniques to maximize my efforts and

compensation. I moved from a solo environment of reward and performance to an aggregator of resources and

candidates that would meet national demand from these organizations. By building a network of recruiters in the

eight regions that had the most concentrated volume of needs, it left opportunities to share workloads and

income potential. The challenge in this new found environment was that since recruiting had three primary

structures; retained, contingency and temporary contracting needs, a choice had to be made as to how to best

allocate time/money initiatives that pursued the greatest gain while allowing the highest rewards and least

amount of time commitment servicing both partner recruiter relationships as well as client relationships. I had to

setup a level of priority that spoke to the urgency and importance of those requirements so that clear delineation

of responsibility for time requirements and accuracy of work presented to me did not bog my efforts to manage,

maintain and service clients was not affected.

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 Self-Assessment of Managerial Skills Assignment #1 Part 2

Belief and Values Questionnaire

Skill Self-Assessment:

The Beliefs and Values Questionnaire (BYQ) contains six scales: There are six
important dimensions of life measured by the BVQ. The dimensions are represented by the
following scales:

Scale I measures the theistic versus nontheistic orientation. High scores indicate a
conventional religious outlook and low scores reflect a secular outlook. The average score
for college students on this scale is 10.

Scale II measures and achievement versus experience orientation. High scorers value
constructive use of time and accomplishing goals. Low scorers believe in living for the
moment. They tend to be spontaneous and are less inclined to make long-term plans. The
average score on this scale is 11.

Scale III shows detachment versus involvement. The higher scorer avoids emotional risk.
This person values control and predictability. The low scorer considers it important to make
commitments to get involved with life and people, even if this includes personal risks. The
average score is 6.

Scale IV is tolerance versus intolerance. The low scorer believes that there is one true
system of beliefs and standards in matters of personal and social conduct. The high scorer
has a liberal or tolerant outlook and rejects the idea of absolute truths. The average score is
10.

Scale V is called behaviorism versus humanism. The high scorer tends to have a
deterministic viewpoint with a strong faith in science as a means of understanding and
dealing with people. The low scorer places emphasis on the uniqueness of each person and
places high value on individualism and free will. The average score is 7.

Scale VI is a measure of positive versus negative orientation. The high scorer is optimistic
about life and people and believes times are becoming progressively better. The low scorer
finds life to be sad and is pessimistic about the future. The average score is 10.
Dimension Scale Your Score
Scale I: Theistic vs. Nontheistic 10
Scale II: Achievement vs. Experience 10
Scale III: Detachment vs. Involvement 6
Scale IV: Tolerance vs. Intolerance 10
Scale V: Behaviorism vs. Humanism 7
Scale VI: Positive vs. Negative 15
South-Western Publishing Co. All
Rights Reserved.

Belief and Values Questions

This required me to create initiatives and time servicing boundaries that communicated expectations to

both clients and business partners. The first part of this was on the client-side and had to do with their

expectations of me and turn-around times and volume and my expectations of their response to those efforts.

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 Self-Assessment of Managerial Skills Assignment #1 Part 2

Since all clients are new until you have placed a person with them and you do not know if they are performing

to your expectations an easy benchmark was established for all partner recruiters that interacted with me and my

business entity.

Assess Your Management Skills

Strategic Management

Rule #1 – Give them [the client] two resumes and see what they did with them [or no more than two

resumes per partner recruiter to me] so that none of us was being cheated of time without return effort. In

assessing long-term strategy and managing expectations, this spoke to communication being the foundation for

the relationship to begin and exist.

Rule #2 – Was a simple “Do unto others...” type rule that stated the obvious. Clients frequently wanted

people ‘yesterday’ to fill their needs as a result of delaying their process to give the recruiters the task while

they tried to fulfill the requirements more cheaply with internal staff. By getting responses in the form of a

“yes, we want to talk to this candidate” or a “no, we’ll pass and this is WHY [allowing us to refine the search

and ensure that we understood the requirement or the original requirement was communicated accurately].

Goal Setting

Feed back from clients, internal recruiters, hiring managers and partner-recruiters was essential to good

process flow and successful completion of a hire. Without coordination of skills between all entities, the process

easily fell apart as a result of critical steps not being completed and falling to the wayside causing mis-

communications and misunderstandings.

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Client
Expectations

Candidate Recruiter
Expectations Expectations