ABSTRACT
These collected comments, views and study reports, providing professional expertise on supportive culture and beneficial behavioural management skills, should provide those academic and professional services managers and leaders who are naturally gifted in such soft skills and those who endeavour to further develop their skills, with sufficient encouragement to discuss these further.
The reputation of ‘leaders’ and ‘managers’, will stand or fall on the combined experiences and observations we have had so far as employees and as further perceived and represented by what we read and hear in the media and from the ‘public at large’.
We should ask ourselves how important is it for us to be around colleagues who can challenge and assist us to work more efficiently and creatively but who are fair, consistent, empathic, interested, reasonably polite, say please and thank-you and value contributions. How important is it to have managers who are sometimes humorous, sometimes self-deprecating, who listen most of the time (as long as you don’t talk too much), encourage openness and transparency, aren’t quick to criticise and don’t jump to assumptions, who realise success is a team game and who are not overly ego driven? Those who are only intimidating when someone or some group of staff is being treated incorrectly, senior staff who, as a result of their behaviour, we trust and respect, aren’t they the ones we enjoy working with and for whom we are most motivated?
Creating a working environment in which staff know they are operating in a ‘psychological safe space’, that is, a professional atmosphere where staff can discuss developments, issues, concerns, etc., they matter, are listened to and taken seriously, is dependant upon these approaches. Attention should be directed at the motivational climate of, and the importance of creating the most stimulating and supportive professional culture by the university’s senior management team members, but generally is not. The most beneficial climate and culture would appear to depend on the collection of approaches by the many contributors comments taken from their articles and from studies, and presented throughout these pages. Senior management and HR department responsibilities and contributions toward the development of this beneficial climate and culture are stressed.
Finally, the introduction of some form of management behavioural framework or standard will locate these approaches and behaviours more centrally within the management practices of higher education institutions.
