As you grow in your career one of the most inevitable pieces of that process is an interview. Although daunting at times, an interview can force you to grow your way of thinking and position you too find new ways of describing yourself, even more so when your career starts shifting into management. You realize then that the interview questions get more intense and more focused on your management skills. That is when you start dabbling into learning more about different management styles and discovering which one relates more to you. So, for me one of the most interesting questions I was faced with during one of my interviews for a manager was when I was asked “what is your philosophy of management?”. Even though I was petrified and answered the question with whatever crazy thing pop up in my head in the moment, it was a question I had not thought about before. Then it became one of those things you can’t get out of your head and for the next couple of days I pondered on how I should have had responded to the question because obviously I was not getting the job with whatever crazy response I had given.
I realized it is not a question you can answer by reading a book, taking a test and spitting out an answer. It is a question that takes times to answer and for me it has taken me time to devise the response that is true for me. I have done research on management, read books on leadership, spoken to managers on their experiences, lead teams of my own, and in the end, I have come to realize that my philosophy of management can be described of what I have come to call the R3 of management. It’s exciting for me because when I am now faced with the question “what is your philosophy of management?” my response is simply saying “My philosophy of management is R3”. R3 signifies the three main attributes that I believe a person should have to be a true leader of a successfully thriving team.
The three R’s are attributes that collectively can separate a manager from a leader, can separate someone from being a leader people want to follow rather than a manager they need to follow and although in this blog post I will describe them briefly, I assure you we will have more in-depth discussions on each of these attributes during other posts. In essence my R3 of management attributes are broken out in three areas: Respect, Responsibility and Recognition.
As simple as it sounds these three attributes encompass a complexity of characteristics, some of which can be taught and some learned through experiences, that together create the building blocks of a leader which now I have come to call the R3 of Management my philosophy.