Congratulations! New year, new promotion and you find yourself managing a team of people. But are you up to it?

According to a new survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), almost half of employees are dissatisfied with their relationship with their line manager, while a third say that they rarely or never get feedback on their performance.

According to Mike Emmott, CIPD’s Employee Relations Adviser: “Poor management skills leave staff feeling disengaged and can damage productivity levels. Getting people to turn up for work is the easy bit. Managers and team leaders need to know how to engage staff, manage performance, deal with problems and lead teams if they are to make a real contribution to the business.”

To improve management skills, CIPD has launched a Managing People Certificate that aims to teach the skills needed to be a team leader, develop line-management techniques and improve personal performance. The company will also work with businesses in-house to produce a tailored certificate programme.

The certificate, which takes a year to complete, begins with an induction period of three or four weeks. This is followed by a face-to-face one-day workshop. The course has five modules, each comprising about 50 hours of study. The modular course begins with advice on managing your own performance and on how it impacts on the team. It later moves on to teach effective performance in working together, so as to improve and maintain communication and collaboration between managers and team members. The third module covers effective recruitment and human resources policy, with the aim of ensuring that staff are less inclined to leave — minimising the expense and disruption of staff turnover.

The remaining two modules consolidate leadership skills by teaching the ways in which a manager can innovate to create a productive and positive environment, so that the capabilities of the team are identified, helping to ensure that performance targets can be met. Each module is backed up by a one-day workshop, by self-study, and through online or teleconference discussions. It is assessed by a work-based project.

Courses of this kind take a serious level of investment, both financial and personal, but the results can be worth it both for the company and for the individual. That promotion could be the first of many.

CIPD Managing People Certificate, £3,750: www.cipd.co.uk/training

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