Before we can discuss what it’s like being good at management, we need a clear expression of what management is. We need to know what the manager is to be good at.

We describe in our latest book, Achieving with Volunteers, that management is about exerting influence over all aspects of the manager’s fiefdom. It’s about intervention in the lives of volunteers. That intervention might concern volunteer motivation, competencies, or technologies used. It might concern day to day activities or strategic decisions requiring capital purchase. It’s where a manager wants to make a change, or some corrective action in the systems of the CSO, to achieve some new state.

To be capable of intervening, the manager must be able to select a possible intervention from a library of options. The first requirement is to have that library, to know where to look, or to be capable of improvising. Academia and peer reviewed texts are rich in options and the manager must be able to select, remembering that many options are specific to case, needing adaptation to be applicable to their CSO and present problem. The manager must be able to predict that the favoured intervention will be successful. To be able to make that prediction the manager must understand the core science behind the topic of management.

That science will likely embrace psychology, sociology, economics, and law. As an example, a manager may think that inviting a volunteer to take on greater scope will enhance their commitment. In making such a claim, the manager must understand the psychology of commitment including the psychology of gifting and exchange. And they must understand too the economics of the CSO’s present and future financial position. Then they must understand the laws of equality, discrimination, and the obligations to play fair in distributing the jobs around. A simple thought like this to solve a commitment issue must never be a decision on a whim. It involves many concepts, each with their unique science. Experience also adds to understanding to allow the manager to have the confidence to make and document the intervention.

Professor Roger Kneebone, in his book Expert: understanding the path to mastery, describes the final qualification for membership of the guild of experts – the ability to improvise. Improvisation is an important management capability.

Improvisation is unique to experts. Management is never deterministic. For every action, like asking a volunteer to take on a particular valued task, there are many results, some wanted and expected, and some not wanted and very unexpected. To elaborate the point, some management interventions could greatly damage the CSO’s reputation and reduce its funding. An expert manager will know how to set up the intervention and then monitor results. If the results emerging in the coming weeks and months are not those desired, the expert manager will know how to recover the position – and the necessary sensing, analysis and improvisation comes from deep understanding and experience.

So, what’s involved in getting to expert?

In the model in the adjacent figure, we show two concepts. The first is Kneebone’s ideas about the evolution from apprentice through journeyman to expert (as labelled on the x-axis in the figure). This idea is about how the journey progresses.

In the second idea, we propose here and in our book that there are absolute levels, and we define four.

The ideas about journey and absolute levels are useful in understanding how a manager grows but each has different purposes. We discuss Roger Kneebone’s idea first.

An apprentice has no opinion of their own about management – they simply don’t have the knowledge or the skills. They identify with the desire to be a manager and are committed to the journey. They are at the conscious incompetence state discussed above. As we identify in the figure, the apprenticeship starts when a volunteer is to become a supervisor and influencer of others. They’re not taking on a management job per se – it’s more about helping others while reporting to or being mentored by a manager. And both manager and supervisor-cum-apprentice agree that the journey to manager should start – given appropriate foundation skills and knowledge.

Generally, a manager apprenticeship involves some academic study in management. It’s a science, and study is essential. It could be anything from reading quality texts to a formal course. The understanding acquired as apprentice is quite basic, but it’s enough to progress to the next phase, the journeyman.

The journeyman phase is arguably the most important. In this, the would-be manager does time. The aim is for them to experience enough of the various interventions and results to build skills, knowledge, and confidence in management. It ends when the would-be manager is getting more things right than wrong. Importantly, they become confident at analysing situations, researching options, intervening, and sensing results as a complete process.

As Kneebone suggests, expert comes when the manager stops thinking about themselves and routinely thinks of others in their CSO and beyond. At the expert stage, the manager realises that they are only an instrument – success for them comes when others succeed. That’s a big awakening and fundamentally changes the manager’s outlook and future potential.

In the second idea, there are four levels of management competency – Trainee, Supervised Practitioner, Practitioner, and Expert. In some senses this matches Kneebone’s three – apprentice, journeyman, and expert but it splits the journeyman phase in two.

Management is not a job with a single role. Each of the many roles requires several competencies. The necessary competencies multiply if we add the requirement that all managers should also be competent in the activities of the CSO. It’s easy to see therefore that it’s likely impossible for all managers to be experts in every task. If we consider each stage of the four as a level reached rather than phases of a journey, we can then identify the various roles and allow a manager to be at one of the four levels in each. In this way, they can be an expert in some roles while a practitioner, supervised practitioner or even trainee in others.

Importantly, managers at supervised practitioner level for many competencies can employ the services of a mentor to work with them while still managing their fiefdom. It’s just that to avoid blundering around, they’ll discuss their research, options, observations, and intended interventions with another who themselves are expert. And as the would-be manager grows, they will move to practitioner, relying less on others.

This notion of four levels in each of many competencies, combined with the idea of management as a journey towards expert, allows a bespoke management development programme to be developed for each manager.