Leadership: Vendor Managers Careers
Posted on | September 1, 2011 | CLICK HERE TO COMMENT OR ASK QUESTION
When working as a vendor manager, or having responsibilities for the work done and delivered by a vendor, the individual should look at how that role serves and helps his or her career. It may hinder the career if the role is a relatively dead-end area, with little visibility, learning or scope to demonstrate skills. Or it may be a boost if the person develops and applies leadership skills. This continues from the previous post on careers.
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Some positive ways a vendor manager role can help a career are:
- Opportunity to pursue a career in outsourced work and managing larger projects
- Bridge to managing other leveraged work, partner programs or reseller sales networks
- Greater responsibilities sooner than being promoted to line manager
- Gain business experience, building management and leadership skills for other career moves
- An opportunity to demonstrate those management skill and leadership to a greater extent than possible as a subject matter expert and individual contributor
- Visibility and access to broader parts of the company, building networks through dealing with stakeholders and client departments
- Gain broader industry knowledge through the vendor and their networks
- Gain experience working with other business models, countries and cultures
- Add vendor management and leadership to their repertoire of skills
- Build up the resumé.
It is important for a vendor manager to document successes and his or her role in that, initiatives taken, differences made, problems solved, examples of leadership and management in action. Where possible, keep emails as testimonials for his or her work, from the vendor, internal stakeholders, or other involved in the process.
What skills and areas expertise are built or strengthened in the process of managing and leading vendors? Here are just a few…
- Integrating work of different parties, and balancing needs and expectations
- Skills to run meetings with a range of interests and people from different areas
- Working with internal and external stakeholders
- Working with contracts and agreements is a broadly applicable business skill
- Seeing performance in terms of outcomes and final results, not just behaviors
- Analyzing and interpreting data and performance metrics
- Negotiation skills, and effective communication of needs and expectations
- Managing remote and mixed teams, other companies, countries and cultures
- Serving and communicating with stakeholders – internal and external
- Planning and problem-solving, working to deadlines
So, with all this in mind, a vendor manager, or their manager, need to do a stocktake of their job, the leadership component and potential, levels of expertise in leading others, and from that identify what further development is needed and how that will be best done. This will continue in the next post.
Tags: business relationships > careers > competencies > leadership skills > managing vendors > vendor manager
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