“You may be a great specialist, but unless you know how to manage people you can do more harm than good”

What makes a chartered accountant with a genius-level IQ, a business degree and an MBA wish to become a Chartered Manager too?

For Catherine Myszka, the road to chartership began with the awareness that technical excellence doesn’t automatically make you a decent manager.

“You might be a great engineer, great nurse or great lawyer, but unless you know how to manage people, you can do more harm than good,” says Catherine, who today is a board-level transformation consultant. 

“People may assume they know how to manage a diverse team, tailor their communication style, get the best out of people and understand the value of compromise and negotiation,” she says. “But they’re just not taught that in day-to-day life.”

Throughout her first career, in accountancy, Catherine gained plenty of experience of bad management, seeing how leaders could negatively affect team performance and morale and people’s willingness to stick around, even in organisations they felt aligned with. She was often exposed to older models of management – “old Anglo-American leadership models, based on extroverted alpha males standing at the front and telling everybody else what to do”, as she puts it.

CMI’s vision of management was different. She recalls how, when she learned of the organisation through its affiliation with the University of Leicester, which ran her MBA, she saw how it understood modern management, and offered the tools to meet its needs in an inclusive, diverse way. 

So she wasted no time in pursuing her chartership, via the Fast Track route.