The importance of management in FM

On Twitter recently there has been some discussion over what to call FM for the hash tag.....should it be #facilitiesmanagement or #facilitymanagement or even #facman?  Another suggestion was to forget management and just use #facilities.

It just so happened that at the end of last week I attended the quarterly training day of the BIFM's South West Region, which was held at the Bristol Hilton Hotel.  One of the speakers was the fabulous Liz Kentish (The FM Coach and deputy chair of the BIFM).  Liz's presentation focused on transformational skills and developing the leadership and management skills of facilities managers so they can be influencing and driving business rather than just supporting the facilities function.  

I think it is such an important point to remember.  Read the extract below.... I have to confess I can't remember where I got it from...(it was in an FM magazine a little while ago and I apologise to whoever wrote it for not acknowledging you - please let me know if it was you!!)

Don't get too distracted by the word "Facilities".

FM is primarily a management skill, the Facilities side is the specialisation of that skill. As a management discipline, many of the skills you could expect are commonplace in management disciplines; Communicating, negotiation, presentation, relationship management, people management, process management, resource allocation, prioritisation, etc. 

But, the Facilities part of FM is the specialisation. FM is a broad, varied & complicated discipline. Experience and knowledge give a big shortcut, but primarily I would say the skills required are practicality, tenacity, resilience, being able to work alone, good judgement, decision making, attention to detail and drive to specialise and improve your knowledge. 

No one is born knowing how the air-conditioning works (or perhaps more relevantly: why it isn't working right now), but a good FM will find out. They'll look into it, they'll ask people, they'll make their engineers explain it to them and they'll test the competency of "experts" by asking difficult questions until they are satisfied with the answers.

Let's remember that we are managing facilities services and work to develop the skills to do our jobs better.