Leadership Development – Page 36 – STL

Being a manager means being a good leader. Your team look up to you for guidance, and want you to give them direction, praise and assistance. They want a manager who can lead them to the correct thing to do, not just someone who barks orders and hands out discipline. To be an effective manager, you need to relate to your team members on a human level. As well as having the practical skills to get your job done, you should also know the best ways to keep your team together and ensure their motivation remains high.

Learn How to Deal with Conflict

Conflict among your team isn’t something that you want to have to deal with. If people aren’t getting along or there are disagreements all the time, it’s obvious that you need to do something about. Conflict can arise from many things, ranging from differing opinions to different working styles. Dealing with conflict requires you to be able to identify the sources of conflict that might be present in your team and find ways to manage them. This means not just putting out fires as they occur, but finding long-term solutions that reduce the amount of conflict in your team and increase productivity.

Improve Your Delegation Skills

Board with projects for delegation — Delegate tasks and projects to your team

Delegating is a vital skill for any manager. You can’t do all of the work yourself; in fact, your job as a manager is to help decide who should do what. There’s a lot more to delegating than you might think, though. You can improve performance within your team by choosing the right person for the job every time, which means that you need to know everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. Working together with your team makes this easier, as they can choose which tasks they are best suited to.

Recognise Employee Achievements

A good manager rewards their team's achievements — Reward and recognise your team

Employees want to be recognised for the work that they have done. No one wants to turn up at work every day feeling underappreciated. Even employees who previously felt passionate about their job could start to get discouraged if they feel that they’re not being recognised for the hard work that they do. It’s important to find ways to recognise achievements that will really be appreciated. Some of them may be small words of thanks, while other ways to hand out praise could involve bigger rewards. You need to avoid being patronising or falling short on your delivery.

Be There for Your Team

Being a good manager requires you to be a people person. If you want to manage your team well, you need to be there for them when they need you. This means making yourself available for them to come to you if they want to speak to you. You might have open office hours when they can drop in to see you. Or you could have regular meetings with your team members individually, as well as together. However you make yourself available to them, they will appreciate the help.

Steve Jobs talks about managing people

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You can improve efficiency in your team by becoming a more effective manager. Build your skills to manage your team better. You may also wish to check out our organisational skills course.

Being a manager of anything is a great responsibility that needs to be taken seriously in order to make an impact. There are plenty of managers in the world that simply don’t respect what they do, resulting in poor communication between team members and a generally unproductive business. If you want to improve your company’s efficiency and productivity (we help businesses achieve this with our management training programme), then here are 10 key skills that every successful manager should possess.

1. Ability to collaborate with team members

Managers might be the ones giving orders to the entire team, but it’s vital that you start thinking about your staff as team members and not subordinates. It’s vital that you learn to collaborate with them on a regular basis so that you can work more efficiently as a team instead of clashing constantly.

An important management skill is collaboration — Collaboration with your team is key; find management training courses near me

2. Being emotional when the situation calls for it

Managers often focus too much on the bigger picture and will only look at statistics when judging decisions and employees. However, having empathy and understanding your staff members can help you become a better manager since you’ll gain a better idea of how your team operates. If this is a skill you would like to develop, you may wish to consider one of our emotional intelligence work courses.

3. Knowing the difference between micro and macro management

Micromanagement is usually seen as a bad practice but it can often be useful especially if you’re dealing with new employees or staff that have recently switched their role.

4. Using positive motivation to get your team more productive

Positive motivation is not threatening to fire someone. Instead, it’s all about encouraging your team and putting your faith in them so they feel like they have a place in the company instead of being treated like a disposable asset.

Your team will thrive if you focus on positive reinforcement — Be positive with your team to improve productivity

5. Ability to accept feedback and criticism

You’re likely not a perfect manager so it’s vital that you learn to accept feedback and criticism if you made a mistake. You’re only human, after all.

6. Not being afraid of confrontation

Confrontation happens in an office environment and you shouldn’t be afraid of it especially if an employee isn’t performing well. As long as you’re understanding and not unfair, confrontation is nothing to be scared of.

7. Becoming the coach that your team needs

Your team will likely look up to you because you’re their manager, so be a coach to them and guide them to being a more productive group.

8. Promoting your company culture

Company cultures can have a huge impact on the efficiency of your business, so nurture yours and reinforce it with your people.

9. Effectively switching between multi and single tasking

Multitasking for too long will stretch out simple tasks and put more stress on your mind. However, it’s undoubtedly an effective way to get multiple things done at once, but you should learn to switch between multi and single tasking to make the best use of your time.

10. Developing effective communication skills

Lastly, it’s important to develop effective communication skills so that your team functions like a cohesive group and not a disorganised mob. To help you out, we’ve also added an infographic that touches on some of the most essential communication skills that a manager needs .

Essential communication tips

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