It is a common statement made by employees these days " I love my work but I cannot stand my manager"
Is it the managers' fault that they are not performing their role as manager to the expectations of the company and it's employees?
Who made the person manager and did they give the manager the necessary skills, knowledge and authority for them to be able to manage?
What pressure are non skilled managers put under?
Are they enjoying their role as much as they should?
Are they costing the business money due to low morale, lost production through employee absenteeism, bad decision making and in some cases unfair dismissal and litigation?
Do you know how much damage a bad manager can do to a company? Employees will not open up to autocratic managers. They will not share innovative ideas which could be costing the company a great deal of money.
It is a known fact that employees follow leaders. Are you a leader?
What you need to know
2.
Listening Skills
This is a part of communication,
but I want to single it out because it’s so
important. Some managers get so impressed with
themselves that they spend much more of their
time telling people things than they
spend listening. But no matter how high you go
in the management hierarchy, you need to be able
to listen. It’s the only way you’re really going
to find out what’s going on in your
organization, and it’s the only way that you’ll
ever learn to be a better manager.
3. A
Commitment to the Truth
You’ll find that the higher you
are in the management hierarchy, the less likely
you are to be in touch with reality. Managers
get a lot of brown-nosing, and people tend to
sugar-coat the news and tell managers what they
want to hear. The only way you’ll get the truth
is if you insist on it. Listen to what people
tell you, and ask questions to probe for the
truth. Develop information sources outside of
the chain of command and regularly listen to
those sources as well. Make sure you know the
truth — even if it’s not good news.
4.
Empathy
This is the softer side of
listening and truth. You should be able to
understand how people feel, why
they feel that way, and what you
can do to make them feel differently. Empathy is
especially important when you’re dealing with
your customers. And whether you think so or not,
you’ll always have customers. Customers are the
people who derive benefit from the work you do.
If no one derives benefit from your work, then
what’s the point of keeping your organization
around?
5.
Persuasion
Put all four of the preceding
skills together, because you’ll need them when
you try to persuade someone to do something you
want done. You could describe this as “selling”
but it’s more general. Whether you’re trying to
convince your employees to give you a better
effort, your boss to give you a bigger budget,
or your customers to agree to something you want
to do for them, your persuasion skills will be
strained to their limits.
6.
Leadership
Leadership is a specialized form
of persuasion focused on getting other people to
follow you in the direction you want to go. It’s
assumed that the leader will march into battle
at the head of the army, so be prepared to make
the same sacrifices you’re asking your employees
to make.
7.
Focus
The key to successful leadership
is focus. You can’t lead in a hundred different
directions at once, so setting an effective
leadership direction depends on your decision
not to lead in the other directions.
Focusing light rays means concentrating the
light energy on one spot. Focusing effort means
picking the most important thing to do and then
concentrating your team’s effort on doing it.
8.
Division of Work
This is the ability to break
down large tasks into sub-tasks that can be
assigned to individual employees. It’s a tricky
skill — maybe more an art than a science, almost
like cutting a diamond. Ideally you want to
figure out how to accomplish a large objective
by dividing the work up into manageable chunks.
The people working on each chunk should be as
autonomous as possible so that the tasks don’t
get bogged down in endless discussion and
debate. You have to pay careful attention to the
interdependencies among the chunks. And you have
to carefully assess each employee’s strengths,
weaknesses and interests so that you can assign
the best set of sub-tasks to each employee.
9.
Obstacle Removal
Inevitably, problems will occur.
Your ability to solve them is critical to the
ongoing success of your organization. Part of
your job is to remove the obstacles that are
preventing your employees from doing their best.
10.
Heat Absorption
Not all problems can be solved.
When upper management complains about certain
things that can’t be avoided (e.g., an
unavoidable delay in a project deliverable),
it’s your job to take the heat. But what’s more
important, it’s your job to absorb the
heat to keep it from reaching your employees.
It’s the manager’s responsibility to meet
objectives. If the objectives aren’t being met,
then it’s the manager’s responsibility to:
- Make sure that upper management knows about the problem as early as possible.
- Take all possible steps to solve the problem with the resources you’ve been given.
- Suggest alternatives to management that will either solve the problem or minimize it. These other alternatives may propose the use of additional resources beyond the current budget, or they may propose a change in the objective that’s more achievable.
- Keep the problem from affecting the performance or morale of your employees.
11. Uncertainty Removal
When higher management can’t give you consistent
direction in a certain area, it’s up to you to
shield your employees from the confusion, remove
the apparent uncertainty, and lead your
employees in a consistent direction until
there’s a good reason to change that direction.
12.
Project Management
This is a more advanced skill
that formalizes some of attributes 7 – 11.
Although both “Management” and “Project
Management” contain the word “management,” they
aren’t the same thing. Management implies a
focus on people, while Project Management
implies a focus on the project objective. You
can be a Manager and a Project Manager,
or you can be a Manager without being a
Project Manager. You can also be a Project
Manager without being a Manager (in which case
you don’t have people reporting to you — you
just deal with overseeing the project-specific
tasks).
13.
Administrative and Financial Skills
Most managers have a budget, and
you’ll have to be able to set the budget and
then manage to it. You’ll also have to deal with
hiring, firing, rewarding good employee
performance, dealing with unacceptable
performance from some employees, and generally
making sure that your employees have the
environment and tools they need to do their
work. It’s ironic that this is skill number 13
(an unlucky number in some cultures), because a
lot of managers hate this part of the job the
most. But if you’re good at budgeting, you’ll
find it much easier to do the things you want to
do. And hiring and dealing with employees on a
day-to-day basis is one of the key skills to
give you the best, happiest and most productive
employees.
Conclusion
This article explains some of
the things you’ll need to learn before you
become a successful manager. You can probably
become a manager without having all of these
skills, but you’ll need all of them to be really
successful and to get promoted to higher levels
of management.
For every one of these skills, there are various levels of performance. No one expects a new manager to be superior at every one of these skills, but you should be aware of all of them, and you should do everything you can to learn more about each skill. Some of that learning will come through education (like reading the articles on this web site — you might want to subscribe). But much of the learning will come through experience — trial and error.
Just learn as much as you can about each skill, take nothing for granted, and focus on doing the very best that you can do. Learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them. And ask for feedback — in many cases you won’t know what you could do better unless someone tells you.