Powerful tips to help leaders manage effectively
Management is a vital part of leadership in most organizations. There are very few companies where you move up to the stage where it’s all about vision strategy. Most leaders end up doing some of the day-to-day tasks and ensuring that people in the organization have what they need to do a great job. Managing takes a certain set of competencies.
In this article we’ll take a look at some of the competencies you will definitely need to be able to manage effectively.
Motivating people
It’s crucial that you understand what motivation is and what it isn’t. It goes beyond studying Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People aren’t really motivated by money in the job in most cases, they are motivated by the intrinsic nature of the role and the people around them. You have to go beyond basic factors such as pay raises and promotions and get people to be motivated from within. It’s the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Of course, you need to pay people and provide them with opportunities for advancement in order to make them comfortable and feel like they are self-actualizing. However, you also need to create a culture within the company that is inherently motivating, ensure that relationships are positive and that the networks of activity work together and are pulling in the same direction.
Getting better at communication
Every manager needs to be a good communicator. If you watch the best communicators out there you will see the high-level communication skill that they produce on a moment-to-moment basis. It is the way they set people at ease. It is the way that they communicate different messages and pass over constructive feedback.
Developing your people-skills involves understanding your style and enhancing the way you come across when you are feeling emotions. It’s easy to be a great communicator when you are feeling confident and everything is going well. The real test of your communication skills is when you need to step up to the plate in a difficult scenario when your heart is pounding.
It’s also about the language you choose. You need to be positive, clear and concise. You need to be relational and put arms around a shoulder in your team when it is necessary. You need to be task-focused and get people on the same page. And all of these means you may also need to communicate differently.
Effective delegation
Delegation is the only way managers can truly survive. If you end up doing all the work yourself, then you will end up as a worker rather than as the manager. Jump in and get tasks done to help the team, but empower the right people to do the right tasks and you will begin to reap the benefits of this area of management.
You should also recognize that delegating tasks comes with some risk. There’s always the possibility that the person that does the job does it wrong, so you need to also be able to evaluate people and ensure that people have that knowledge and skill gaps plugged before they are given tasks that are beyond their means.
Acknowledge superb results
As a manager, it’s easy to criticize failures and ignore successes. In fact, neither should be the case. Failures should be treated as an opportunity to learn and develop. Successes should be rewarded and celebrated. By creating the right approach to these two outcomes you can go a long way in building the right type of culture within your teams and company.
Conflict resolution
Management is about people and tasks. From time to time people in your teams will have disagreements, and you may have conflicts of interest with people at high levels in the organization or with subordinates. You need to learn the best way for you to manage conflict, rather than trying to avoid it.
Conflict resolution involves both parties seeing each other’s point of view. Remember the old maxim, a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. If you have positional power over someone, then imposing a certain solution on them will not actually be a positive way to resolve the conflict. You need to understand their point of view and have them understand yours. Conflict needs to be dealt with in a rational adult way, with due recognition of the emotional side of the process.
It is important to note that this is a hard skill to master. There are numerous management and leadership training companies that can help you develop the skills to thrive as an effective business manager in the twenty-first century. Every leadership and management training company has a slightly different slant on the way that you should manage conflict, and most of them have good value. Work on yourself and learn more about how to best resolve conflict.
Be an example to others
According to Graham Hart at Mantle, it‘s impossible to be a great manager without being the kind of person people aspire to be. True management involves setting an example in the workplace, both in terms of working hard and living with integrity.
Therefore, develop creativity in yourself and others and be the first to understand when there is a challenging situation and become solution-focused in those scenarios.
Give and get feedback
As a manager, you need to ensure that you provide adequate feedback to other people so they know what they’re doing well and what needs work. Without feedback, an organization goes off track as processes will have a tendency to break down and people may get complacent in the way they do things.
Get honest and create room for open feedback from those around you so that you can develop yourself and make sure that you have a valid perception of how you are performing.
The management balance
As a manager, you need to learn where you need to manage. Do you need to get involved in the supply chain? Do you need to sit in on junior level recruitment interviews? Do you need to take the lead in the sales operation? These questions will vary from organization to organization and manager to manager. Being a micromanager is a stressful process, and one you want to avoid.
However, you need to have a clear picture of what is going on in your organization in order to manage when things start to go wrong and before they become major issues. Having a good team of people reporting to you is crucial in this regard, but also you need to stay as close as you can to the team and goings-on in order to remain in touch and effective.
