Expertise, experience, and being result-driven may land you a managerial job, but you need to up your skills if you intend to stay relevant in the organization. A manager’s communication skills, personal characteristics, cognitive skills, critical thinking skills, decision-making skills, and ability to manage situations will be put to test. That is why you may work hard to become a manager, however, you need extra effort to be a good manager. One quality a good manager must possess that distinguishes them from other managers is their leadership style. In addition to your leadership style, there are other qualities you must possess too. These skill sets and many others make up the qualities of a good manager. You do not just help your organization to grow or achieve its objectives alone, the good managers also help other staff and team players become better while giving their best to the organization too. Learn how to be a good manager and the qualities a good manager must possess.
Good Manager
Amazon, Google, Apple, and many famous brands we know today are successful because they have good, effective, efficient, and great managers who nursed their dream and built their teams. They do not just envision the outcome of these firms but also strategized and followed the strategies with keen discipline.
A good manager builds two entities. First is the organization, and secondly, the people. A manager builds the organization through its goals and objectives. Michelle Donovan, the director of people operations at Google said “Having a good manager is essential, like breathing. And if we make managers better, it would be like a breath of fresh air”. This simple sentence holds the secrets of effective management. Every good manager aims to be better today than they were yesterday. To do this, they go for the best and never fail to celebrate past victory. However, they do not dwell on it. Rather, they set future goals today and devise strategies on how to achieve them. Managers must remember they were appointed a manager to make a difference in the organization. Anything short of that, someone else may gladly take your position.
What Makes A Good Manager?
Certain qualities make one a good manager irrespective of the person’s current job or position. A good manager’s primary foundation is emotional intelligence, general effectiveness, and soft skill, this is in addition to technical know-how. Beneath a manager’s soft skill lies the ability to effect fair treatment of personnel within the firm.
How To Become A Good Manager
In becoming a manager, do remember you have three responsibilities. These are your personal development, achieving organizational goals, and building the company’s human capital by building other staff. When it comes to personal development as a quality of a good manager when you fail to add value to yourself, junior staff will take over your job sooner than you expected and you may have to use the door.
Secondly is your organizational goals. This is the sum of your company goals with their customers’ expectations as well as cash flows. Finally, you have the responsibility of building your team through personnel training for them to be their best. While a lot of people avoid developing working capital because they believe people will leave after being developed, Favour Emeli the founder of Business yield consult thinks otherwise. According to him, building people, in turn, builds your business, and if you think they will go, what if they stay?
The following tips are proven steps that will help you become a good and effective manager. Top professionals in the business and organizations recommend them as must-have qualities a good manager must possess. Adding them to your leadership style will skyrocket your portfolio.
Adopt A Situational Leadership style
Experts in the business organization forewarn anyone who intends to become or remain a good manager to adopt the situational leadership style. This is because there is no one size fits all sizes in the business setting. You will have to put a round shape in a round hole and endeavor to do the same with the square shape too. This simply means your ability to understand the uniqueness and difference in each situation and attend to them in the manner ideal for such situations makes you a good manager. Although each manager has their leadership style, every manager needs to imbibe the situational leadership style in leading organizations.
Do Not Just Say My Doors Are Open, Be Open And Available
Managers are not supposed to be locked up in their office reading reports or just overseeing functions through the camera. Managers get involved with the work and the people too. So do ensure you are accessible to your other staff.
Know Your Employees
If you will get the best from the people under you, you will have to know and relate with them. It is not enough to give orders to them. A good manager will have to know a little beyond the name tag on an employee’s jacket to build trust and also to bring out the best in them. Before you term this an impossible task, you work with a team and get to know the people in your team.
Design An Enabling working Environment
A good manager ensures the workplace is a happy and welcoming environment. Consequently, this birth overall company performance and productivity. Furthermore, a serene working environment helps a culture that adds to the value of its workers.
Appraisals
This doesn’t have to be in form of incentives or rewards. Although, the aforementioned boosts hard work and like magic, birth drive, appraising every act of excellence is something every good manager must imbibe. Sam Walton once said, ”Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re free and worth a fortune.” Appraisal encourages the people under you to be better and do better.
Treat Employees with Respect And Fairness
No good manager will achieve the organizational objectives alone. You need people who will help you accomplish your vision but you need to help them understand your dream and carry it out. In doing this, you are to value every employee and treat them with respect and fairness. Appreciate their strength and abilities but treat everyone equally.
Take Ownership Of Situations
If you want to become a good manager, you must learn to understand you are a leader and therefore take responsibility. Managers protect their team and company image by taking responsibility. When this is practiced for a long time, it forms part of the organization’s culture and this also boosts the overall company performance. You have to own up to situations else, most of the employees under you will also learn to make excuses.
Learn, Grow, And Improve
Anyone who intends to become a great manager must task themselves with growth. Growth is a daily goal and you must never assume to have reached the pinnacle of your career. Take up an extra course, read books, and join relevant communities online or offline. Learn to add value to yourself daily. Remember you became a manager because of your expertise, experience, or skill, but you need more than these to be effective and remain relevant in your position. Adding value to yourselves must be part of your to-do list.
Set Big Goals And High Standards
Setting big goals and high standards from the onset, gives you the reputation of an achiever but then, you have to ensure your goals are realistic, achievable, practicable, and viable. Do not settle for less. Your organization expects a result and setting big goals challenge everyone in the organization to give their best shot. One essential quality a good manager must possess is to set big goals.
Build And Sustain A Team Spirit
Espirit de corps is a sentence every good manager must understand and relate with. It Is not enough to understand it, you must also live it out. A manager manages people and resources effectively and efficiently to be productive. This means you have to work with your team as a team and not bore employees with instructions. Frederick W. Smith once said, “A good manager is not a person who can do the work better than his men; he is a person who can get his men to do the work better than he can.”
Qualities Of A Good Manager
To be a good manager, there are qualities and traits that you must possess. What are these set of habits that must be inculcated in your daily routine to make you an exceptional manager? They include soft skills, ICT, leadership skills, and other managerial qualities that make a manager succeed in his roles.
Good Communication
According to Brain Tracy “Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life.” One of the qualities a good manager must possess is good communication. Managers must be great communicators, and the end of effective communication is feedback. This means you do not just dish out instructions, you ensure your messages are understood and affected by feedback. To do this, you have to ensure communication lines between you and other workers are open. Before now, the line organizational structure was ideal for businesses but not anymore. If you intend to promote your business brand, then you must adopt a diagonal communication line where information can easily be accessed with ease and accuracy.
Active Listening
Active listening is different from hearing. It is an excellent skill and quality any good manager must learn. Active listening as a skill involves various stages. These are receiving, understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding. Furthermore, it gives you a broad scope and enables you to learn from others.
Lee Iacocca, the former president, and CEO, of Chrysler Corporation, once said “I only wish I could find an institute that teaches people how to listen. Business people need to listen at least as much as they need to talk. Too many people fail to realize that real communication goes in both directions”. The above statement proves that it takes active listening for communication to be complete. Take time to listen to what your staff has to say. If they do not freely provide their opinions, ask them for them. As a good manager, do ask people for their views and when you receive user input, make a conscious effort to act on it.
Encourage Teamwork
Another quality a good manager must possess is the ability to encourage teamwork among workers. Working as a Team promotes cooperation and increases efficiency, productivity, and employee growth. As much as management should build employees, it is unhealthy to create competition amongst workers. Allowing this will affect the overall management result, and the manager will be held accountable.
Identify Employees Strength
A business culture built on strengths has several benefits. The link between development, employees’ output, and corporate performance is seen in Gallup’s 2015 Strengths Meta-Analysis. Reports have it that any organization that focuses on building the strength of its employees increases its profit. Identifying staff strengths and capabilities is a quality a good manager must learn and employ in his administration.
Critical Thinking And Analytical skills
Managers must possess the ability to analyze situations. Aside from being able to analyze situations, having strong cognitive and analytical skills is also a quality that a good manager must possess.
Empathy
Managers are result-oriented. Empathy is a trait that ensures a manager pushes employees beyond the norms. Managers must learn to view things from other perspectives too.
What makes a good manager and leader?
Good leaders believe in their employees’ skills and give them support. They defend their group in front of top management. They confidently assign assignments and seldom micromanage. Lastly, they are aware that having confidence in talented workers gives them the freedom to flourish professionally.
Are good managers born or made?
Managers and leaders are fostered, not born. Spend the time necessary to guarantee that leaders and managers receive the needed professional development so they may build the abilities to effectively guide and mentor their staff.
What is the role of a manager?
by hiring, vetting, onboarding, and training people, one keeps their workforce. provides for a safe, secure, and compliant working environment. provide opportunity for personal growth. By articulating job expectations and planning, monitoring, and appraising job outcomes, managers can achieve desired staff results.
Why are good managers so rare?
It’s because of the talent required to be a great manager that they appear to be in short supply. Great managers, according to Gallup, possess the following skills: They engage each and every employee with a compelling goal and vision, which inspires them to take action.
Is every leader a good manager?
A leader communicates with their team to establish direction, provide motivation, and inspire them. Both a manager and a leader are attainable roles. But keep in mind that being a great leader does not necessarily translate into being a great manager, or vice versa.
What should managers stop doing?
Stop adding us as CCs in so many emails. Be less of a pushover and more aggressive. Put an end to being overly customer-focused. Do not impose your ideas.
What 4 things do managers do?
In the early 1900s, Henri Fayol first classified them as five functions. Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling are the four primary management activities that have been consolidated and decreased over time from all of Fayol’s individual roles.
Conclusion
Certain traits qualify one to be a manager. Managers must be conversant with growth and development, wrapped around the company objectives, soft skills, and emotional resilience are additional traits that qualify one to be a good manager.
FAQs On Good Manager
What quality makes a manager a good leader?
Several things make one a good leader but an exceptional manager in addition to being result-oriented, one must also concerned about working capital.
What roles do managers plan in organizations?
The primary responsibility of a manager is to bring growth and help the organization achieve its goals. To do this, the manager must get involved with planning, staffing, controlling, overseeing, leading, staffing, training and so much more.
What are the best skills a manager must possess
A good manager must possess ICT, Soft Skills, and management skills
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