A good leader is not just support. It is an inspiration. This is how this whole text can be described in 2 sentences. However, to become an inspiration, you must first find and manage it within yourself. How to be a better manager? Find out how to develop yourself, and therefore your team, and support your employees in achieving common goals.
15 qualities of a good manager
Below is a list of 15 qualities of a good manager. Below it you will find a description and example of how to develop a habit that will lead you to become a better version of yourself in managing your team.
- Take responsibility
- Build a work culture
- Focus on strengths
- Show assertiveness and empathy
- Handle stress skilfully
- Manage your time effectively
- Courage to take difficult decisions
- Clearly communicate goals and expectations
- Set ambitious goals
- Listen to
- Build community
- Manage yourself
- Focus not only on results
- Keep up to date
- Share the knowledge
Take responsibility for tasks
Don't blame your subordinates. You manage the team, a mistake by one of your employees is also your mistake. Analyse and locate the seeds of emerging communication and technical problems. In this way, you can "join forces" to eliminate the problem at its roots.
Build a culture of work and mutual trust
Hiding facts, keeping quiet about details - this is an easy way to alienate employees when something 'comes to the surface'. There must be transparency in the team. An employee who does not know "how much the company earns from him or her", "what contribution he or she makes to the achievement of goals" is uninformed and unhappy, because he or she does not feel valued and fairly assessed.
Want to find out more?
Learn to nurture the emotional wellbeing of employees, build strong relationships based on trust and cooperation, where the employee feels noticed and important as he is, and the organisation gains its commitment and loyalty.
Click and check out the video: Closer to the needs of managers
Focus on employees' strengths
Don't look for a hole in the whole. An employee slipped up? It happens to everyone. Highlight what he or she did well and inspire improvement in the area where he or she fell short. When you attack an employee's vices, they do not perceive it as constructive criticism, but as an attack. This does not motivate. It is quite the opposite.
Show a high degree of assertiveness but also empathy
To meet targets, you need to be decisive. Be specific, don't beat around the bush, enforce the goals, but when they fail to be met, support the employee. Punishment creates conflict. Constructive criticism + support will create an opportunity to find a solution and teach the employee that he or she can count on others when things go wrong.
What to do when communication does not work?
Find out how to tailor your communication to the different personalities of the człhou: When communication does not work
Handle stress skilfully
Ro1TP1Loading stress on employees will make them that way too. This leads to less effective work. Be a rudder, not an anchor that hinders growth. Outside of work, take care of your sleep, your family, your hobbies - this will de-stress you, which will be evident in the performance of the whole team and your health.
Learn how to better manage stress from the video: Understand stress and feel relief
Manage your time effectively
Do the most important tasks first. According to the Pareto principle, 20% of the activities performed produce 80% of the expected results. This method is not ideal, but remember to use the most creative and active period of the day for organisational activities, planning. You can leave answering emails and motivational talks for later.
Courage to take difficult decisions
Fear of consequences is a handbrake in a manager's job. You do nothing because you are afraid - nothing new or good will happen. You are afraid, but you do - something will happen - either something good or something złego from which you will learn a lesson that will protect you from making a mistake again.
Clearly communicate goals and expectations
Employees need to know 'where we are going'. Otherwise they will wander. The common goal must be transparent. The goal is not to increase sales. The goal is to get 2 new customers in a given month, just to ensure peace of mind in the following months.
Set ambitious goals
Consider what goals you want to achieve and what tools will help you do so. Inform the team of the goal, outline expectations and how progress will be verified. Finally, show the tools and demonstrate that it is within your reach, but requires commitment.
Listen to
Your ideas are good, but so are your employees'. Not listening to their vision? Don't be surprised that, over time, they won't propose anything because they will regard you as a person with the "I know everything better" patch.
Build a community, not a task force
Motivated employees do not need daily cheering. Support those who are down. According to a study published in the Journal Of Happiness Studies, it appears that the best group effectiveness is achieved by improving engagement, those who are less satisfied at work.
How to manage emotions in a team?
You can find the answer to this question here: With eMOTIONS to the people
Manage yourself
If your desk looks like a mess, you have 20 missed calls on your phone and there is no one to pick up the kids from school, your organisation is not working. Pick it up and you will increase your productivity and prove to others that better organisation translates into more efficient work.
It's not just profits that define your value to the company
Profits in a company are important, but if your team is only looking at them, they think it defines them as the 'value link of the company'. If someone is not delivering results, they probably need help. Build relationships where employees feel a sense of togetherness that holds them accountable for achieving goals. Be sure, however, that buddy relationships do not obscure the goals for which you are accountable.
Keep up to date
According to Hippocrates, there are four personality types. One of them is the sanguinarian. This is a person who likes to start new things, it motivates them. There may be at least a few such people in your team. Want to motivate them? Show novelties. This will automatically make them the centre of inspiration and solutions that will bring innovation to the company and better results to you.
Share knowledge and learn from the team
The employee has the technical knowledge. He is the one who can explain difficult things in simple terms. Be inspired by this. This will make your conversations with customers easier, because you will better understand the specialist's area of expertise.
How to become a better manager?
The 15 qualities above are an excellent starting point for becoming a better manager. However, these are just 'dry' tips that now need to be turned into practice. To do so, you need to set yourself a goal - to introduce new team management habits.
Manager, manager, leader - how do you set goals to be better at managing?
Apparently, it only takes 21 days to form a new habit. The beginnings are difficult, of course, but when you have a specific goal in mind, those three weeks are nothing compared to the quality of work you will experience over the following months, years.
You don't have to develop habits from scratch. Take the ones you have and make them easy to implement.
Example:
Conversations with employees take up a lot of your time because 30 minutes pass before you present your vision, then the employee presents his/her own, which takes another half hour and after 1H of work there are no concrete conclusions?
Print out the 'new goal' assumptions and send to the employee before the meeting. When the conversation happens, you will start talking about solutions right away.
Do you want to become a good manager? Work on...
Yourself. This is the most important thing. If you want to change the world around you, you have to start with yourself. How do you do that? Work on...
The most important characteristics of a good manager
You already know them. Now design 15 habits that will make it easier for you to follow them regularly and without too much effort.
Soft skills in managing your team
Good communication is good cooperation. You can see that conversations are not going your way and are generating stress for you and the interviewee. Get to know: the path to acceptance of self and others
Effective team leadership techniques according to Transactional Analysis
All of the above methods largely depend on your communication skills. A very long text can be written about this, but in the Meeting Group you can assimilate the whole thing much faster. A recording will help you with this: ABC of Transactional Analysis
Manager vs manager - people in this position should not...
Run away from responsibility for actions and words. If you don't achieve the goals you set, you can't blame it on others. You are a team and you are its captain.
In moments of weakness, team links will always look for support and will greatly appreciate you offering it.
How do you become a manager that your employees like and your employer appreciates?
Reading this text will be of no use if you do not put these methods into practice. Each of them is important, and the effect of scale you will notice when you implement them will certainly surprise you.
Need support in developing your managerial skills? Explore the full range of training courses available from the Meeting Group: Business training
