Five Ways to become a ‘Super Manager’
- Have business ethics
- Establish trust with your team members as well as anyone in your business circle. Build effective interpersonal relationships, through collaboration, respect, trust and attentiveness.
- Listen: A great manager shouldn’t go into ‘problem solving’ mode, but rather just take a moment to really listen.
A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.
Nelson Mandela - Communicate: Managers need to challenge their team members and set appropriate expectations. Employees need to know what is expected of them. Good managers are able to determine the best ways to challenge their employees and the right buttons to push to motivate them. Interact with others not only by listening but also by providing two‐way feedback.
- Acknowledgement: praise good work and provide recognition. It is like ‘watering your plants’, where praise is the water and motivation and morale are the plants. Positive reinforcement of actions usually gets those actions repeated, increasing motivation to work hard for the success of the business.
And in addition:
- Lead by example: Managers must ‘walk the talk’. Reputation can take years to build and seconds to destroy. Managers must show themselves to be people of integrity and consistency in who they are.
- Team Building, keeping the team ‘sealed’, so that each member feels they have ‘become more’ – more effective, more creative, more productive.
A leader leads by example, whether he intends to or not.
John Quincy Adams - Build respect: If your team members respect you, they will be more likely to follow you wherever you are leading. Part of being a great leader and manager is acknowledging when you make a mistake and working on improvement.
Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.
Peter Mcintyre
As a manager, learning and applying some basic coaching skills can help you improve your team’s performance, motivation and commitment, which will increase their job satisfaction and create a positive working environment, all of which are key to long‐term success.
Bear in mind that even if your team is already performing well, there is always room for growth and improvement.
High‐performance teams lead to success, requiring:
- Participative leadership ‐ involve and engage team members
- Effective decisionmaking - based on a blend of rational and intuitive methods
- Open and clear communication ‐ understand how they can work with each other, reduce conflict and improve working relationships (within the team and outside of it)
- Valuing diversity ‐ a team is made up of different experiences, backgrounds and viewpoints, generating creative and varied solutions, which can benefit the team as a whole. Heterogeneous teams have a tendency to perform better.
- Mutual trust ‐ within the team and as an entity
- Managing conflict ‐ dealing with it openly and transparently before it becomes a bigger issue and impacts the team’s morale in a negative way
- Clear goals ‐ define together SMART objectives (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely) that must have a meaning for each team member so that there is commitment and engagement
- Defined roles and responsibilities ‐ each team member understands what they must do (and what they must not do)
- Coordinated relationship ‐ the bonds between the team members allow them to coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness
- Positive atmosphere ‐ an overall team culture that is open, transparent, positive, future‐focused and able to deliver success
A ‘Super Manager’ is someone others want to follow, which will entail:
- Leadership: commitment to the team’s goals, which need to be defined together, then assign the responsibility to team members in a clear manner, bearing in mind a clear vision in what direction the team needs to grow and ‘infecting’ them with this vision. Communicate the end result and empower them to achieve it.
- Dealing with changes requires flexibility and adaptability, with the ability to react quickly when facing any obstacles, to then make the right decisions.
- Helping people grow and develop their skills and capabilities through education and on‐the‐job learning.
There are obviously other skills that are important for a top manager, but each of the ones I mention here can be enhanced with a coaching background.
Coaching is all about acknowledgement, powerful listening, reaching goals, empowerment, growth, a trusting communication and…
…Developing potential
Coaching is about drawing out a person’s potential (from inwards to outwards).
As a manager, to truly develop your team’s potential, it is essential to know them, their strengths and development areas, and to support them in enhancing what they need to stretch themselves and take them to the next level, doing what they are not only good at but what they thrive in.
A manager who takes on a coaching approach, will look at what isn’t working well, acknowledge the team members strengths, discard what isn’t helping them grow and help them build on these strengths to take them to the next level ‐ ‘peak performance’.
By using coaching skills, managers can help their team members feel empowered, want to achieve results, capitalize on their strengths to achieve the end goal and be aware of what they want to develop.