BECOMING A BETTER MANAGER
IF you oversee a team, your biggest challenge is with productivity and communication. The ability to diagnose these challenges and deal with them will help in augmenting your confidence as a manager and improve your capacity to lead a group of people.
So, what are the most common issues you need to be cognisant of as a manager?
The first and most vital thing to keep an eye out for is productivity. Some people in your team will, from time to time, not be as productive as you need them to be. This reduced efficiency affects other members in your team and naturally mess up your overall goals.
If you consistently review your internal processes and workflow, you can tweak things to compensate for this. If you scrutinise workflow and review the systems, you will identify and rectify weaknesses. Also, as a manager, hold engagement sessions and offer solutions to the problems faced by your team so you can overcome productivity problems.
As a manager, you need to know to employ people to ensure you fulfil the expectations of stakeholders for your department or division.
Hiring effectively is a vital fundamental step to maintaining a growth trajectory for your team. It’s not easy and so, engage with human resource professionals when seeking new candidates.
Ensure that you create a proper job description and person specifications. Understand what the interview process entails, be clear of the personality that you want in your team, and clarify your own expectations before selecting anyone.
Many managers fail at this basic step and then live to regret their hiring decision.
Communicate constantly with your team. This is a major challenge for managers. Without effective communication modalities, your team will struggle. Realise quickly that you have different personalities in your team and that there will be miscommunication periodically.
If you increase the regularity of communicating and remain consistent in the manner you communicate, your co-workers will learn exactly what you expect of them.
Habitually recalibrate and reinforce your goals and purpose for your team. Allow for easy and quick communication platforms. You will find that a team that communicates with each other constantly performs much better.
Watch out for poor teamwork. Keep a keen watch on interlopers and those who tend to derail the cohesiveness of your team. If you want to rebuild teamwork, you have to revisit the purpose drive for the team’s very existence. Keep your team buoyed by praising in public and reprimanding in private. And never ever hog the limelight. Your division or department’s success is, and will always be, a team effort.
Depending on the nature of your work, there will be tremendous pressure on you to deliver results. If you are new manager, you will especially feel the need to show quick wins. Managerial stress is a real killer of efficacy.
Make time to reflect about why you were offered this job in the first place. Remember your own purpose when you accepted the position. This helps with reshaping your stressors. When you realise that leadership is also learnt along the way, and mistakes will happen, you become better at managing your own emotions.
If you secure a managerial role in a small organisation, a common problem you may face is the lack of structure. One of your first tasks would be to create a structure of supervision and with clear expectations communicated to your colleagues. It is important to get their buy-in for any new plan that you create. Take time to carefully develop a collaborative organisational structure that encourages loyalty.
Knowing how to properly address any issue before it becomes a major problem is also a challenge. Often, managers wait and hope that problems will go away. This rarely happens.
When you meet these difficult types, get the rest of your team to become solution partners. Elicit feedback from your team members to learn about any issues they may have with that person. Focus on communication issues, and don’t make it a personality battle.
You must clearly demonstrate that you are willing to listen to your team. Understand their concerns and find out what you can about the situation. When you can efficiently resolve conflicts, you will find that you will reduce incidences of dealing with difficult people.
Lastly, remember that as a manager, you are responsible for the work culture in your team. If your team is disconnected, there will be a problem. If your team cannot work with other departments, you will breed silo-mentality in them.
Promote a strong work culture by regularly meeting, connecting, discussing aims and goals. Organise cross departmental outings and make it rewarding for team members who beat expectations.
Being a manager is wonderful privilege and a great adventure once you know what to look out for and how to surmount problems.
You must clearly demonstrate that you are willing to listen to your team. Understand their concerns and find out what you can about the situation.