How To Be An Effective Manager

Effective management leads to a happy and productive workforce and low staff turnover. Ineffective management has the opposite effect - unhappy, unproductive staff and very high staff turnover with associated hiring and training costs. Ineffective management leads to poor profitability for the company.

What makes a good manager?

1. People Skills. A good manager knows how to communicate with his or her staff in a way that is motivational and inspirational. It is very important that your actions as a manager don't undermine what you say to your staff. Courtesy and respect with encouragement, availability and proper training will create an atmosphere in the workplace where the staff want to work hard and achieve. If, as the manager, you think of your subordinates as inferior to you, they will very quickly sense this, resent it, and not perform as well as they could. Even thinking in terms such as 'subordinate' is a slippery slope. Rather consider your staff to be part of the team, each with their own role in the organisation.


2. Setting high, but achievable, targets. An effective manager will be aware of all his staff's capabilities and will set challenging, but achievable, targets and performance measures. If a member of staff feels overwhelmed by what is expected of them, it will be very demoralising and stressful for them. They will feel bad about their performance not measuring up and may well look for a job elsewhere. Conversely, if too little is expected of a person, they will become bored and waste time chatting, emailing or surfing the net.


3. Decisiveness. A good and effective manager is willing to make decisions and carry the consequences of those decisions. With a clear direction most people will work effectively. Wishy-washy decision making leads to no clear direction so no-one knows how to work effectively.


4. Enthusiasm and vitality. As the manager, your enthusiasm for the work and the company can be inspirational to your staff. Where enthusiasm is catching, so is disinterest and boredom. To have the most productive workforce you need to set an example they can emulate.

Over my long and varied career I have had the pleasure of working for some excellent managers who drew out the best in me. I have also had the misfortune to work with some very poor managers - that time was fraught with stress and sleepless nights - I was not productive and I was not happy not being productive.

A lot of people are dependant on your skills as a manager so it's worth working to be the very best manager you can be.

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