Great managers have the skills and abilities to form personal and meaningful bonds with their teams. They are also human managers and leaders. They support their people, listen, and respect them. Most great managers are pragmatic. They don’t push their people to conform to practices that get them stuck and constrain fresh ideas.
They demonstrate their behaviours and values in practice. Not just telling staff one thing and do another. They put their unconditional trust into the team to come up with answers and solutions to a range of teething issues.
Great Managers Build Great Teams
Your team wants to know what you expect them to deliver – refine the goal, decide what you want, and how to get it.
What you wish to must be clear to your team and achievable. It is not always going to be possible to get your staff involved whenever you are planning something.
However, wherever possible, get the team involved in the process of making the goal. Team members be will become motivated and passionate to deliver their objective.
Also read: Why Good Managers Are Very Rare?
Show Confidence
Great managers are full of confidence. If you are insecure, find out where the insecurity stems from and fix it. People don’t get inspired by weak managers – they are a significant pain to work with.
Especially when they start to compete with the same group of people, they are supposed to lead. Not only that, insecurity can make you intimidating, and start playing power games to show that you are in charge.
However, power games can only bring you trouble. Because some of your staff already know how to put up appropriate defences. Your employees know your weaknesses and strengths.
They evaluate your daily contribution to the work they do. They know how much you rely on them. Accordingly, they can choose not to corporate with you and expose your vulnerability.
Ensure that you know where you are going to land before you choose to jump with your power games. Have the confidence and put your trust in the people.
Also, please don’t interfere with what they do. Let them get on with the job. All you need is to provide support and energize them, especially on gloomy days.
Great Managers are Pragmatic
There are always areas of the job that require strict adherence to standard practices. So, it is necessary to abide by specific rules and standards. As a manager, you want your staff to follow these rules and standards.
However, it would be best if you were flexible in your thinking and disruptive in your approach.
Your staff is not going to question practices that are no longer helpful if you impose strict rules and standards on them.
Why do you want your team to keep repeating something without questioning it? Whether those practices are better or best, they maintain the status quo.
Maintenance doesn’t move you forward – creation does. Also, there are no such things as best practices. Because there is always room for new thinking and innovation, take a pragmatic approach and let the team keep thinking the way forward not best practices.
Read also: Tips For Managers Starting New Jobs
The Team of Individuals
Remember that you are managing a group of individuals. Everyone is different and has a; distinct source of motivation, unique talent, passion, behaviours, and a set of ambitions.
Also, one may be a slow learner, and the other is a fast learner. Many people learn by observing, and others learn by reading. Therefore everyone has a unique destiny.
Some of your staff may share some of their talents. However, even among your best performers, their differences outweigh the similarities.
The key is to understand their individual needs. Also, the best way to do that is by having a regular one-on-one conversation with each person.
Then you can learn from that conversation what the person wants out of your leadership. Plus, what does the person want to do — how is the person going to do it? After learning their needs, then you can guide each person to cultivate his or her talent and become more.
Always Ask Questions
Maybe you don’t know that many of your staff are always expecting questions from you.
They also expect questions that stretch their imagination and solution finding capabilities. From my experience, we are good at making statements and telling our staff what to do.
We even twist comments and instructions to sound like questions. Remember that you only get answers to the type of questions you ask.
What you ask or how you ask matters to the development of your team. A good question can stimulate your team’s creative thinking – it can also trigger new ideas.
Great managers ask right and simple open questions such as, – what do you think? – What can we do? – Where are we on this? – How do we get this done? Then they stop and listen to them.
They don’t interrupt by suggesting answers. Otherwise, it is pointless for them to influence what their staff has to say.
Listen to Team Members
Great managers pay attention to the needs of their people. For others, there is always a temptation to tell too much, but no effort on listening.
Many managers don’t pay full attention when their staff talks to them – Instead, they turn their focus on composing replies to make themselves sound smarter.
You don’t need to look more intelligent. You need a very bright group of people around you.
Any manager who wants to release the full potential of his or her people always listens to them. Listen to your people – not just the cursory listening. You want nothing more than paying full attention with your ears and eyes to what he or she is saying.
Was this article helpful? Please leave your thought in the comment box below.