The best managers know that their job is to achieve through the efforts and performance of their team. Learning how good managers work and then applying the same skills every day in the workplace will improve everyone’s management skills.
Understanding five management areas will improve team performance.
Understand Motivation: Good Managers Keep the Team Motivated
Many managers want to motivate their staff. They know that motivated people achieve more and that good management performance is achieved through great team performance.
The difficulty is that it’s not possible to motivate someone. Motivation comes from within and the best a manager can do is to provide an environment where employees motivate themselves.
Every individual person is motivated by different things at different times (whether that’s putting a roof over the family’s head, earning more money, achieving a goal, gaining promotion, or recognition of a job well done). The best managers know what is driving an individual and help to match the drive with the organisation’s needs too – tapping into the energy of motivation.
Be Efficient: Good Managers Understand and Seek Efficiency
Lucas, Friel and Hughes in their book Understanding Management explain that in management terms efficiency is about doing things right. It’s about making the best use of existing resources and producing work of the right quality, completed in the right way.
Good managers continually question how things are done and encourage teams to innovate and make best use of resources.
Be Effective: Good Managers Guarantee Effectiveness
Effectiveness is about doing the right things according to the book Understanding Management (Lucas, Friel and Hughes). If high quality work is being completed, but it’s not what is required then that’s not effective. The best managers ensure that everyone is working on the tasks that need to be completed; the tasks that will ensure organisational objectives are met.
Encouraging team members to question whether they are working on the right tasks and linking tasks to objectives is good management practice.
Improve All the Time: Good Managers Look for Change
The world is changing all the time and good managers know that change will happen, so look constantly for changes in the environment which will affect their teams. They anticipate the changes and are ready to adapt when needed. Good managers are also change initiators, looking for ways to improve and innovate and encourage their teams to do so too.
Have Self-awareness: Self-Appraisal is as Important as Team Appraisal
The best managers are self-aware and appraise themselves not just their team. They strive to improve their own managerial skills and are open to feedback from their team on how they could improve as a manager. The manager’s job is to serve the team.
Improving skills in the five management areas outlined above and applying them every day will improve managerial and team performance.
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