I seem to remember a time when I was young and thought I could do anything. When work was fun and I stayed at the office for countless hours and thought that hard work and dedication is all you needed to be successful. I was never more wrong, but hey, it happens. One of the naive notions I had was that if your technical, (that’s work jargon for saying you are smart at what you do), that would be enough to make you a great manager. In truth being a great manager is incredibly hard to achieve, and it takes some time to even become a somewhat good manager. Brilliance does not necessarily equal greatness. Managers do many things, and while technical skills are always a plus, if you ever want to be successful in your career, you have to constantly improve others and yourself in the process.
Lesson 1: Utilize Your People
It does not matter how smart you are, what matters is that you can motivate your people to work together. This means you need to know who your people are, what they can do, what they can’t do, and what they would like to do? Find out exactly who your team is, then give them the resources to be successful. If they run into obstacles its your job to get those annoyances out of their way. Remember, good managers are successful because the people that work under them produce, so ask your people how they can work better and then let them show you.
Lesson 2: Improve Yourself
Any business seminar will tell you that improving yourself is the best thing you can do to improve your company. Companies invest in people who invest in themselves. It is not what your company can do for you, it is what you can do for the company, and the only way to be innovative and progressive at work is for you to use all your available resources to learn more. This means taking extra classes, reading more about everything (not just your own field of work), and learning to be a better listener. You will find that by trying to be a better person, you also become a better manager.
Lesson 3: Seek Out Wisdom
Regardless of how the digital lifestyle has changed our work environment, we still live in a society and not in a cubicle alone with our computers. Now more than ever, it is important that you surround yourself with good people. To be a better manager, you need to work with great managers. Learning from others is something which we all do, so make sure that you pick up on the good advice from your peers.
Lesson 4: Accept Criticism
Everyone hates filling out surveys, but surveys are essential to business. They tell you a lot about the perceptions that people have about a business. In essence surveys are a form of feedback and criticism. As a manager you need to be open to criticism and evaluation from everyone. Without any feedback, how will you know what areas to improve on? No one becomes the perfect manager overnight. Good management skills are something you work on every day.
Being a manager is tough as you have the demands of those above you and well as all the issues of those below you. It takes a good listener as well as someone willing to make tough decisions and understand all the issues and ramifications of their decisions. I have never wanted to be a manager as I would rather be involved with the day to day issues (front lines) than being a general pulling the punches but still dependent on others to actually do the work in a timely manner. Management is much tougher than most people realize. You need to be technically smart as well as capable of understanding people very well and usually these two things are not possessed by one individual.