Management skills: be a better manager

Powerful management skills to make you a better manager.

Keen to develop your leadership and management skills?
Do you want to be a better manager?

Mike Chitty, developer of the Outstanding Manager program, has outlined here some top management skills and tips.

If you want to develop your management skills but perhaps feel hesitant about management courses… then read the top tips below.

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What makes a good manager?

Firstly, a good manager knows how to help others to do their best work. This requires a set of skills and behaviours as well as attitudes.

In summary, a good manager:

• Succeeds in building positive and trusting relationships
• Is respected by the people who work for them
• Regularly gets the right things done
• Is coachable, and as a result is always open to learning
• Not only has the courage to be honest about what is going well, but is also honest about what isn’t going so well

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With the above in mind, key managment skills from the Outstanding Manager program by Mike Chitty are outlined below, coupled with 5 corresponding top tips.

Mike is an experienced facilitator, trainer, coach and consultant. Currently, he offers online management training workshops at £25.00. View the upcoming sessions here or book straight onto the next session below. Limited free spaces are also available, so please take one if needed.

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Management skills:

1. Great Working Relationships
2. Giving and Getting Great Feedback
3. Being a Brilliant Coach
4. Maximum Effective Delegation
5. Time and Priority Management

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1. Great Working Relationships

Undeniably, great working relationships are vital to outstanding people management. Recognising different personality types and then changing your approach accordingly will certainly get you the best response.

Tip 1: We all under-perform at times. To manage an underperformer and get them back on track, you must want them to succeed. Unless you can be positive about them, you and they, are unlikely to otherwise succeed.

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2. Giving and Getting Great Feedback

Simply put, feedback is information that changes behaviour. This is a powerful tool to get more of the behaviours that work, and less of the behaviours that don’t. As a result, feedback is the answer to most of your performance management challenges.

Before you can start to give feedback however, you must understand the behaviours that create or destroy value. What do you need more of? Or less of? Recognise these labels i.e. ‘professional’, ‘unprofessional’, ‘caring’, ‘lazy’, ‘pedantic’ and ‘detailed’ for example. Then, comment on the behaviours that trigger these words to provide feedback.

More commonly, the focus of most managers is on improving the behaviours of others. An outstanding manager focuses on improving their own behaviours. Getting feedback without a doubt helps you to be a better manager. With this in mind, develop a way in which your colleagues can easily give you feedback.

Tip 2: Only give feedback when you see a behaviour that you want more of or less of at work. Use it positively and deliberately to shape future behaviours, and most importantly, never to punish.

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In truth, sometimes feedback doesn’t work. Simply because the person getting the feedback does not have the knowledge, skills or desire to change their behaviours. In this situation, the outstanding manager has to move into a coaching role.

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3. Being a Brilliant Coach

An outstanding manager will coach every member of their team so that all of them learn something every week that helps improve the organisation, making things better overall. From agreeing objectives to planning the learning process, as well as celebrating success.

Tip 3: Expect learning to happen every week. Ask about what your team member has learned in their 121s. Share your learning too.

You can learn more about this management skill in Session 4 of the Outstanding Manager Program.

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4. Maximum Effective Delegation

Delegation is essentially about empowering others to develop their careers, to take on new responsibilities and work at the leading edge of their abilities. Equally, it also helps you to retain talented people who might otherwise outgrow their jobs.

Along with the above, you can get the most value out of your team and get them working at the edge of their potential too.  So many managers have bad experiences with delegation. For this reason, they often end up just doing the job themselves.

Tip 4: Offer each team member two or three significant delegations a year. In this way, they will develop quickly and start to feel comfortable with accepting greater responsibility.

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5. Time and Priority Management

In reality, it is impossible to manage time.  It slips by at the rate of one hour, every hour. We cannot make time, nor can we find it.  But we can make choices about what we spend our time doing.

Tip 5: Set hard stops for at least three days of your week and get every team member to do the same. A hard stop is a fixed time at which you are going to stop working and finish for the day. When we have a hard stop it forces us to manage our priorities to get things done. No hard stop and time can just slip away…

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In summary, developing key management skills will help you to be a better manager overall. But, if you really want to get the most of the people you manage, online coaching to develop essential management skills should really be your next step.

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Find out more about these management skills from the Outstanding Manager Program.
Alternatively, feel free to contact Mike Chitty with any questions.