Effective Management Skills

Effective management skills are now the currency of success. Whether your organization is concerned with business, commerce or industry, it will need managers who have well developed leadership skills, are excellent communicators and are also effective strategic thinkers.

To manage at all levels, communication skills, leadership skills and time management skills are required. These skills are at the heart of all successful businesses and at the heart of the effective management of teams of people.

Managers are also expected to train their own team members and provide help with team member’s learning. This means that managers must also have coaching skills to support their staff. The skills of a trainer are specialized and will need to be developed. Once again, there will be demand for creativity to achieve this.

Management strategies for building and maintaining team moral, techniques and tips which help to motivate and support people are vital to business success, particularly in a time of economic uncertainty.

In achieving management objectives, of particular importance are interpersonal skills – the so call “soft skills”. The term “soft” can imply that they are skills which are of secondary importance. Secondary for instance to harder skills such to financial management and project management. Such an interpretation is wrong. Soft skills are the complex and demanding and ever-changing skills which effect individuals in organizations – communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, change mamangement, performance appraisal and performance management. Get these wrong and business suffers. Soft skills – interpersonal skills – are the “meat n’ potatoes” of the effective management of human resource; they are essential manager skills.

Human resources management is the key to effective management of any business’ finite financial resources

Effective management is about managing every project well which means managing effectively, efficiently, in a timely manner and with the full co-operation of everyone involved.

There are a huge number of requirements of a manager and yet resources for training are in short supply for most businesses operations these days. It’s likely to become the responsibility of managers to develop their own effective management skills.

In the past, managers could look forward to being sent on training courses to learn or develop a particular skill but now managers must be creative in building their own personal bank of resources to improve their effectiveness. In a climate of economic downturn and dramatically reduced budgets, managers must add innovation to the ever-growing list of requirements of their professional education.

Also, in the past, it was quite easy for a manager to find a class which suited the learning schedule of his professional development but increasingly, classes are run at times which conflict with normal business or personal life commitments of home and family.

Time management is usually a top priority for every manager. It’s the #1 continual gripe of most managers that meetings are not time efficient or well managed. Many managers struggle with acting as the chair-person in a meeting and also with writing the minutes of meetings. A short online management course dealing with a key skill such as “Running effective and efficient meetings” can be of considerable assistance.

Working on presentation skills doesn’t only involve getting to grips with Powerpoint. Presentation skills involves the fundamental skill for a manager of addressing an audience – how to stand, how much you can walk around without distracting your audience and what clothes to wear.

Customer service cannot be allowed to suffer during ecomomic downturn. Keeping every customer satisfied is the cornestone of good business management.

We are all in the business of marketing ourselves as managers. There is no better way to impress a future employer that to be able to demonstrate that you have taken on the task of your own professional and personal development.

Whether you’re in marketing management, regularly dealing with the media or you’re in financial management or project management, you’ll need effective management skills. You and the develpment of your effective management skills are your #1 project – Doing the right thing and doing it well.

Dealing with Difficult People

You must address the issues. If you don’t deal with the issue, the situation won’t get
better and it usually gets worse. If you leave well alone, hoping the problem will resolve,
conflict simmers and erupts counter-productively. Coworkers feel angry.

Deciding to live with the situation long term is rarely an option.

Firstly, let’s be clear about the sort of person we are considering in this topic.

The person we are not considering is the person who has a real and genuine grievance
because they’ve been badly treated and who is complaining because they should
complain. Those people are completely justified in their complaint.

Be careful that the person you’ve been asked to “sort out” isn’t this sort of person. Do
some research before agreeing to take on the task.

Secondly, it’s more helpful to you and it’s easier to deal with if you think about the
unproductive /unacceptable behaviour rather than the “difficult person”.

The behaviours we are considering here are:

Read the rest of this “5 Minute Guide” for managers..

What Makes a Good Manager

I’m often asked for ideas on how to be a good manager and how to be a good people manager.

These are the essential skills of managers no matter what is the end product – computers, customer service or bread.

Make a list of the names of your previous “managers”. You may even want to go back to schools and when you were growing up. You may even want to consider your parents and how they managed you.

Consider also stories which stick in your mind which you’ve heard from friends and relations about their experiences of people who managed them.

Against each “manager” make 2 lists – what they did well and what they did badly.

Don’t rush this – give yourself a couple of days to ponder it all.

The aim is to give you a reminder of what works and what doesn’t work and importantly, why it works or doesn’t work.

Read the rest of this article

Taking on a New Management Position?

Get our “New Manager Training” and you can stop lying awake wondering what you’ve forgotten.

It’s all there, like a check-list. It’s a step-by-step “how to” guide.

It takes you from what you need to consider before you begin the job all the way through to the end of your first 3 months.

It’s written in an easy-to-read practical style which you’ll come to know is Elizabeth Best’s trademark style. That’s what she’s known for – great practical, focused information.

See our New Manager Training

Question – Open door or door ajar ?

I started my management job 9 weeks ago and I manage a team of 12 people. I really want to have an “open door” policy of access to me for my team and that’s what I told them when I started. Trouble is – they took me at my word which is what I thought I wanted but I find I’m continually interupted to the point I have to stay late every night to get my own work done. My team are great. They are good workers and not time wasters. What they come to me with is important to the work. What can I do? Basically I really believe in “open door” but in practice it’s driving me nuts.

This is a question from one of our members. See our Questions and Answers section for our answer and examples of other questions we receive….

Managers look around – for FREE

With free Silver Status of Team Effective you will be able to see examples of all the types of resources on offer to our managers.  If your serious about developing as a manager we hope you’ll try out our site and decide to become one of our Platinum Managers.

Join us today – see the sidebar on the right.

Best Management Books Online

How we rate the Best Management Books.

What puts a management book in the” best” list?

We’re often asked what makes a “best management book”.

Here’s what we think is important to deserve the rating of “best management book”:

• Practical advice – advice that’s presented in practical terms. Many management books are written as abstract views on management theory. Sometimes theory can be tortuous to get through and….even more time-consuming to work out how to apply it to a practical work situation.

• We think the information should be addressed to and appropriate for “Effective Executives” – not just “managers”. Often executives aren’t called managers but do manager work without all the manager responsibilities. At Team Effective we use the term “manager” as shorthand but we include “Effective Executives” in that term.

• Advice and suggestions should be real and practical. You can always tell when advice comes from a university academic who has never had to work with and be responsible for a team of people. Managers and executives sometimes need advice from someone who has clearly done the job themselves – you know – you can tell by how they write about a subject.

• Many management books concentrate on topics such as project management, setting goals and objectives, and fail to give enough time to the so called “soft skills”. That’s a very bad name we think for skills which are so vitally important. Soft skills are the skills of communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, active listening and showing consideration, empathy and care. Those skills are vitally important for all managers and particularly for people with a technical background. Often technical university courses and technical backgrounds don’t include these skills in the curriculum and so, when a technical expert becomes a people manager, there’s a gap in their necessary skills to do the job well.

• To be a “best management book”, a book should offer new ideas and ways to approach the challenges a manager faces every day. Most days your normal range of ideas work fine but sometimes you need something else – something extra – but it has to be something directly relevant to your situation.

• Managers hit low points or even just “stale times” and they need inspiring and motivating themselves. They spend all their energies motivating and inspiring their teams with little left over for themselves. A “best management book” will also inspire and motivate a manager to take action on the content they’ve just read. That could be just the idea they need to lift their game to another level.

• Managers explain that they want focused advice and information – set out in a “how to” style which they can use directly and immediately without interpreting and applying woolly non-specific “talking around an issue”.

• Information and advice needs to be relevant to the modern work environment. So many management books were written decades ago. The essentials are still sound but need to be updated and applied to the present day. workplace and work ethic. There have been huge changes in culture in the last 5 years.

• Managers need to feel that a “best management book” reflects true, real-life management as it is on the action floors of organizations  – situations that managers will recognize.

• We’re told that management books which are the best for managers should be concise. Quality is far more important that quantity. 50 great pages are better than 437 mediocre ones. Managers haven’t got spare time to read, let alone plough through 437 pages of which only 50 “do the job” and are “on the button”.

• Another huge problem can be that the best management book isn’t available for sale in every country – it may be the best but it’s no good if you can’t get it.

• It has to be immediately accessible to be the best – managers can’t wait a week or more for a book to be delivered – problems are NOW. Therefore books which can be downloaded immediately are the best.

• Even the best management book may not go far enough or go deeply enough into a topic. Often managers need additional support from extra materials which they can use with the book and as supplements to the book

Here are just 4 of the best management books online that we’d recommend.

 

• The Executive in Action: Managing for Results, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker.
  This book contains three of the “best management books” in one.

• Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices by Peter Drucker  
  is a true-to-life account of management and we think it should be required reading for all managers.

• Listening: The Forgotten Skill: A Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self-Teaching Guides) by Madelyn Burley-Allen. 
  Listening is an essential manager skill and knowing exactly when to stop talking and listen to  people is an extension of that skill.

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – by Stephen R Covey
  is an integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems

Please also look at my own Best Management Books Online  – eBooks that you can download today.

What are the Skills Needed to be a Good Manager?

The list of skills needed to be a great manager is long and varied and endless.Let’s take a look at what we like to call: “What nobody thought to tell you at the interview”.

Your managers didn’t in any way set out to keep things from you during the interview process. However and inevitably, in any interview, the main focus is usually on the specifics of the fit between you and the company and the fit between you and the goals of the organization.

Your bosses will have had in mind that the company is about to e.g. launch a new initiative or they want to re-organize the company or they want a leader for a new department or they have a specific problem which they needed someone with the ability to fix…etc. That’s all about what the company needs from you and that’s why they employed you.

What they didn’t think to mention is that there are tasks which are implicit in a manager’s job which may not have been detailed to you and it may not have occurred to you that they are explicit in your job. And…they are the skills of an effective manager.

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