No matter which industry you work in, the same elements are involved in being a great manager. You need to develop those around you, you need to build strong relationships throughout the organisation and there needs to be alignment between your own and your organisation’s values. Let’s take a look at three strategies that can help you achieve these goals.
1. Developing others
Chip McFarlane is a director and master coach at the Institute of Executive Coaching. He says for many managers, one of the hardest parts of the job is getting the balance right between being a good manager and also doing their own work.
“There is a delicate balance between delivering on your own work and at the same time developing others. But developing others will give you the bandwidth to be able to perform your own role properly,” Chip says.
According to Chip, empowering others has two key elements: giving staff a clear sense of the task they need to achieve, as well as the way you as the manager want it done.
“For more senior people, it’s essential to be able to look across the organisation, rather than focus solely on your own patch. The way to do this is to have a willingness to have others comment on your work and take the best from that. Don’t take criticism personally, look for the gift in what you’re being told,” he explains.
2. Building relationships
A key part of being an effective manager is having strong relationships with stakeholders in the business, including your own manager and your direct reports.
“How you run your relationships establishes organisational culture and sets out what you expect from others around you. Optimal relationships will have a high level of trust,” Chip says.
Chip says trust is a function of credibility, reliability and intimacy, but that perceived self-interest can detract from the creation of trust between two people. If an employee thinks his or her manager lacks credibility, reliability and there’s no intimacy in the relationship, the manager’s actions will appear self-interested, which will detract from the relationship.
“Managers need to be believable, understandable and also show a little of themselves from behind the manager mask to establish good trust levels,” he says
3. Aligning values
It’s essential to get the right alignment between the manager’s and the organisation’s values. But the tricky part about this, says Chip, is that often people won’t understand their own values, or have even thought about what they might be, until they find themselves in conflict with their work environment.
“Often people will say their values are what’s socially expected of them. For example, in Australia, that might be giving people a fair go or mateship but actually, often people’s values goes much further than these kind of generalities. You might be passionate about sustainability, or being involved with business that is committed to diversity. Whatever it is, it’s good to align yourself with a company that mirrors this. If you develop a real understanding about your values, you will get a deeper understanding of yourself, which makes it easier to make decisions, which in turn makes you a better manager,” he says.
If you feel your organisation’s values are out of step with your values, Chip says it’s important to talk this through with someone in the business – your own manager, or the HR division are two avenues for having this discussion. Chip also says the St James Ethics Centre runs excellent courses for managers about how to resolve a situation where a manager’s values are not in line with the organisation’s values.
What do you think makes a good manager?