What it Takes to Become a Great Manager

By Tony Jacowski

Self Evaluation
The key to becoming a great manager is to know yourself. This is imperative, as it helps you to evaluate your weaknesses and strengths even before you get to work.

It is impractical for you to handle day-to-day business operations if you cannot manage your employees - and for that reason, it's important that you know your temperament and management style.

This will help you make any adjustments that you need to make, so that you interact with your employees in the best possible way; an approach that will foster good relations among everyone.

Hire the Best
When you have to hire staff, you should hire the best-qualified people for the positions that you have to fill, even if that means paying them more. Having a superior team will push your own efforts as a manager further, while a team that is not superior will not measure up to your expectations - or those of your superiors.

Interaction Is the Key
Remember that you are a manager - you are not competing with your subordinates. Make sure that you relate to your employees and that they know they can come to you if they have a problem.

When you come up with new ideas or thoughts about the business that affects them, get their opinion and hear what they think. This will stimulate them and make them react positively to the responsibilities that they are assigned to.

Delegate
Being a great manager means knowing when to pass on work to others. You aren't superman, and you can't do everything yourself. There comes a time when you have to trust your employees to do the work that you are paying them to do.

Identify the strengths and weaknesses of each employee, so you know that they can handle.

Accountability

As a manager, you are generally accountable for how well or bad your team performs. Therefore, you should know that if they fail, the team has failed as a whole - not them, not you, but all of you. If someone on your team fails, everyone must take responsibility, especially you.
Avoid harsh blame games that might prove costly later.

Above all, a good manger always knows where they are coming from and going to. Develop the habit of always being ahead in terms of the direction your organization is heading.

Think and plan ahead, do your research, and always be alert to new issues that affect the long-term performance of your team. In the long run, how well your team performs (or doesn't) will determine your success as a manager.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

How to Get the Best Out of Your Workers

By C Jackson

The aim of any manager is to try and get the most out of your workers possible. In technical terms, you want the highest productivity.

From a purely financial point of view (and this is how senior management will often view you), you need to get the most output for every input i.e. spend the least amount on salaries and produce the most money.

So what approach should you take?

Revenue Generating Team
If your team is actively generating revenue such as a sales force or does work with clients, then money should be the main motivator.

In a purely sales driven team, you will probably already have commission in place and this should be motivation enough. One thing that you can try doing is to tweak the basic pay to commission ratio. Increase the amount of commission payable and reduce the basic gradually.
This way, your best workers will earn more and the worst will earn less. You will also motivate those in the middle to succeed.

Support Team
Many job functions are support functions. The workers get paid the same as long as they meet some minimum standard. So how can you increase their output?

One way is to try and incentivize financially in other ways. For example, having a limited bonus scheme based on performance. If your company policy does not allow this then you may be able to do a deal with your partners to obtain coupons or vouchers at some discounted rate and offer them monthly to the star performer.

Non-Financial Incentives
If you cannot offer any kind of financial incentives then you will need to motivate your workers in other ways.

The best way to do this is to formulate a personal development plan for the worker. This is nothing more than an agreed plan of development - you agree to fund training and development (a relatively low cost) in return for their commitments to take on additional responsibilities and achieve set targets.


This carrot and stick approach can work very well and costs very little.

Discover how to effectively manage your employees and exceed your performance targets through smart, low effort management at http://www.HowToBeABoss.com