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What Makes a Good Manager:
Hi reader’s, You know, one of the questions I like to ask business owners is, what is a manager? They’re generally managing a group of people, or they may have managers or supervisors underneath them that need to manage groups of people. Often times, there’s a struggle with learning how to be a good manager. When you ask the question, what is a manager? What comes to mind for you? When I ask it, I get answers like, “Oh, they’re a leader.” “Well, they’re a manager, you know.” “They have responsibility.” “They provide direction to a group of employees.” “They’re accountable for certain results within the organization.” “They’re the one who hires and fires, and sets job descriptions and does performance reviews, and makes sure things get done.” Stuff like that. That’s all true. Those are all tasks of a manager, but I think the important thing that we need to drill down to is how does the manager do that? The ‘how’ is really, really important. A manager has to take the attitude of a servant leader. What I mean by that is, he or she serves that group of people that are under them, that they work with.
When you’re serving that group of people, you’re making sure that they are being trained with the skills that they need, that you’re putting them into areas that they can succeed at. Each employee has different strengths and weaknesses. Are we plugging them in, within our team or within our organization, so that their strengths are maximized? They’ll be a much happier employee, and they’ll be much more productive if you do. Do I make sure that they have the resources that they need? If I can make each employee and excellent employee, and if I’m focusing on them and how I can help them in that way, I’m going to succeed by default, because if I have a great team of people working for me, my job becomes very, very easy, and I become very successful at it. Think about it. Think about it for yourself, and how you have to manage.
If you have managers and supervisors working for you, help them understand what it means to be a servant leader so that they can accomplish the ‘what’ of management by being skillful at the ‘hows’.
