What makes a manager a good manager?
In the year of 2011, Adam Bryant reported in the New York Times several management tips that Google found to be as the most effective for their culture on their Project Oxygen. They analysed thousands and thousands of their personnel reports to figure out what makes a successful and effective manager. The list you’ll see below has some very interesting points about the nature of management, which is very much about people skills on trying to get to know their team, coaching them and taking an interest in their work.
1. Be a good coach
Susana Torres, one of the most well known High-Performance Coaches in Portugal, defines coaching as a conversational method of achieving set goals in a thoughtful and organized way. In this process, a good manager not only helps to define goals but also helps their team members to evaluate competencies that need to be acquired or worked on. A good manager helps each individual of their team to look to a given context and understand if a particular threat is actually a really good opportunity for development. If you already had the opportunity to work with a good manager, you’ll know that she/he are the support we need to help us change our mindset so that we can achieve our goals.
In the competitive environment that companies live in, providing the managers with coaching skills may seem a good option. Let’s see what Google says about it:
“We want to understand what works at Google rather than what worked in any other organization,” says Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation.
Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.
“We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers”.
2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage
Instead of micromanaging your team, give them empowerment, and their confidence and ability to overcome obstacles will increase.
To avoid micromanaging, as a manager, improve your ability to see the bigger picture, trust your team and let them know that they don’t need your constant approval and to justify themselves before you. As Adam Bryant suggests:
Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.
3. Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being and help them with career development
I believe that a trustworthy environment whereby team members can state their opinions, thoughts and feelings without fear can only be achieved if their managers have the same transparency with them.
Guide and help your team members in accomplishing their goals by recognizing their achievements along the process, not forgetting to provide them with educational opportunities so that they can acquire or work on competencies required in order to achieve their future career goals.
4. Be productive and results-oriented
In addition to everything, I’ve said above about results achievement, help your team prioritize work and make decisions, and if they’re running into an obstacle guide them so that they can eliminate it.
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
- Be aware of your body language and the facial expressions you use. That can influence both positive or negative way the encourage of the other people to talk.
- Make sounds that indicate attentiveness like “hmm,” “oh,” “okay”.
- Show your attention by nodding your head or raising your eyebrows.
- Be non-judgmental.
- Paraphrasing by your own words what you believe the other person said, reveals a greater sense of closeness and intimacy in a conversation.
- Do not interrupt the other person.
- If you don’t know, or you didn't understand something, don’t assume — Ask.
6. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
Imagine your team as a plantation of resources, where you — the manager — are the farmer. Your job is not only to take care of that plantation but to ensure that you have the right conditions so that it can grow and you achieve the goal you have established for it.
In this plantation of resources, the ones that will grow are those that receive plenty of sun and water, and of whom you have removed the weeds.
So, ask these questions to yourself as a manager: Have you got a strategy for what you want to obtain with your plantation? and those who work with you are aware of that strategy too? If you don’t, how will you know which resources need more water and sun? Have you been giving the right conditions for the resources to grow in abundance?
Do not forget that the outcome that you established with your vision and strategy will depend on how you and everyone involved on the plantation have been taking care of it.
7. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team
I believe that the guidance from the manager's side that we’ve been talking above can only be totally accomplished if the manager can couple his/her experience with technical leadership in the process. These are two critical aspects weighted by team members when assessing the degree of respect for their manager. So, roll-up sleeves and work side-by-side with your team when needed. Be their base support.
