How To Be a Good Manager

In this, I will cover:

🧐 How to be a good manager

❌ What not to do as a manager

📘Resources and Books you should read

As John C. Maxwell has put it, “Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.”

Currently, I am a Product Design Lead and I have been managing teams for the past few years and have had the opportunity to learn from my own experiences and those of some genuinely outstanding successful people in various fields. Nobody knows how to be a great manager, but everyone wants to be one. Since most of us recall our former managers’ positive and negative managerial traits, it is crucial to understand what you should and shouldn’t do. This illustrates how significant one person can be and how their actions impact others’ lives.

Here are some of the tried and tested tips that could help you get recognized as a good manager.

🧐 How to be a good manager

Good managers are vital because their actions are far-reaching and long-lasting. Numerous members of the team mostly your direct reportees (DRs) are impacted by a manager’s actions throughout all phases of the worker’s life cycle. I’ve been able to keep my team motivated by sharing certain topics, concepts, and routines with them.

1. Set clear goals

Maintaining open communication about the objectives is crucial since leadership is a means of uniting individuals to achieve a common goal. Each organization creates its own objectives, which are then true for a while before changing. It is now your responsibility as a manager to transform the organization’s objective into yours as well as your team’s goals. Every organization, therefore, has an objective, or a north star, but that objective is broad and might not apply to your vertical, PODs, or products. It is therefore crucial for managers to comprehend it, break it down, and adjust it to fit their PODs and domain. After completing this, meet with your DRs to ascertain their current situation and the steps necessary for them to meet the goal. This can be in terms of competency, skills, opportunity, etc. Once you identify this, try to work out with the individual to define a timeline and then how they can develop themselves in that area. I usually maintain an IDP (Individual Development Plan) for all my DRs and we discuss this in our monthly 1:1s. This helps both in tracking and staying on the right path.

2. Track the development plan for the team

The IDP I mentioned above is a very important tool for developing individuals within your teams. This becomes like a journal where you with your team member, decide what they are good at and what needs improvement or learning. Once you identify them, it’s important to identify how they can improve on the items you have listed, it can be either through coaching, training, or an opportunity that helps them build that certain skill. The last thing is to put a timeline and priority to these, which skills are crucial now that can change depending on what level they are for e.g. storytelling and influencing a stakeholder is a very important skill for a senior team member whereas craft and execution are very important for a junior team member.

3. Two-Way Communication

Nobody is perfect, and no manager is always right. Hence feedback is always important in generating the results that we need to be successful, especially in a workplace where the main objective for feedback is to strengthen progress towards objectives and goals. However, to grow and improve, a manager must be able to receive feedback from both leadership and its team. Along with this, 360 degree feedback plays a very important role in the development of every individual where everyone can give feedback to anyone and can choose to show their name or be anonymous. The next part is what takes time but is good to do is now form themes out of this feedback. As a manager, you should do it for both yourself as well as your DRs and then discuss these in your 1:1 meetings. I also conduct a separate workshop every quarter to get feedback at my team level about how my team is feeling, and the areas they need support in.

4. Transparency

Employees respect managers who are honest, fair, and transparent in all their dealings with them. All they expect is true feedback about themselves and information that keeps them informed about their current and future work situation, no matter if it’s good or bad, you should be able to communicate it to your DRs so, in the end, it should not come as a shock or a surprise for them. As a manager, you are exposed to a lot of information, but try to address your DRs with the information that is important for them to make a decision. This increases the trust between you and your DRs which in the end improves the relationship between a manager and a reportee.

5. Active Listening

Although it requires practice, effective listening can have a significant impact on the people you lead and your managers. DRs who feel heard praise others about your company’s excellent culture. They instantly feel more motivated and are more productive knowing their manager is paying attention and listening to them openly and without any judgments as this enables them to focus on the work more than worrying about the other things that happen around e.g. their visibility, new opportunities, work-related issues, etc. When they know their manager will take care of it, they focus more on the work. I never miss my 1:1 and I usually keep the first half to listen to them and the second half to give them feedback or mostly where I do the talking.

6. Effective Decision Making

Decision-making is a huge part of management. Understanding the relevant information and making the best decision available is a fundamental skill all managers have to learn. When your DRs come to you with a problem or an issue, they look for a solution or a closure. Have backbone, disagree and commit is a very important trait for every individual. This is a very important skill for you to understand and act on it. Be confident, don’t be afraid of the consequences, be fair, say no if you think it is not right for the team or for the company, and know when to take the risk. This all comes from experience, when you have faced certain situations or when you have handled these situations before. If you are a new manager, don’t hesitate to ask for help. A practice that has made me successful in making effective decisions is that I gather information — Identify solutions — have pros and cons for each solution — take action — and always review your decision and impact.

7. Collaborative Efforts

Collaboration with your DRs is a critical leadership skill for creating a good culture and engaging workplace. Giving your DRs the chance to voice their opinions shows that you value their opinions and contributions. The interactions and problem-solving techniques of your team will be affected by a collaborative management style. As a result, there is an increase in team member accountability, the frequency of new idea generation, and efficiency. We keep having multiple workshops where all of us collaborate and get equal time to explain and put up the thought process, and ideas in one place and then do affinity mapping to pick a few from the long list.

8. Reflect

We all reflect on the year’s events at a workshop we do at the end of the year. We complete it as a team, giving them the option to share it with others or keep it confidential and discuss it in their 1:1 with the manager. Since we can observe and monitor the progress here, I believe this is a really crucial step. We discuss this year’s major accomplishments, areas for growth, strengths, and priorities for the upcoming year in this session. This provided me with a chance to reflect on the events that transpired, my responses to them, and whether there was a more effective approach to handle this. If yes, then this is the area for me to develop or keep in mind next year or whenever the same situation comes again, what I can do next time.

❌ What not to do as a Manager

1. Micromanagement

Have trust in your team, I know this comes in when you are a new manager or you join a new team, but once you identify your team and build trust, this should reduce. Stop being part of every meeting, utilize your time, and let your DRs handle it, stop asking or doing a status check every day, you can have a standup once a week and then identify a task for a week and then meet next week to review or identify the impediments.

2. Spoon-feeding the solution

Give the team problems to solve rather than providing them the answers. There are always different types of people in every team, some will look to you as their manager to provide them with instructions, which they will then follow. Others, however, will want the instructions to be broken down into action items, which they will then follow as instructed by you. This is acceptable once in a while, but we should create a culture where team members think creatively and work to find their own solutions. This will help them grow personally and will also open up new avenues for innovation. Sometimes, the ideas your team came up with might surprise you as well.

3. Unclear goals

Defining clear goals is a very important step for your team, without this they might go in different directions and a lot of effort will be required by you to get them on track every time. It’s important to come together as a team define your goals at the beginning of the year and then follow and track them. This also helps us in making a lot of decisions when you have multiple possible solutions or options to pick one that helps you achieve your goal quicker and faster.

4. Egoism

Never let your ego get in the way of working with your team. You have to realize that power and responsibility are not the same things. In this situation, try not to become agitated; instead, pay attention and exercise patience. You may be surprised at times by the thoughts that emerge from other people. You have to realize that ultimately, we’re all trying to accomplish the same goal. This is mostly what I have predicted would happen when you are friends with your team and all of a sudden you get promoted to manager and will be in charge of that team. Making the correct choice will be aided by concentrating more on the vital things than from whom it is coming.

5. Treating everyone same

This is the most important part here, where you have to differentiate between your professional and personal life. You might be friends with a few, and you might be closer to a few of your teammates but it’s important to treat everyone the same when you are leading a team in terms of information flow, opportunities, focus on developing your team members, but at the same time be fair. During appraisals, ensure your decision-making process is always data-oriented.

🪄Other than this I also do the following things for myself that help me stay focused

• Get up early and start the day early
• Exercise for at least 1 hour
• Focus, meditate try to get rid of the noise around
• Eat good, take your vitamins and supplements
• Keep learning through podcasts, and books, attending training and networking events, or with your peers

📘 Resources and Books you should read

• Getting Things Done by Ananya Nair
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads for New Managers
• The Elephant in the Boardroom by Edgar Papke
• How to own the room by Viv Groskop
• How to talk to anyone about anything by Ian Tuhovsky
• The Making of a Manager Book by Julie Zhuo

That’s it.

I hope this helps you by providing some clarity; it is brief, but if you have any concerns or want to know more about anything, please contact me and we will discuss the issue in detail. This is my experience, and I hope it can assist you in Living Seamlessly.