A managerial job might look easy from the outside but there can hardly be a more difficult position in the world than the position of a manager. The challenges aren’t just related to meeting the targets and overcoming the politics that plagues workplaces, they are also related to motivating people and bringing the best out of them. Probably a manager’s most difficult task is to get the people under them to perform according to their potential and this is why most managers are judged on the amount of work they can get out of the people who work under them. Here are a few common yet ignored management tips that should help you in bringing the best out of your employees.
Practice What You Preach
As a manager, it’s pretty important that you practice what you preach. You must make an example out of yourself of how good an employee should be and people would start following you automatically. You shouldn’t need to ask people to respect you and follow your directions; your actions should compel them to do so. This would only happen if you use the same yardstick for yourself that you use for people who work under you. If you ask people to stay late then you must do the same, if you leave early then you should allow people to leave early as well. Your body language, your behavior and your work ethic should be as good as you expect from your employees. Only then will you be able to get the best out of them.
Be Honest When Giving Feedback
It’s important that you keep communicating with your employees and keep giving them feedback on their work. Your employees would never know if they are performing well or below-par until you tell them so. It’s not just about giving feedback though, it’s also about being honest. Many managers believe that praising their employees would take them to cloud nine which would affect their performance. This is not true. Praise can motivate people to work even better while if you will praise one employee, others would start to give their best to earn praise as well. So, you should definitely not filter out the praise when giving feedback. It’s also important to be slightly considerate when giving negative feedback and you should only use harsh words if you know that the harsh critique would serve as motivation for the employee.
Know the People Who Work for You
The point about modeling feedback according to the personality of the employee brings us to this tip about people management i.e. knowing the people who work for you. Knowing people is very important to understand what can motivate them to work harder and what can adversely affect their performance. As a manager, you must not stay aloof of the personality of your employees. You must keep in touch with them to know their goals, their expectations and their plans to know them better.
Keep Your Expectations High but Realistic
It’s important to push your employees so as to help them reach their potential but it’s important that you don’t set unrealistic targets for your employees. People tend to crack when unrealistic things are expected of them, so you must know where to draw a line that would push your employees but won’t make them crack.
Give Your Team Members the Spotlight
Giving your employees the spotlight won’t take the spotlight away from you. You shouldn’t shy away from taking credit but you shouldn’t also shy away from sharing the credit with your team members. Giving people who work hard the spotlight would really motivate those individuals and would also push other people to work even harder.
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