How to Become a Manager

13 Skills You ll Need

1. Communication There s a lot of communication when you re a manager. You have to communicate with each of your employees. You have to communicate sideways with your co-workers and customers. And you have to communicate upwards with your own manager or executive. You need some substance in the communication, of course substance isn t enough you need to have something worthy of being communicated. But if you know what you re doing and can t properly communicate it to anyone

else, then you ll never be a good manager. 2. Listening Skills This is a part of communication, but I want to single it out because it s so important. Some managers get so impressed with themselves that they spend much more of their time telling people things than they spend listening. But no matter how high you go in the management hierarchy, you need to be able to listen. It s the only way you re really going to find out what s going on in your organization, and it s the only way that you ll ever learn to be a better manager. 3. A Commitment to the Truth You ll find that the higher you are in the management hierarchy, the less likely you are to be in touch with reality. Managers get a lot of brown-nosing, and people tend to sugar-coat the news and tell managers what they want to hear. The only way you ll get the truth is if you insist on it. Listen to what people tell you, and ask questions to probe for the truth. Develop information sources outside of the chain of command and regularly listen to those sources as well. Make sure you know the truth it s not good news. 4. Empathy This is the softer side of listening and truth. You should be able to understand howpeople feel, why they feel that way, and what you can do to make them feel differently. Empathy is especially important when you re dealing with your customers. And whether you think so or not, you ll always have customers. Customers are the people who derive benefit from the work you do. If no one derives benefit from your work, then what s the point of keeping your organization around? 5. Persuasion Put all four of the preceding skills together, because you ll need them when you try to persuade someone to do something you want done. You could describe this as selling but it s more general. Whether you re trying to convince your employees to give you a better effort, your boss to give you a bigger budget, or your customers to agree to something you want to do for them, your persuasion skills will be strained to their limits. 6. Leadership Leadership is a specialized form of persuasion focused on getting other people to follow you in the direction you want to go. It s assumed that the leader will march into battle at the head of the army, so be prepared to make the same sacrifices you re asking your employees to make. 7. Focus The key to successful leadership is focus. You can t lead in a hundred different directions at once, so setting an effective leadership direction depends on your decisionnot to lead in the other directions. Focusing light rays means concentrating the light energy on one spot. Focusing effort means picking the most important thing to do and then concentrating your team s effort on doing it. even if

8. Division of Work This is the ability to break down large tasks into sub-tasks that can be assigned to individual employees. It s a tricky skill maybe more an art than a science, almost like cutting a diamond. Ideally you want to

figure out how to accomplish a large objective by dividing the work up into manageable chunks. The people working on each chunk should be as autonomous as possible so that the tasks don t get bogged down in endless discussion and debate. You have to pay careful attention to the interdependencies among the chunks. And you have to carefully assess each employee s strengths, weaknesses and interests so that you can assign the best set of sub-tasks to each employee. 9. Obstacle Removal Inevitably, problems will occur. Your ability to solve them is critical to the ongoing success of your organization. Part of your job is to remove the obstacles that are preventing your employees from doing their best. 10. Heat Absorption Not all problems can be solved. When upper management complains about certain things that can t be avoided (e.g., an unavoidable delay in a project deliverable), it s your job to take the heat. But what s more important, it s your job to absorb the heat to keep it from reaching your employees. It s the manager s responsibility to meet objectives. If the objectives aren t being met, then it s the manager s responsibility to:
  

Make sure that upper management knows about the problem as early as possible. Take all possible steps to solve the problem with the resources you ve been given. Suggest alternatives to management that will either solve the problem or minimize it. These other alternatives may propose the use of additional resources beyond the current budget, or they may propose a change in the objective that s more achievable.

Keep the problem from affecting the performance or morale of your employees.

11. Uncertainty Removal When higher management can t give you consistent direction in a certain area, it s up to you to shield your employees from the confusion, remove the apparent uncertainty, and lead your employees in a consistent direction until there s a good reason to change that direction. 12. Project Management This is a more advanced skill that formalizes some of attributes 7 11. Although both Management and Project Management contain the word management, they aren t the same thing. Management implies a focus on people, while Project Management implies a focus on the project objective. You can be a Manager and a Project Manager, or you can be a Manager without being a Project Manager. You can also be a Project Manager without being a Manager (in which case you don t have people reporting to you you just deal with overseeing the project-specific tasks).

13. Administrative and Financial Skills Most managers have a budget, and you ll have to be able to set the budget and then manage to it. You ll also have to deal with hiring, firing, rewarding good employee performance, dealing with unacceptable performance from some employees, and generally making sure that your employees have the environment and tools they need to do their work. It s ironic that this is skill number 13 (an unlucky number in some cultures), because a lot of managers hate this part of the job the most. But if you re good at budgeting, you ll find it much easier to do the things you want to do. And hiring and dealing with employees on a day-to-day basis is one of the key skills to give you the best, happiest and most productive employees.

Conclusion This article explains some of the things you ll need to learn before you become a successful manager. You can probably become a manager without having all of these skills, but you ll need all of them to be really successful and to get promoted to higher levels of management. For every one of these skills, there are various levels of performance. No one expects a new manager to be superior at every one of these skills, but you should be aware of all of them, and you should do everything you can to learn more about each skill. Some of that learning will come through education (like reading the articles on this web site come through experience trial and error. you might want to subscribe). But much of the learning will

Just learn as much as you can about each skill, take nothing for granted, and focus on doing the very best that you can do. Learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them. And ask for feedback many cases you won t know what you could do better unless someone tells you. in

A good manager has at least 10 good qualities

RECENTLY I wrote about 10 qualities of a good employee, which prompted quite a few people to ask about the attributes of a good manager. There isn't a magic formula for good management, of course, but if you're a manager, perhaps these tips will help you be more effective: 1 Choose a field thoughtfully. Make it one you enjoy. It's hard to be productive without enthusiasm. This is true whether you're a manager or employee; 2 Hire carefully and be willing to fire. You need a strong team, because a mediocre team gives mediocre results, no matter how well managed it is. One mistake is holding on to somebody who doesn't measure up. It's easy to keep this person on the job because he's not terrible at what he does. But a good manager will replace him or move him to where he can succeed unambiguously; 3 Create a productive environment. This is a particular challenge because it requires different approaches depending on the context. Sometimes you maximise productivity by giving everybody his or her own office. Sometimes you achieve it by moving everybody into open space. Sometimes you use financial incentives to stimulate productivity. A combination of approaches is usually required. One element that almost always increases productivity is providing an information system that empowers employees. When I was building Microsoft, I set out to create an environment where software developers could thrive. I wanted a company where engineers liked to work. I wanted to create a culture that encouraged them to work together, share ideas and remain motivated. If I hadn't been a software engineer myself, there's no way I could have achieved my goal; 4 Define success. Make it clear to your employees what constitutes success and how they should measure their achievements. Goals must be realistic. Project schedules, for example, must be set by the people who do the work. People will accept a "bottoms-up" deadline they helped set, but they'll be cynical about a schedule imposed from the top that doesn't map to reality. Unachievable goals undermine an organisation. At my company, in addition to regular team meetings and one-on-one sessions between managers and employees, we use mass gatherings periodically and E-mail routinely to communicate what we expect from employees. If a reviewer or customer chooses another company's product , we analyse the situation. We say to our people, "The next time around we've got to win. What's needed?" The answers to these questions help us define success; 5 To be a good manager, you have to like people and be good at communicating. This is hard to fake. If you don't enjoy interacting with people, it'll be hard to manage them well. You must have a wide range of personal contacts within your organisation. You need relationships - not necessarily personal friendships - with a fair number of people, including your own employees. You must encourage these people to tell you what's going on and give you feedback about what people are thinking about the company and your role in it; 6 Develop your people to do their jobs better than you can. Transfer your skills to them. This is an exciting goal, but it can be threatening to a manager who worries that he's training his replacement. If you're concerned, ask your boss: "If I develop somebody who can do my job super well, does the company have some other challenge for me or not?" Many smart managers like to see their employees increase their responsibilities because it frees the managers to tackle new or undone tasks. There's no shortage of jobs for good managers. The world has an infinite amount of work to be done; 7 Build morale. Make it clear there's plenty of goodwill to go around and that it's not just you or some hotshot manager who's going to look good if things go well. Give people a sense of the importance of what they're working on - its importance to the company, its importance to customers; 8 Take on projects yourself. You need to do more than communicate. The last thing people want is a boss who just doles out stuff. From time to time, prove you can be hands-on by taking on one of the less attractive tasks and using it as an example of how your employees should meet challenges; 9 Don't make the same decision twice. Spend the time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don't revisit the issue unnecessarily. If you're too willing to reopen issues, it interferes not only with your execution but also with your motivation to make a decision in the first place. People hate indecisive leadership;However, that doesn't mean you have to decide everything the moment it comes to your attention. Nor that you can't ever reconsider a decision. 10 Let people know whom to please. Maybe it's you, maybe it's your boss, and maybe it's somebody who works for you. You're in trouble and risking paralysis in your organisation when employees start saying to themselves: "Am I supposed to be making this person happy or this other person happy? They seem to have different priorities."

I don't pretend that these are the only 10 approaches a manager should keep in mind. There are lots of others. Just a month ago I encouraged leaders to demand bad news before good news from their employees. But these 10 ideas may help you manage well, and I hope they do.