Good day everyone
Welcome back to the Café
Here is a piece of training I shared with a student this week.
I hope you find it helpful.
Empowering Your Manager
“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”
– Peter Drucker
Managing is often equated with controls rather than leading and developing a business. The manager feels more comfortable and secure when they can put strict rules on everything in a business organization. This is true especially of Senior Managements where the controls and directing becomes so severe that it erodes any creative freedom for the middle managers to work towards achieving the goals set out for them.
Here are a few simple prescriptions to get the best out of your managers.
Avoid Centralizing Decision Making
This is perhaps one of the best ways to achieve total control. By centralizing decision-making, you feel you will be able to avoid wrong decisions. In contrast, this may be so to some extent who is to prevent your own bad choices. Unless your managers can make mistakes and learn from them, you will never develop expertise through experience. Centralizing decision-making is also the surest method to kill your business growth.
Provide Working Space
Top management often entrusts tasks and responsibilities to their subordinate managers. More often than not, any specific time frames which are comfortable to achieve the given responsibilities or tasks are discussed. However, in your anxiety or aggressiveness and sometimes over-enthusiasm, you start chasing your subordinate for action and results. If you do it too soon and too often, you are severely limiting the workspace of your managers. They may be spending more time complying with your commands rather than focusing on operational priorities and essential tasks.
Suppose you are not providing sufficient working space for your managers. In that case, you are surely heading towards disaster as important tasks may be neglected to escape your frequent and aggressive follow-ups.
Listen to Your Managers
While experience is an asset, it also makes one arrogant and conceited. Sometimes one tends to believe because they are the superior, they are always right. The Boss Is Always Right principle looks good only on posters. It doesn’t work if you want to build a Professional organization.
Cultivate the ability to listen to the voice of your managers. They often know better as they are more familiar with the ground realities. If you decide on their behalf and just issue orders, you will have clerks in the guise of managers as you have killed their initiative.
Don’t Micromanage
Once broad goals and objectives are set with specific time frames and key results are outlined, leave your managers to perform. If you get into too many details and meddle with the execution at every stage, you may be sure to mess up the entire process and, ultimately, the results.
The key to managing effectively is to empower people across the management structure to feel part of the responsibility and ownership.
Thank you for stopping by the Café. Would you please share it with someone who could benefit from it if you found this helpful? For more tips and resources, visit the website at thecafeboss.net. Please also feel free to buy me a cup of coffee. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/cafeboss2503
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