What's the profile of a 'complete' manager - one who daily achieves success for herself, her team, and also the organization she works for?
For several years currently, I've been coaching lots of managers in simply concerning each surroundings imaginable - massive and tiny organizations, for-profit and not-for profit, over three continents and over 20 countries, and I've noticed that in all that point, sure characteristics of successful managers recur frequently again.
Pattern Recognition: What Makes a 'Complete Manager'?
During the last year, I've been consolidating this pattern recognition of successful managers and comparing it with organizational success principles to develop the profile of the 'Complete Manager'.
Setting apart the technical skills required to meet the manager's core operate (sales, legal, IT, accounting, etc.), I've found fourteen characteristics, broadly fitting into three categories (although there is some overlap - many of the fourteen characteristics have an effect on additional than one category).
Class 1. Productivity
The primary of the three categories of the 'Complete Manager' is Productivity.
Here, the manager is focussed on guaranteeing that each she and her team deliver the particular outputs needed from them. There are four specific characteristics that the Complete Manager demonstrates in doing so:
Time Management
The power to manage their time - not simply in the abstract, however hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and over the course of a whole year.
Priority Management
It's attainable to have nice time management skills, however to be using them on the wrong things! The Complete Manager also contains a heightened awareness of what their real priorities are, and stay focussed on not just 'doing things right', but additionally 'doing the correct thing'.
Crisis Management
So many otherwise excellent managers simply allow themselves to be too easily derailed by crises and problems. The Complete Manager absorbs crises, adapts appropriately, and gets the train back on the rails effectively and quickly.
Delegation
Even the foremost effective manager can achieve less than optimum results if they try to try and do everything themselves. The Complete Manager refuses to micro-manage, and delegates appropriately to those on her team.
Category 2. Developing Others
The second of the 3 categories of the 'Complete Manager' is Developing Others.
Not solely is Productivity (Class 1) enhanced by developing others, but the medium and long run strength of the organization as a full is dramatically increased by doing so.
Performance Assessment
The Complete Manager regularly, consistently and fairly offers feedback on every team members performance.
Skills Assessment and Coaching
Though you may not personally do the actual coaching, the Complete Manger ensures that each team member is given access to formal and informal coaching as needed - specifically to reinforce performance issues arising out of the performance assessment process.
Mentoring & 1-1's
The Complete Manager will provide each team member with a risk-free, judgment -free environment to develop as people and as contributors to the organization as a whole.
Empowerment
The Complete Manager ensures that her team members have the authority and responsibility necessary to not only do their own jobs, but to use creativity and take ownership of issues and issues as they arise.
Hiring
Rather than seeing it as an inconvenience, or the responsibility of 'HR', the Complete Manager embraces high-quality hiring as an integral part of her job and ensures that it's given the time and attention it desires to confirm the standard of every hire is as high as possible.
Class 3. Teamwork
The third of the 3 classes in which the Complete Manager excels, is in Teamwork.
This characteristic - of working not just during a silo, delivering their own outputs in a vacuum, however working with peers across the whole organization to deliver the overall organizational goals also - is maybe the foremost frequently underdeveloped category in organizations that are not consistently achieving the results they set out to.
Conflict Management
Complete Managers don't avoid conflict - not do they needlessly produce it, or worse, avoid it. Instead, they manage conflict completely, forever seeking the most effective for the organization as a whole.
Tough Conversations
In managing their own groups, peers and 'managing up' to their bosses, the Complete Manager is aware of how to conduct a tough conversation - the way to be 'ruthlessly constructive' and tell bad news when necessary, while not concern or favor.
Communication Skills
With the quantity of data concerned in management, it isn't surprising that the Complete Manager has exceptionally sturdy communication skills - written, verbal, listening and presentational.
Operating Cross-functionally
The Complete Manager first breaks her own silo by involving others outside of her team in cross-practical consultations, then helps others break down their silos by making herself and her team on the market to help in understanding and improving how the organization 'passes the baton' across the whole enterprise.
Accountability
Last, but the linchpin that holds thus much of the other characteristics along, the Complete Manager holds herself and her team accountable to every commitment and milestone, and establishes a reporting mechanism that can keep her and her team honest in delivering on what they say they will. Notably, the Complete Manager is visibly accountable not simply on those comes and tasks and comes she deems important and/or exciting, however all tasks and comes she has committed to.