Improve Your Leadership Skills

Being a manager is difficult. Not only do you have to face irate or unreasonable clients at times, but you also face all the challenges leading a team entails. You have to keep employees motivated and happy while also making decisions that may not be popular with the group. Negotiating these responsibilities can be tricky. So how do you balance your authority with being a good manager? We have some tips to help you out:

1.) Don’t Breed a Culture of Fear

Promote a culture of openness and honesty for times when your employees make mistakes. It’s important your employees feel comfortable acknowledging their role in a project gone wrong. Encouraging honesty is a much better tactic than instilling fear in those working for you. If you go the latter route, your employees will be too nervous to ever own up to their mistakes. If you go the former route, you’ll prevent problem situations from snowballing into a disaster because your employees were too reluctant to admit what happened.

2.) Acknowledge Your Own Mistakes

Just as you should ensure that your employees can safely admit to their mistakes, you should also feel safe to admit to your own. No one’s perfect. Those in authority are often reluctant to admit that they’re wrong, but doing so will give your staff members respect for your humility and honesty.

3.) Give Compliments

Praise your subordinates for things they do well. Managers who only criticize do not serve as good motivators for their employees. If you only focus on the negative, your employees will always associate you with negativity. They’ll likely be unhappy at work, and this attitude may translate to their productivity and output.

4.) Be a Team Player, Too

Being a manager means supporting the team as well as leading it. Get down in the trenches with your subordinates and pitch in when necessary. Helping the team when it needs assistance will show your subordinates how invested you are in helping them succeed.

5.) Have Some Fun at Work

Liven the day up a little by bringing some fun into the office. Have a four-hour meeting? Kick it off with a fun trivia quiz about the company and award small prizes to those who answer correctly. Making the day pleasant by shifting the focus away from work will help you keep the company’s work/life balance from leaning too much toward the work side.

6.) Be Self Aware

Be self-aware so that your bad morning experience before work doesn’t translate to employees thinking that they’ve done something in error. If you let your employees know what’s frustrating you, you’ll save them from spending a lot of mental energy wondering what they did wrong.

7.) Encourage Autonomy

While it’s true that as a manager, your job is to lead the team, that doesn’t mean you have to (or should) micromanage every little action. Employees often perform their jobs better if they’re allowed to do things their way. CBS Moneywatch contributor Suzanne Lucas asserts that taking a step back in the workplace is important. As she writes, “micro-management tends to destroy morale and results in your good employees leaving and your bad employees doing just enough to not get fired.”

8.) Use Modern-Technology Tools

You can’t compete on a high level these days if you don’t use digital marketing and SEO services. Make sure to make your business more visible online, protect your online reputation, raise brand awareness, and use social media to promote your products and services. AJ Prestige offers a solution for all advanced SEO and digital services. Grow each day and boost your business! Managing can be a stressful job, and unfortunately, there’s no one way to make your job free of headaches. But manage your team well, and your employees will perform well. This feedback loop won’t be a cure-all for stress, but it will make your job a whole lot easier.