Managing yourself and others is a very specific skill. That skill can help or hurt almost anything that you are working on in life. Sadly, it is a skill that many think they have but do not actually possess.
I was fortunate to get my start in real-world jobs in the retail management field. I worked for a clothing retailer that required a college degree in management positions but did not care about the subject of that degree. They felt that if you could attain a college degree, they could teach you how to manage a retail store. They had a very good program to educate their Managers in Training, MITs, to learn their business. This included how to manage employees to maximize their potential and their input into the business. After completing the three-month program and moving to an Assistant Manager role, I felt slightly confident in managing people. That skill was practiced during the next few years as I moved up in their company and a few others. I realized that managing people to their strengths helped create a much more productive environment. This is something that many do not really look at when managing others or themselves. They do not allow people to do what they are good at and instead assign roles based on some other definition. This creates some strife in the team environment and does not allow everyone to enjoy what they are doing. At times, people are good at things they do not like doing and this is when a true management test occurs.
By knowing yours, and other strengths when working with a team, allows you to set up everyone for success in projects. These strengths can help create a team that is constantly working towards the goal of a project. By using what everyone is good at, that helps to use their strengths as a strength of the team and moves the project along in much larger steps. It also allows for much less time in reworking parts of the project because it was done well the first time. It was done by your best instead of someone else. This keeps you from then having to reach out to your best person to have them look at and even rework that part of the project done by a weaker team member. By taking these larger steps forward, you can use the time that might be saved to make some changes at the end to further refine your project and allow some of the smaller details to shine.
Communication is one of the most important tools in the management process. You must be clear in your expectations to make sure that you and others are always working towards a clearly stated goal. If you leave some room for the goal, you can get a product that you were not expecting and does not meet the requirements. There is some space for creative paths in the middle of the project but not in the goal. The manager, even if you are managing yourself, must be very clear on what end result is expected and what it must look like. The manager must also check in regularly to see how the project is progression, revisit the goal if working alone, to make sure there has been no miscommunication of the expected result. Proper and clear communication saves time and allows the work to remain productive and keeps any sidetrack behavior from happening.
Communication also takes the form of proper questions asked both by the manager and the team member. They both need to feel comfortable enough to ask key questions at times when there is a misunderstanding. These questions keep big mistakes from happening in the creative process. They can be as small as, is this the proper fold, and as large as, do we really want this on the front of the website. Each has a very different level of importance of the project but can both lead to big-time commitments to fix errors. Even something as small as an improper fold can take hours to fix, just like having to change the front of a website.
Managing yourself and people is a very useful skill to have. It is something that may take years to learn but pays off big dividends in the end. A good manager can help a team reach heights they could never attain alone. It brings out the sum of the team is greater than the parts.
No comments:
Post a Comment