There are a lot of managers out there. 

However, not all of them are  great managers. If you would like to become a great manager, this of  course brings up the question of just exactly what you will have to do  in order to make this happen. It turns out that there is not just one  characteristic that you are going to have to have, there are a number of  them. 

Do you have what it is going to take in order to develop the manager skills  to become a successful manager?

As all managers have probably realized by now, the millennials have arrived.  

That younger generation of workers are moving into the office at the  same time that the baby boomers are starting to move out. The arrival in  force of this new type of worker is going to cause some fundamental  changes to occur in the workplace. As a manager, you need to have the  manager skills to be ready for the changes in tools, workspace, and  culture. 

Do you know what is getting ready to happen?

In a perfect world, a manager would have all of the knowledge, manager  skills, and manager training that he or she needed to have when it came  time for them to make a decision. 

With this information they could be  comfortable that the decision that they were making was the right  decision. However, as I’m pretty sure that you are well aware of, we don’t live in a perfect world. 

What this means is that we have to make decisions with limited information and that means that we need to learn how to deal with risk.

As managers we are always looking for way to use our manager skills to  get more out of our teams. 

What we’ve been told is that we can do this  if we can come up with a way to boost their innovation. It may sound easy, but it isn’t. What managers need to do is to find ways that they can revamp their business processes.  This is going to require a radical rethinking of our business’ strategy  and processes: how we interact with our customers, how they drive  operational excellence and how we approach innovation. This is going to  require that managers decide which technologies to use as the foundation  of their transformation. 

Just in case you were wondering, there is no  manager training for this kind of change.

Becoming a successful manager is a difficult enough thing to accomplish.  

So why would we want to jeopardize it once we achieve it? But research  says we unwittingly do just that when we withhold or try to bury one  thing about ourselves in particular – our failures. Yes, you heard me correctly – we’re supposed to tell people about the things that we’ve done wrong and the mistakes that we’ve made. 

This is not an easy thing for any of us to do, but it turns out that in order to be a good manager it is something that we do need to do.

Now that we are all dealing with the arrival of a global pandemic we now find ourselves working from home,  many managers are asking themselves just exactly how to go about doing  this. 

Our goal has to be to find a way to stay productive while at the  same time remaining healthy and taking care of our personal well-being.  

What we need to do is to use our manager skills to develop some basic  habits that will ensure that working at home does not end up  compromising our well-being.

Managers understand that when the job market becomes tight, employee retention is key.  

What this means is that they are going to have to get good at using  their manager skills to detect when their team members are thinking  about leaving.

 Managers need to be able to detect the tell-tale signs  that highly valued team members may be considering moving on in order to  get in front of staff turnover before it’s too late.

Ok manager, so you are in charge of a team. 

What would you like to do with that team? If you are like most of us, you’d like to be able to use your manager skills to create a happy, very productive team.  The studies have shown us that happy teams score higher on  productivity, engagement, loyalty, and creativity. They also take fewer  sick days. Who wouldn’t want a team like this? 

Now, just exactly how do  we go about creating a team like this without any manager training on  how to do it?

If I had to guess what kind of feedback you like to get, I’d be willing that just like the rest of us you like positive feedback about your manager skills the best. 

However, somewhat surprisingly it turns out that there is a type of manager who likes a different type of feedback. Negative feedback.  Most of us dislike negative feedback and we go out of our way to avoid  getting it or giving it out. We fear that if we give someone negative  feedback it is going to cause dejection, anger, and may even end up  making them cry. 

That’s why it’s so amazing that some managers actually  seek out negative feedback.

As managers we are being asked to do a lot of different things. 

We may  come into work with a list of things that we want to get done during the  day and when we leave at the end of the day we discover that we’ve  spent our time doing a lot of other things and our list is untouched.  People seem to have no problems dropping by our desks and asking us to  do things for them. If we’re not careful, a lot of stuff is going to fall through the cracks. 

How can a manager use our manager skills to stay on top of everything that we’ve been asked to do?