How are management skills acquired?
Secondly, it is crucial to think about who you are, what you want to achieve, where you are going and how you are going to get there. Without clarified goals and values, it is impossible to make a strategic plan for all of your actions and, consequently, impossible to achieve your goals. When you made a plan of your actions, the next thing to do would be influencing yourself in the process of achieving a particular goal and it is called self-management. Self-management is influencing yourself by organizing, controlling, planning and directing yourself. The next step is defining a personal mission. This is the philosophy of your life. In addition, you have to set goals and do it effectively. After that, you have to apply emotional intelligence. This is basically controlling the emotions and feelings of yourself and others.
The basic element of human interaction is communication. So, management skills are also acquired through the development of interpersonal relationships. This is about receiving and sending information effectively. You need to learn how to clarify the message, develop credibility and also solicit feedback. I believe, this way of developing management skills is also one of the most effective and can be achieved by increasing the clarity of messages, developing credibility, and soliciting feedback.
Another aspect is the ability to listen, but not simply hear. In addition to this, you have to learn how to read non-verbal messages correctly. Furthermore, knowing how to provide people with positive or negative feedback is crucial as well. This is an extremely important skill as it can potentially increase your employee’s performance.
When the company is huge, people often have to deal with a wide variety of cultures and languages. If you learn how to communicate with people from different countries, your effectiveness as a manager will increase.
As the aforementioned key points show, it is not so difficult to develop management skills. I’m sure, almost every person is capable of it.
What motivates people to work hard?
Every manager should provide people with a clear idea of what the company is going to accomplish. And managers have responsibility over employees by setting goals for them to achieve. When you set goals to people, they do not always want to do what you suggest. Sometimes people simply do not understand what others expect from them, sometimes they think that they are underestimated, sometimes the problem lies in simple things such as lack of support and help. That is why managers have to motivate people to work harder. There are some very useful tips to bear in mind.
Firstly, you need to support your employees. Support and no manipulation can be a very effective tool in getting your workers to work. Good managers help employees select challenging goals and provide them with all the necessary equipment, time and resources. Supportive climate is essential. It develops by promoting free exchange of ideas and opinions. Managers who apply this technique try to reduce such barriers. What is more, managers should apply participation. That means that managers should really be interested in the difficulties and problems of a worker. This behavior should be authentic. If it is not, people will not work harder, they aren’t stupid. A manager should always seek ways to improve performance. This is performed by asking questions or simply by observing people’s work.
Secondly, you need to know what your people are capable of. When the task is realistic and suitable for an employee, he or she will deal with it much more enthusiastically. Enthusiasm can also be boosted by using rewards. Your people should be rewarded after achieving a particular goal, especially if the way to achieving it was really hard. Your employees should think that achieving company’s goals will bring him or her something additional as well.
Thirdly, a really good manager will apply counseling if needed. This is helping a person cope with his or her emotional problem. Such problems might include divorces, financial problems, alcohol or drug abuse, serious illnesses and so on. In this case, managers should, first of all, maintain confidentiality. Then, the person needs to clarify his or her thoughts and feelings. The manager, in his turn, should be supportive and provide reassurance. People need to know that their problems have solutions and that they have the ability to improve.
At last, another concept I would like to mention is politicking. This is the actions you can take to influence or try to influence the distribution of pros and cons within your organization. Furthermore, effective managers empower workers to accomplish assigned goals by delegating responsibility and authority to them. Delegation mostly include allocation of duties, delegation of authority, assignment of responsibility and creation of accountability. All in all, there are a lot of techniques how to motivate people to work harder.
I believe, that the most important topic is self-awareness: a point of departure. Self-awareness is simply knowing what person you are. It is much easier to achieve success if you know everything about yourself – what are your weaknesses and strengths, how you can apply strengths in your life and how you can avoid situations which involve the weakest sides of your personality. As we all try to protect ourselves, try to hide the areas in which we are vulnerable, we sometimes are afraid of finding out the truth about ourselves. But people merely do not understand sometimes that changing and improving themselves involves acquiring knowledge of strengths and weaknesses, actually getting the truth. Without this knowledge it is impossible to be emotionally intelligent. What is more, if you do not know yourself, you can not imagine how other people will perceive you. And this is important. When you are aware of your unique personal characteristics, you get a better understanding why people react in this and not that particular way. How can a person become successful if he or she does not know how to lead himself or herself? It is very hard, or maybe even not possible, to be a leader in a team without knowing how to lead yourself.
So, I posit that the point of departure in this situation is essential. As I have mentioned above, it is very difficult to start because of the fear of knowing yourself. However, self-awareness plays a crucial role in developing leadership skills and organizational behavior. The first step is, of course, confession that you need to change yourself and for that you need to get rid of the fear of knowing and take a decision to find out more about yourself. First of all, self-analysis can help. One of the techniques is gaining feedback from the person you can be honest with. Another is writing in a journal. I believe it is effective as when your write about the events in your life, you analyze them and look at all these things from a different perspective. Furthermore, when you write in a journal you can have a look at how your thoughts about interpersonal relations and, in general, the situations of your life have evolved, so it is, in my opinion, a perfect way to know yourself. It is also possible to exchange a journal for a blog. Then, you can try to set a particular goal and write down what you expect to happen. After that, you need to analyze whether your expectations came true or not. By doing so, a person can assess what are his or her strengths and weaknesses, what he or she should and should not do in life, which areas he is competent in and which are absolutely not suitable. And the last thing you can do to gain self-awareness is taking self-assessment questionnaires. Sometimes the results can be biased, that is why you need to get feedback of those people who know you best. They can make a conclusion about whether the results are untruthful or they provide reliable information.
Solicit feedback from others
Keep a journal or a blog
Compare experiences with the set goals
Have time to reflect
Complete self-assessment questionnaires
Works Cited
Robbins, Stephen, and Phillip Hunsacker. Training in interpersonal skills: tips for managing people at work. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2014. Print.
