So what actions could you take to become an even better manager?

Action 1: Be Honest With Yourself

It is really easy to fall into the trap of believing that because you are the manager you need to be the best at everything. The reality is you don’t and cannot be the best at everything. Stop pretending that you know it all.

Action 2: Invest Time To Save Time

One thing so many managers complain of is having too much to do and not enough time. However unlike a computer you cannot buy an upgrade in the amount of tome you have. So what’s the answer? Make a one off investment of time to train someone else and then assign responsibility for a task to them.

Action 3: Find Out What Motivates

On just about every management and leadership course I run people bring up motivation as an issue. When I ask them when was the last time they asked employees what motivates them, most acknowledge it was no time recently. If you don’t know what motivates others you are always going to find it a struggle.

Action 4: Don’t Avoid Problems

It might be tempting to avoid problems in the hope that they will somehow disappear into thin air. In reality this never happens. The problem just gets worse. Deal with them rather than letting them hang around like a bad odour.

Action 5: Show Trust

Trust takes time to gain and can be lost in minutes. Truth is the best way to gain trust is to show others you trust them.

Action 6: Never Forget What It Was Like At The Bottom

As people climb the career ladder it is easy to lose sight of what life was like when you were just starting out. Always try and stay connected to what it is really like at the bottom of the hierarchy when you had little or no experience.

Action 7: Delegate A Lot

Delegation is vital to your success and has many benefits in terms of developing and growing others. It also gives a huge message to others that you really trust them.

Action 8: Try Not To Criticise In Public

Yes this requires a lot of self discipline but when you criticise in public you run the risk of losing the respect of the individual and potentially your whole team.

Action 9: Praise and Acknowledge

When you praise someone it lets others know you are noticing and care about them. Remember too that you can acknowledge effort as well as results.

Action 10: Accept That It Is Ongoing Work In Progress

Despite what you might read you never reach the point where you are the perfect manager. You have to keep learning and growing in order to continue to deliver success.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps highly rated professionals to become high performing leaders and managers. He invites you to sign up for his free management mastery course

Difficulties show up in a number of guises for managers, including:

• The employee who is not delivering what is expected in terms of performance
• The dissatisfied customer or client
• Employees who are in conflict with each other
• The team who are resisting change
• The loss of customers or clients
• The feeling of overload

While some might say that managers are rewarded well enough and so should be willing to deal with the difficult stuff, the reality is often very different.

So why do managers avoid dealing with the difficult stuff?

1. They don’t want to be seen as the bad guy or gal
2. They question whether they have the right
3. They worry about the reaction they will have and whether they will be able to handle it
4. They hope that the issue will somehow disappear if they ignore it
5. They want an easy life

While on some level these reactions might seem reasonable they have a direct impact on:

• The performance of individuals
• The personal reputation of the manager
• The reputation of the team
• The reputation of the organisation
• The ability to recruit people
• Staff turnover and retention
• Customer satisfaction
• Personal and team productivity
• Bottom line results

While it might not always be easy to deal with the difficult stuff as a manager, the reality is that simply ignoring these issues is rarely a good long term strategy.

Duncan Brodie helps highly effective professionals become highly effective managers.  He invites you to check out his management mastery e-course

In this short video I highlight a number of areas where you need to focus in order to be effective. As always I value your comments and contributions too.

Duncan Brodie helps organisations and individual leaders to achieve great results through people. He invites you to sign up for his free audio e-course

On the face of it this should not be that difficult to do. On the other hand recent research from the CIPD shows that there is a huge gap between perceptions and reality among the UK’s 8 million managers.

While I was expecting that there would be some differences between what employees and managers thought, the differences to say the least were stark.

Here are just a few of the things that the research highlighted.

Six in ten (61%) of managers claim they meet each person they manage at least twice a month to talk about their workload, meeting objectives and other work-related issues. However, just 24% of employees say they meet their managers with such frequency.

More than 90% of managers say they sometimes or always coach the people they manage when they meet, while only 40% of employees agree.

Three quarters (75%) of managers say they always/sometimes discuss employees’ development and career progression during one to ones, but just 38% of employees say this happens.

There are similar gaps in views between managers and employees on how often managers: joint problem solve with employees; discuss ideas employees might have to improve the business and; discuss employees’ wellbeing.

You can find a press release and access to the research in full here

With managers having a huge role to play in the success of the organisation there is clearly an opportunity to raise self awareness and at the same time gain greater engagement and ultimately bottom line results.

I wonder what your experiences have been when it came to self awareness among managers.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps highly successful professional people to become highly effective managers. He invites you to check out his free management mastery e-course.

Challenge 1: Being Clear About What You Want To Achieve

A lot of people talk about mission statements and the importance of having a clear vision. In reality getting crystal clear about what you want to achieve is really tough and yet without clarity it is difficult to brief others.

Challenge 2: Getting The Buy-In Of People

Unless you have followers you are not a leader and not leading a team. Winning hearts and minds is tough, especially when proposing something different. Being able to step into others shoes is a major benefit.

Challenge 3: Responding To Different Agendas

Different people want different things from their work, their employer and boss. Responding to these different demands and agendas is tough.

Challenge 4: Handling Resistance

Resistance will come up whatever you try to do. It never ceases to amaze me the lengths people will go to in order to hold on to things, even those things that they don’t like when they face uncertainty.

Challenge 5: Keeping People Engaged

Many studies have identified that as few as 20% of people are actively engaged in the organisational agenda. Disengagement hurts organisations in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction and profits so don’t underestimate the importance of keeping people engaged.

Challenge 6: Handling Negativity

Some people are said to be glass half full people while others are glass half empty. In those situations where the glass half full dominate they can drag down even the most optimistic team members.

Challenge 7: Impatience

We all to some extent want quick results and the reality is that anything significant takes time to achieve.

Challenge 8: Remaining Positive Personally

You are a human being not a robot. In the face of a tidal wave of despondency it can be really tough to stay positive.

Challenge 9: Getting The Balance Right

There is a fine line between pushing people to hard and being a soft touch and it is tough to get it right.

Challenge 10: The High Jump Factor

When you achieve anything just like in the high jump the bar is raised to another level. As a consequence you are under constant pressure to continually raise the game of your team and yourself.

The Bottom Line: Leading a team can look really easy from the outside looking in. The reality is often very different.

Duncan Brodie helps professional people to become highly effective leaders. You can sign up for his free audio e-course here

Be specific with your feedback rather than generic. While any feedback is better than none, the more specific it is the better.

Give specific examples of what you noticed, especially when giving praise and positive feedback. Examples really re-enforce the fact that you really noticed something good that someone did.

Do it as a matter of routine rather than relying on formal appraisal or performance meetings to give feedback.

Ask for others’ perspectives as they may well see things that you don’t.

Prepare in advance of giving feedback. This is particularly important when you have to give what might be perceived as difficult feedback.

Step into the shoes of the recipient and look at things from their perspective. It might just influence the way you deliver your message.

Try to match the style or preferences of the recipient. Some will want a very simple “thank you” while others may want more detailed feedback.

Avoid making it personal by focusing on behaviours or impact of doing or not doing something.

Accept you will sometimes make a hash if it. You are human and cannot deliver perfect feedback all of the time.

Never underestimate how much people value feedback and a simple bit of praise. “Thank you” or “well done” takes seconds to say but can yield huge benefits in terms of motivation.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps professional people to become highly effective managers. He invites you to sign up for his free e-course, Management Mastery, at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk.

At the same time there are often some simple changes that you can make that really make a difference to the results that you acieve.  In this short video blog post I share 5 ideas on things that you can do right now to increase your success and improve your results as a leader.

As always I value your comments and and tips on specific adjustments leaders can make to be even better at what they do.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achivements helps organisations and leaders to achieve better results through people. He invites you to sign up for his free audio e-course at http://www.goalsandachievements.co.uk/leaders-main.html

So what in my experience are the keys to achieving long term organisational success?

Key 1: Clarity Of Direction

You need to be clear about where you are heading. While you will need to be flexible from time to time, it is important to keep focus on the end game.

Key 2: Products Or Services Someone Wants To Buy

Ultimately, unless you have sufficient demand for what you offer, you can never achieve long-term success.

Key 3: The Ability To Market What You Have To Offer

There is little use in having a product or service that is world-class but the best kept secret.

Key 4: The Ability To Convert Interested Parties Into Buyers

A lot of interest in what you have to offer is great but the real acid test is whether you can convert the interested into buyers.

Key 5: Good Back Office Processes

Some businesses do a great job at making the sale but struggle with delivering the product or service because they don’t pay enough attention to the back office stuff.

Key 6: A Range Of Products And Services

Successful organisations know that products and services have a period when they are at their peak so spread the risk by having products and services at different stages in the life cycle.

Key 7: Employees Who Are Engaged

A lack of engagement hurts organisations in terms of productivity, sales, customer satisfaction and profits.

Key 8: People Who Can Do The Job Well

Successful organisations have people who are appropriately skilled and developed to do the job to the highest standard.

Key 9: A Willingness To Innovate

People have a thirst for new things or things that improve what is already on offer and good organisations respond to this demand through innovating.

Key 10: A Willingness To Take Balanced Risks

No organisation can get beyond a certain point without taking some sort of risk.

The Bottom Line:

In a fast moving world where there is a demand for instant results it is easy to lose sight of the key things that contribute to organisational success. I wonder what else you would add to the list?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps professional people become great leaders and managers. Sign up for his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk.

The trouble is, beyond the interview situation few people ever really give much thought to this question and this is a lost opportunity.

The question is great in many ways:

1. It gets to the heart of the type of leader that you want to be.
2. It shapes how you interact with others, behave, set an example and go about undertaking your role as a leader.
3. It keeps you constantly conscious of what it is that makes you perform at your best.
4. It gives you a marker or frame of reference against which you can check before getting into a difficult conversation or making a difficult decision.

When your team is asked this question I guess that you and most leaders and managers would like to hear things like:

1. They are highly supportive of me and the team.
2. They encourage us to try new things and provide the safety net to allow us to do this.
3. They are approachable and I can go to them if I have a struggle.
4. They are honest with me.
5. I trust them completely.
6. They are a great role model and someone from whom I can learn.

By contrast, few leaders or managers would like to hear the following:

1. They are totally autocratic and never involve us. They might best be described as the Nike boss who says “Just Do It”.
2. They put excessive demands on the team and we feel like we are collapsing under the weight.
3. The only person that matters to them is themselves.
4. They take all the glory when things go well and never acknowledge the contribution of others.
5. They blame and try to pass the buck when things go wrong.

And here is the good news. You get to determine for what you have a reputation as a leader or manager. So what choices will you make?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps professional people become great leaders and managers. Sign up for his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk.

So what would I highlight as 10 struggles facing new leaders?

Struggle 1: Making The Mindset Shift

Up until the point where you are in a leadership role, you are probably doing a lot. You measure your success on what you get done. As a leader, you are often spending a lot of time looking long-term and not seeing immediate returns from your efforts. This takes a time to adjust to.

Struggle 2: Accepting You Are At The Bottom Rung Of The Ladder

Just before you became a leader you probably were at the top of your peer group. When you move into the leadership role, you are at the bottom rung of the ladder once again.

Struggle 3: Adjusting To Your New Role

One of the things I found when I first stepped into a leadership role was accepting that I could not physically deliver the same volume when I was spending a lot more time in meetings.

Struggle 4: Feeling Under Pressure

New leaders often feel under real pressure to deliver something of significance quickly because you are under scrutiny. If you doubt this, just tale a look at the business section of a good quality newspaper. Keep in mind though that leading is a marathon, not a sprint.

Struggle 5: Feeling Isolated

Being a leader is very often a lonely existence. You might not have someone who you can speak to and discuss concerns with confidentially. This isolation can be tough and is not always something you appreciate before you become a leader.

Struggle 6: Doing What You Always Did

Being a leader is different to anything else you have done in your career so far, so you need to be willing to work differently.

Struggle 7: Making An Impact

The chances are you are joining an already established leadership team. The challenge is to make an impact without upsetting the balance in the existing team.

Struggle 8: Speaking Up

It is easy to think that, because you are the new kid on the block, your point of view is not valid. You have to speak up and offer your point of view with confidence and the realisation that you might get shot down.

Struggle 9: Getting Out Of The Way

You probably have a highly capable deputy who can pretty much do all of the things you can do but perhaps has chosen not to step up to the next level. Your challenge is to acknowledge this, focus on your role and let your deputy do what they do well.

Struggle 10: Continuing To Develop

You will more than likely find that the biggest constraint you face is time, or the lack of it. When this happens, it is easy to put your development on the back burner even though the need to develop is never greater.

The Bottom Line:

Success as a new leader is never guaranteed but changing your behaviour and getting the right support can really make a difference.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps professional people become great leaders and managers. Sign up for his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk.