Jory MacKay on May 07, 2024 What makes a good manager? 9 essential qualities and skills
Managers who build trust, provide mentorship, and inspire those around them drive a 70% increase in their team’s productivity and engagement. But unfortunately, it’s an upside many managers miss out on.
In reality:
Nearly half of all employees say they simply don’t trust their manager to have their back.
Despite a busy workload and multiple responsibilities, the best managers find a way to blend their hard and soft skills to deliver on their goals while providing support, direction, and guidance to their team.
If you’re a new manager or a leader looking to strike the elusive perfect balance, this article is for you.
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In this guide, we’ll cover the common mistakes managers make, and how to overcome them with practical hints, tips, and techniques to help you grow into a manager your team will love.
What makes a good manager? (And what gets in the way?)
A good manager leads, mentors, and supports their team to achieve their goals while ensuring their team’s work aligns with the broader company strategy and objectives.
To do this, they must rely on various hard and soft skills, including communication, organization, and strategic thinking.
But proper team management is no small feat — especially with the constant distractions, changing workload, and company, team, and personal pressures that get in the way of being a great manager.
Here are just a few of the regular roadblocks that get in the way of being a great manager:
- Balancing the team’s needs with the work. Managers are constantly communicating upwards and downwards to keep everyone happy. This is challenging as company goals rarely align perfectly with the team’s needs. For example, a project go-live may require team members to work on weekends when they’d much rather be with their families.
- Negotiating stress and conflict to create a nice environment. People clash in all walks of life, and this is only exasperated when you add workplace stress. As a manager, you’re constantly dealing with people’s emotions, personality differences, and conflicts to resolve tension and create a productive environment for everyone to work in.
- Having to make tough, unpopular calls. While all managers want to be collaborative, sometimes you have to make tough decisions that will be unpopular. These tough decisions, such as re-prioritizing tasks or giving constructive feedback, inevitably strain the relationships you’ve worked hard to build.
- Constantly adapting your style and communication. Everyone responds to different management and communication styles. What inspires one person could completely disengage another — so, you must continually adapt to get the best out of everyone. While this is a skill great managers learn over time, it can be exhausting and time-consuming to maintain.
- Being the constant source of motivation and inspiration. When the going gets tough, your team will look to you for motivation and inspiration to help them keep going. But there will be times when you’re feeling the pressure, too. Constantly putting on a brave face isn’t just hard but, if not managed correctly, can lead to burnout.
- Being open to and acting on feedback. As a manager, you’ll find yourself in the firing line for good and bad feedback every single day. While the positive feedback will give you a nice boost, you’ll also receive feedback on what’s not working, so you have to be open to continually improving.
- Building resilience to the inevitable setbacks. Setbacks are an inevitable part of management, causing you to work to build yourself and the team back up constantly. Whether it’s a team member leaving the organization, failed tasks, a team member’s personal issues, or team underperformance, you need to be resilient to the inevitable challenges coming your way to be a great manager.
Being a manager is no easy job. Management is a full-time balancing act, where you’ll need to navigate different personalities, goals, resources, and setbacks to create a high-performing and adaptable team. To do all of this, you need a blend of hard and soft skills that enable you to become a master tightrope walker.
How to become a better leader today: 9 practical lessons
No one becomes a great manager overnight. It takes years of learning, practice, and making mistakes to get it right.
Nearly half of all employees say they simply don’t trust their manager to have their back.
To help you start your journey, we’ve pulled together nine practical tips and tricks to help you and your teams excel:
1. Get to know your team's strengths and weaknesses
As the famous saying goes, a team is only as strong as its weakest link.
While we all have weak areas, everyone has their strengths, too. As a manager, it’s your job to uncover those strengths and organize the team in a way that enables everyone to do their best work.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Take time to get to know your team. If you’re a new manager, get to know everyone by booking one-on-one meetings with each team member. Set a brief agenda to ask what each team member likes, what they don’t like, and the type of work that makes them tick.
- Use short tests to uncover hidden strengths. For something more scientific, ask team members to complete personal strengths tests. There are many different models that each objectively assess an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, highlighting the types of work they’re strong at and areas for improvement.
Real-life example:
Florian has started a new Project Manager role, responsible for a team of three junior consultants: Sarah, Javeed, and Imogen.
Florian has a one-to-one meeting to get to know everyone and asks them to complete a Clifton strengths test. This uncovers that Sarah is a well-organized communicator, Javeed is highly analytical, and Imogen’s strengths lie in creative thinking and problem-solving.
2. Set clear goals and expectations
There’s nothing worse than feeling confused about your responsibilities. Not only does it make you less productive, but it can also cause stress and disengagement.
As a manager, you must be clear about the problems you’re solving and the tasks each team member will complete to contribute.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Get better at setting clear goals. There are several frameworks available to help you set goals and objectives clearly and concisely. Check out our Planio guides on Project Objectives and Setting Goals that Get Accomplished to get you started.
- Connect daily tasks to the bigger picture. Remember that your project or team goals must reflect your organization’s strategy and vision. If they don’t, you’ll find your team pulling in a different direction, and it won’t be long until you receive pressure from your own manager.
Real-life example:
Florian’s project will deliver an updated mobile app to the organization’s customers. Florian breaks the overall project objective into a range of sub-objectives for the team to track their progress against.
Florian assigns each team member a role relative to their strengths, with Sarah as the Stakeholder & Communication lead, Javeed as the Business Analyst, and Imogen as the Solution Designer.
3. Consistent and clear communication
More than any other skill, mastering consistent and clear communication is key to staying aligned with team members. Everyone likes to communicate differently, so managers must adapt their style and technique to maximize performance.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Don’t let communication take over. Like many things in management, balancing a planned approach with day-to-day flexibility is key to getting communication right. Whether it’s a dedicated communication plan or ad-hoc asynchronous touchpoints, look for a communication style that works for everyone.
- Take advantage of project management tools. For example, Planio can help you organize your team communication in one place thanks to a range of features to track comments, updates, actions, and real-time IM chat. Putting all your communication in one place helps reduce the noise and keep everyone focused on the task at hand.
Real-life example:
Florian discusses the preferred communication styles for the project with the team. Given everyone works remotely, they’ll have to use video calls and IM chat to stay in sync. Javeed asks Florian to keep their communication structured via email or one-on-one meetings to help reduce distractions during his analytical work.
4. Make time to support team members and give feedback
Even the most independent of employees need support and guidance. The best two ways to offer support are to take a mentorship approach and find an effective mechanism to give and receive feedback. This way, you’re there to help without micromanaging.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Place yourself in a mentorship position. Serving as a mentor is a great way to offer hands-off support to independent team members. Being a mentor is also a rewarding experience for managers, as it can help develop your communication, empathy, and coaching skills.
- Set aside dedicated time for feedback. For team members who need more structured support, including a chance to give regular feedback in one-on-one meetings is a great way to keep everyone on track. The Planio guide to Project Management Feedback is a great place to start if you need some initial help and advice.
Real-life example:
As the team’s most junior member, Florian knows Imogen will need more structured support. They agree to use the ‘Stop, Start, Continue’ model in monthly catch-ups meetings to pass meaningful feedback.
Both Sarah and Javeed are more senior team members, so Florian takes a laid-back approach, ensuring he’s available to provide direction whenever needed.
5. Create an open and collaborative culture with team rituals
The highest performing teams have a bond that helps them create new ideas, overcome challenges, and deliver outstanding results.
That type of bond comes from a culture that enables everyone to collaborate while being open and honest about their successes and failures. As a manager, it’s your job to create that culture.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Look for routines your team is already familiar with. For those teams working in the software development world, the agile framework provides a range of Agile ceremonies to help you plan, review, and launch your work. These ceremonies are also great opportunities to build team cohesion and connection.
- Create custom routines to build team bonds. Team rituals are a great way to relieve stress, build confidence, and bond through shared experiences. If you’re new to team rituals, our 4-step guide is the perfect place to start you on the road to building an awesome culture.
Real-life example:
Florian’s team is adopting an Agile approach to their project delivery, using sprint planning and retrospectives to collaborate on their work openly and honestly. The team puts in place some other rituals to help them bond, including a monthly award for the biggest achievement and a post-weekend catch-up to share what they got up to.
6. Don’t shy away from conflict, instead manage it effectively
Conflict is an inevitable part of life, and that extends to managing a team too.
Many managers try their hardest to avoid conflict, but that’s a mistake. Sometimes, conflict can cause positive sparks, leading to creative ideas and innovative solutions, so it’s all about managing rather than avoiding it.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Be prepared for when relationships go south. When conflicts arise, the best managers know how to manage and resolve them before they cause irreversible damage. To help your development, take the time to learn a few different conflict management techniques and keep them in your back pocket for when you need them.
Real-life example:
Florian’s team is getting along well, but he knows that conflict will inevitably arise at some point in the future. Florian studies some conflict resolution techniques, including compromise, negotiation, and active listening, to help him get the team back on track if ever he needs it.
Conflict is an inevitable part of life, and that extends to managing a team too.
7. Develop your own leadership and management style
While much of being a good manager is about looking after your team, you also need to be true to yourself. This is essential when it comes to building your own management style that aligns with your own strengths, weaknesses, and ways of working.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Learn from the great managers of the past. To get started, do your own research on management styles. In general, managers either favor a top-down or bottom-up management style based on their own beliefs, the organization's culture, and the team's needs.
- Start with a popular theory — and then make it your own. If you need specific examples, try reading up on Fiedler’s Contingency Theory and the concept of Servant Leadership. Both take opposite views of management and leadership, proving there are many different ways to manage a successful team.
Real-life example:
As a relatively new team manager, Florian researches different management styles. He completes the Fiedler Least Preferred Coworker (LPC) test to determine his natural leadership style.
He also asks the team the qualities and attributes they’d like to see most from him as a manager. He takes this information and decides to take a democratic approach to leadership, focusing on aligning and sharing decision-making across the team.
8. Master delegation to keep your own burnout at bay
With so much on your plate, the key to success as a manager is knowing when to delegate and when to keep them to yourself. If you try to take on too much, you won’t have the capacity to be there for your team and could drive yourself to burnout.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Know your tipping point. Knowing when to delegate and when to complete work yourself is a skill that takes time to get right. Your workload, and that of your team, will constantly change, so there are no clear guidelines on when and how to delegate. To help, start by reading our How to Delegate Like a Pro guide.
- Listen to your body. Burnout is a real risk, especially in high-pressure roles like project management. Delegating will help you achieve the best work-life balance, giving you the headroom to support your team to excel.
Real-life example:
As a project manager, Florian is used to taking on high-pressure tasks and delivering them to tight schedules. As the team expands, he realizes he can’t do this all of the time, and needs to delegate tasks to balance the workload. He prioritizes his tasks and delegates those he can to the team members with the right skills.
9. Lean on collaboration tools to make your job easier
The life of a tightrope-walking manager is a busy one. To help make the tasks a whole lot simpler, the best managers use collaboration tools to keep everything their team does all in one place.
Practical tips and tricks:
- Keep everything your team needs in one place. Scattered documents and files, missing repositories, and multiple tools slow down and frustrate your team. With Planio, your team has everything they need to do their best work right at their fingertips.
Planio includes powerful project and task management (for both Agile and traditional projects), custom workflows, built-in team IM and video chat, cloud storage, and more.
Real-life example:
As Florian gets established with his new team, he realizes he needs a way to keep everything organized. He researches several collaboration tools, with a focus on features to manage projects, store documents, and help communication. He chooses the right tool and sets it up for him and the team.
Don’t fall for these easy-to-make managerial mistakes
Even though management is hard, you can make life easier for yourself by avoiding several common pitfalls.
Let’s look at five of the easiest management mistakes to help you avoid them in the future:
- Don’t shy away from hard decisions. Layoffs, failed projects, and unpopular decisions are all part of managing people. As much as it’s uncomfortable to be the bearer of bad news, avoiding them will mean you lose the respect and trust of those around you.
- Always make time for your team. Many managers — especially project managers — get bogged down in their work and forget to make time for their team. While it takes organization and time management to free up your calendar, if your team feels isolated, they’ll soon become disengaged, stressed, and their productivity will drop.
- Don’t take things too seriously. While we all have a job to do, work isn’t the most important thing in life. As a manager, you must set a serious but friendly tone to help everyone else keep the right balance. Take it too far the other way, and you’ll lose the connection and trust of your team.
- Micromanagement kills great teams. Everyone’s worked for a manager that can’t let go of the details. This is inefficient for you and stifles creativity, autonomy, and a sense of responsibility for team members. Plus, they’ll resent you, which will only end in them leaving the company.
- Hold yourself to the same level of accountability. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ simply doesn’t cut it in the modern workplace. If you want to keep the respect and commitment of your team, you have to hold yourself to the same level of accountability. If you let your own standards slip, it won’t be long until your team notices and begins to question your ability as their manager.
Becoming a great manager is a lifelong endeavor. But the more you practice the necessary hard and soft skills and avoid the common pitfalls, the better you’ll become.
Your team will thank you for becoming a better manager
Becoming a great manager takes a lot of learning, practice, and the pain of making some mistakes. But like many things, the best way to progress is to take small steps, implementing little changes that build up over time.
If you’re new to management, the tips in the guide are a great place to start, helping you get the foundations in place to lead a great team.
But even the best managers need help, and that’s why so many use project management tools such as Planio. With features for time management, task tracking, communication, document management, and much more, it’s a one-stop shop to help you and your team turbocharge your project outputs.
Try Plan.io with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)
