Terrific managers do what others don’t or won’t, so keeping the business moving forward, says Dr William Holden, chairman of Sewells, in his latest installment of Sewells’ series with AM-online, providing monthly insights into people and performance management to assist automotive retail leaders to encourage, motivate and guide their dealership teams more effectively.
Let’s face it, managers, and particularly middle managers, are the organisation ‘engines’ and ‘gearboxes’ (no pun intended) that turn strategic intentions into performance and results.
Nevertheless, somewhat alarmingly, we’re finding many middle managers have lost the flexibility to be effective at making decisions, becoming masterful at creative problem solving, or planning and prioritising in a way that turns ideas into motion and spectacular results.
The above are the fundamentals of management; if we will’t master these, we’ll never find a way to master the job of managing.
After we get them right, we can have maximum impact by being a terrific manager.
So how will we get it right then? Listed below are 5 key things to contemplate:
1) Terrific managers do what others don’t or won’t. How briskly and easily the ‘engine’ runs depends upon the deliberate and proactive selections they make every day, again and again a day.
Have conversations others delay and don’t let busy work get in the best way of truly necessary tasks. Give attention to “the vital few”, not “the trivial many”.
2) Management is a social act. Due to this fact, conversations are a manager’s currency to generate excellent, trusting relationships that bring out the perfect in others. If we erode relationships, we erode results. 
We’d like to change into a low-tech communicator, switch off our mobiles, unplug our PC/laptop and have more face-to-face time with our team.
3) We’d like to enhance the business by constructing talent and partnerships. Selling – to internal or external customers – is usually a push process, but probably the most powerful strategy to expand our opportunities and impact is thru creating pull.
Pull is rather more powerful … and sustainable.
4) Great managers know that point is precious and expensive. We’d like to make every conversation, every meeting, every internal memorandum and each email engaging, exciting even.
Enliven and explain. We must always take every opportunity to be highly visible and aware of questions, ideas, suggestions etc from the team. “You said, we did” at all times works well.
5) We’d like to weed out those that can’t or won’t perform. There’s nothing worse than good team members seeing perpetually poorly performing people “getting away with it.”
After we apply these, watch productivity undergo the roof as our work relationships change into deeper and stronger.
Allow us to know the way you get on.
Writer: Dr Will Holden, chairman, Sewells
This Article First Appeared At www.am-online.com
