10 Skills All Effective Managers Have

What makes an effective manager? Learn about 10 skills all effective managers have that make them successful, effective and respected. Included are tips, frameworks, and where to get additional information.  There are so many skills need to be an effective manager – those managers that get a lot done through their teams, keep their teams motivated through thick and thin, create the right environment for individual and team success, develop the skills of their team members so they can do more, manages all the people relationships and deals calmly with the pressures involved. Unsurprisingly these effective managers are the ones that get noticed and are consistently promoted.  One of the most important skills of an effective manager is self-awareness. If you don’t know what your strengths and weaknesses are, how your beliefs impact decisions and actions, it makes it much harder to learn and improve how you deal with other people.  Another vital skill all effective managers have is building and maintaining relationships. Managing relationships are at the core of management.  How to be a great manager absolutely includes setting clear expectations with all team members, stakeholders, and your manager. If you don’t know what is expected, how can you or your team members deliver against it.  How to be an effective manager also includes having great communication skills. Being able to get your message across, persuade, deal with emotionally charged situations calmly and being able to read other peoples non-verbal clues are all essential communication skills.  Highly effective managers all spend a lot of their time educating their team members and passing on the skills they have accumulated. This helps their team become more and more effective and be able to deliver increasingly impressive results.  The qualities of an effective manager very much include great delegation skills. There is a lot more to delegation that many people think. It is not enough just to tell someone to do a task or project. You have to support them, check up on them, get them the right resources and so on. Planning ahead is another key characteristics of an effective manager. There are nearly always so many moving parts in managing a team, a set of projects, tasks, requests and so that good planning skills is a must.  Problem solving is a daily occurrence for an effective manager. They solve problems personally AND help their team members solve problems.  And finally, effective decision making is another key skill, particularly being able to adapt their decisions making style to different situations and problems.