On paper, management development sounds like a breeze: providing your employees with the opportunity to develop their interpersonal and organisational skills.
The reality is that a manager’s challenge is huge. A manager needs to understand, organise and motivate people to achieve more, better and faster together – all while juggling their own workloads alongside competing demands.
When we replace a lousy manager with a strong one, team performance soars between 13 – 29%. Wondering how to make your managers great? MindGym psychologists has spotted seven talents that can make the difference.
Where are all the great managers?
Management development - an overview
I’m a manager. Get me out of here. Becoming a manager has always been considered the natural course for someone who is progressing in their career. Be good at your job and one day you can help others be good at theirs.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. People management should be viewed as a separate job, or at least as a separate part of a job.
It requires unique skills that don’t necessarily come naturally. And if there hasn’t been a good role model to learn from, we can be left floundering and our direct reports disengaged and in disarray.
The 7 talents of great managers
There are probably as many models for what makes a great manager as there are managers at work today. Some have hundreds of different management development tactics for managers to strive to – and companies create complicated competency frameworks to match.
Based on findings from over 100 peer reviewed studies, we’ve uncovered the seven key talents that describe the skills that all managers need to lead a team in today’s – and tomorrow’s – world.
At the centre of it all sits the ability to form, redefine, repair and maintain strong working relationships. This skill will multiply or dilute the effects of the other six talents. A manager with strong working relationships gets a disproportionate return on their efforts in the other areas.
How to apply it
To get the most out of your managers it’s important to remember what typically goes wrong in a workplace and what to do to get it right.