Mind Tools for Managers

100 Ways to be a Better Boss

James Manktelow, Julian Birkinshaw

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119374473
• eBook ISBN: 9781119374374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The manager's must-have guide to excelling in all aspects of the job

Mind Tools for Managers helps new and experienced leaders develop the skills they need to be more effective in everything they do. It brings together the 100 most important leadership skills—as voted for by 15, 000 managers and professionals worldwide—into a single volume, providing an easy-access solutions manual for people wanting to be the best manager they can be. Each chapter details a related group of skills, providing links to additional resources as needed, plus the tools you need to put ideas into practice. Read beginning-to-end, this guide provides a crash course on the essential skills of any effective manager; used as a reference, its clear organization allows you to find the solution you need quickly and easily.

Success in a leadership position comes from results, and results come from the effective coordination of often competing needs: your organization, your client, your team, and your projects. These all demand time, attention, and energy, and keeping everything running smoothly while making the important decisions is a lot to handle. This book shows you how to manage it all, and manage it well, with practical wisdom and expert guidance.

• Build your ideal team and keep them motivated
• Make better decisions and boost your strategy game
• Manage both time and stress to get more done with less
• Master effective communication, facilitate innovation, and much more

Managers wear many hats and often operate under a tremendously diverse set of job duties. Delegation, prioritization, strategy, decision making, communication, problem solving, creativity, time management, project management and stress management are all part of your domain. Mind Tools for Managers helps you take control and get the best out of your team, your time, and yourself.

Part I
Know and Manage Yourself

Chapter 1
Know Yourself

Leadership is about influencing people, and a leader is someone who attracts others to follow them. So, if you want to become a more effective leader, you should start by putting yourself in the shoes of those people who work for you. What makes you worth following? Why would they want to be led by you?

Some leaders do this by formulating and communicating an inspiring vision to give people a sense of purpose in their work. It's great if you can do this, but the reality is that many leaders are not bold, charismatic visionaries. If you think about leaders you have worked for, some may have been like this, but others were probably quietly efficient people who got things done without a lot of fuss.

A more universal characteristic of effective leaders is that they are authentic: They bring a human touch to their work, they play to their strengths, and they are highly self-aware. To make the same point in reverse, we can all spot a boss who is faking it – someone who is trying to be the larger-than-life, charismatic leader that they have read about in business magazines. These types of people are a big turn-off, not just because they seem phony but also because they are unpredictable and hard to read, which makes our jobs more difficult. We would much prefer a boss whom we can relate to, who struggles with difficult decisions, who isn't always perfect.

This notion of authenticity is central to our current understanding of effective business leadership. It provides a good starting point for the book because it reminds us that, even though being a good boss is ultimately about understanding and enabling others so they can do their best work, the ability to do this rests on a deep understanding of ourselves. Simply stated, good bosses have high levels of self-awareness, and as a result, they are able to reflect on and develop their own personal skill sets, which makes them more effective over time.

This chapter describes seven ways to help you know yourself better, to help you become more self-aware, and to help you become an authentic leader. We first describe a well-known framework for understanding your personality in the workplace (#1), then we develop two techniques for assessing your personal strengths (#2) and setting goals (#3). Next, we describe ways of improving self-confidence (#4) and self-awareness (#5). Finally, we propose two techniques for self-development – the notions of cognitive restructuring (#6) and growth mindset (#7).

1. Understand Your Own Personality and Manage Accordingly (The Big Five Personality Model)

Have you ever worked in a role that didn't suit your personality? And have you ever managed people who put in a huge amount of effort but just didn't have the right mindset for the work they did? This can be an unhappy, low performance situation for all involved, and it's why it's so important to understand your own personality – and to shape the way you manage accordingly.

One way of avoiding these situations is to be aware of and use the big five personality model, which addresses what researchers call the big five dimensions of personality:

• Openness – your desire for new knowledge and experience, your appreciation of art and beauty, and your creativity.
• Conscientiousness – how much care you take with things and how hard you work. This brings together factors such as industriousness, self-discipline, competence, dutifulness, orderliness, and your sense of duty.
• Extraversion – how sociable you are. Are you warm, enthusiastic, and gregarious in social situations, and does being in a crowd fill you with energy? Or do you find yourself drained by social contact with new people?
• Agreeableness – your friendliness and kindness to others. This includes factors such as compassion, altruism, trust, politeness, modesty, and straightforwardness.
• Neuroticism – how volatile you are and how far you are in control of your emotions. It also takes into account factors such as hostility, impulsiveness, anxiety, self-consciousness, and depression.

The big five model is useful because it's actionable and because there are plenty of online tests available for it – use the second URL below to try one. So how should you use the results?

If you find that your conscientiousness is low, you need to take firm action – if you don't change this, you are not going to get far in your career because people won't be able to trust you to get things done.

Similarly, low levels of agreeableness and high levels of neuroticism are going to make you unsettling to work with, particularly in high-stress workplaces. There are strategies you can learn to manage these things (for example, see #4).

Introverts can often bring deep thinking and calm reflection to situations, but many twenty-first-century workplaces favor a faster, team-oriented, extroverted approach. Introverts need to adapt to this or find situations and roles that better suit the way they prefer to work.

Finally, greater openness is generally a good thing in the workplace. There are situations where a low level of openness may be useful: For example, we sometimes need people to make sure that rules are followed. However, if you have a low score on this dimension, you will probably want to work on trying out new experiences and ways of thinking.

Once you've used the test, think about what you have learned from it, and make appropriate plans to address these learning points.

Find out more about the big five model, and discover strategies for addressing disadvantageous scores:	http://mnd.tools/1-1
Take an online big five personality test (free):	http://mnd.tools/1-2

Source: Adapted from Judge et al. 2013. Reproduced with permission of the American Psychological Association.

2. Understand and Make Better Use of Your Personal Strengths (Personal SWOT Analysis)

We are most likely to succeed in life if we use our talents to their fullest extent and if we understand and address our weaknesses. SWOT analysis is a popular tool for looking at an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (#85). It works just as well on a personal level.

To use it, start by looking at your strengths. What skills, certifications, or connections do you have that other people don't have? What do you do particularly well, and what resources can you access that other people can't? What achievements are you proudest of, and what strengths contributed to these? And what do other people, particularly your boss and your coworkers, think you are uniquely good at?

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Tip

If you're struggling to identify strengths, consider using the online StrengthsFinder and VIA assessments. You can access these using the URLs on the next page.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author Biographies
• Introduction
• Part I: Know and Manage Yourself
• Part II: Manage Tasks, and Get Things Done
• Part III: Work with and Manage Other People
• Part IV: General Commercial Awareness
• Appendix: Survey Methodology
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement