Top 10 Staff Management Tips For Effective Leadership

Feb 12, 2018

We’ve all had some pretty terrible bosses in our careers. If we’re lucky, we’ve also had some great leaders.

So what makes a leader effective? What makes someone capable of pulling a group of different people together for a common cause? Surprisingly, there’s no magic formula. There are just some basic things that good leaders do and bad bosses fail at. What are those?

Let’s take a few minutes to look at ten tips for effective leadership.
 

1. Relate

This is a big one. Effective leaders will tell you over and over that having a connection with staff is one of the keys to success.

Let’s start on the opposite side, with a boss who isn’t strong in staff management practices. They might read a book about the importance of relating to their employees and feel like the only way to achieve that is to invite themselves to lunches and after-hours celebrations.

But that’s missing the point. What’s needed is for the leader to see their employees as people. To understand their real-world stresses and know how those affect them personally and professionally.

The ability to relate helps employees to see you not just a “power-mad, bottom-line driven taskmaster”, but someone who has the best interests of the entire company at heart.
 

2. Make Decisions Count

Many businesses are held in paralysis by indecision. Decisions count, especially ones that are affecting people’s employment.

This doesn’t mean you have to agree or disagree with everything, nor do you have to make snap-judgment decisions just to do…something. What it means is that you should be decisive. Make a decision based on the facts, and the trust you have in your senior staff, and then follow the next tip.
 

3. Provide Support

How many ideas fail because the team at the top thought that making the decision was the most important part? One could argue that it’s actually much lower down the importance scale.

Making a decision isn’t good for anything unless you can also provide the resources to support that decision. Time, manpower, money, resources – if you’re going to make a decision, you need to provide the materials needed to make that decision a success.
 

4. Admit Failure

That’s a tall order in life, let alone the workplace where everyone is looking to you for guidance and leadership. But, by showing that you can own up to a mistake and create a path from it, you’re laying the groundwork for employees to do the same.

In fact, science has shown us that when you make a mistake, your brain actually grows. When you admit that mistake, your business may grow as well.
 

5. Surround Yourself With the Best

You may not personally like an employee for any number of reasons; they talk too much, you don’t like their politics or they eat odd foods!

Everyone has quirks. A good leader can overlook those to see the employee’s true strengths. For instance, that person who annoys you because of how their cubicle is decorated may, in fact, be the best at what they do in the company hands-down. So which is the more important fact about them for the company?

Being strong a strong leader means overlooking the personal idiosyncrasies of an employee. It means setting aside any personal biases to build a team and help others become their best.

Sometimes that even means having people with differing opinions on business practices or company direction. Diverse viewpoints can help expand your options.
 

6. It’s Staff Management, Not Reality TV

Encouraging a diversity of opinion can be a good asset to any team when that diversity is allowed to be engaged and nourished. Too often a bad boss will let diversity be a tool which is used to divide a team or create chaos.

Diversity should be celebrated as it forces people to think outside their normal channels. When we’re pushed outside of our comfort zones, great things can happen.
 

7. Let Your People Work

You may know this as a different management technique – delegating. It’s easy to say that you’ll let people work, but sometimes it’s hard to do.

I suppose it’s the human nature aspect of management, you want something done and you want it done right, so you do it. That creates problems for the issue at hand and for the greater good of the company.

In the end, management that is too hands-on will also end up costing you good employees. People want to work, especially when they are passionate about what they do. If they’re constantly being held back because you don’t give them an opportunity to excel, they’ll move on.

Not delegating also beats up morale. Employees are less likely to want to work when they know that the boss won’t give them a chance to solve a problem.

Great leaders are most effective when they trust their people. Hire good people and give them the freedom to do great work.
 

8. Set Clear Goals

Everyone wants the company to succeed. But what does that success look like to you?

Success goals need to be clear and achievable for everyone involved. Move your plans from aspiration to the attainable, particularly when there are compensation benefits and bonuses involved.

Clearly and directly setting goals gives everyone a common win to shoot for.
 

9. Want Employees to Succeed

Training should be ongoing and impactful. Give your employees the tools and knowledge to succeed, and then give them more.

Some managers worry that in doing so they’re just training the employee for their next job. That may be the case for a few, but the majority of employees will put that investment right back into their work, be more productive, and happier.
 

10. Communicate

This should be obvious, but, sadly, many fail at leadership because they are poor communicators. That’s always been an issue for businesses, but in this info-centric world, it’s taken a new place of importance.

People could work anywhere, yet they’ve chosen your company. They have a vested interest in its success, yet managers leave them out of the flow of information.

Communication, at all levels, breeds success. From your position, you need to communicate a clear vision for the company and the way that you (collectively) can achieve that vision.

Sharing information means that everyone is starting from a common base point. It also allows for new ways of thinking and succeeding.

 


 

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