Why your managers are likely failing you

One of the hardest business lessons that business owners must learn is that choosing someone in your company to step up and be a manager is no easy thing. Yet, the entire future of your business depends on your choices. Being able to manage is a mindset that people either have or they don’t. You can teach someone to be a great manager but they must have the mindset for it to begin with. So few people do including many who actually founded and started the company.

What often times destroys an otherwise thriving business is bad management. The challenge seems that too many businesses tend to take who they consider their “best” employee and promote them into a position of management. They mistakenly believe that because someone is good at their job where they are, that they will somehow make a good leader and manager. This rarely works out.

Studies on this have been done and, not long ago, even search god Google did their own research into what must be done to be considered a good and effective manager. This is what much of that research has discovered:

• Finding the correct mindset is the most important thing. If they have that mindset then they will be an exceptional teacher and coach. All employees, even the best ones, need to be managed properly if the strategies and logistics for growing the company are to be carried out effectively. New employees need to be trained and brought up to speed while veterans need to hone skills and develop new ones as they begin to realize the big picture and overall vision of the company.
• The greatest leaders, coaches and managers to ever live all have one thing in common: they never micromanage. They know that micromanagement is counterproductive and the mindset of an obsessive and controlling individual. Micromanagement has never worked and will never work. All it does is destroy motivation and initiative which, in the end, brings productivity to a screeching halt. The best managers start with the best and the brightest people they can assemble for a project and then empower them to do what they do best. They never focus on the negative and, instead, play to everyone’s strengths.
• Because the best managers are effective communicators, people want to work with them. When all of these things begin to come together then production and morale are high and, before you know it, your company has grown beyond even your most conservative imagination.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer