The 5 Steps to be Promoted to Manager this year

If you as an employee too want to earn higher salary without causing a rise in cost for your employer, you need to handle more responsibilities and take more risks.  This means that you have to be promoted to a level that has more managerial and leadership roles, i.e. manager.  In fact all employees that are not already managers now should aim to get promoted in 2014, and here are the 5 steps:

1. Change Your Thinking from Employee into Management.  Typical employee thinking is 'What's In It For Me?' whereas management thinking is 'What's in it for the Stakeholders?'  Also, management thinking is about win-win abundance, whereas employee thinking is about win-lose scarcity. Most importantly, management thinking is long term business sustainability, while employee thinking is about yearly increment. 
2. Take on some roles outside your usual role.  Like volunteer to look after certain issues or best take over some of your boss's work.
3. Learn skills on 4 critical areas of management: People Management, Teambuilding, Leadership and Communication. People Management is about making people better than themselves, whereas teambuilding is about getting things done with less people.  Leadership is about doing the impossible and communication is about involving and influencing people to work.  You can refer to here for the list of things to know in these 4 areas.
4. Take Risks and Make Decisions to Solve some Problems.  To take risk, you must be ready to be wrong. To make decisions, you need to be decisive.  To solve problems, you need to analyse things critically but also consider the human side of things.  Your final decision should be one that takes care of all stakeholders, i.e., everybody benefits. 
5. Go to the Ground, Get Really Dirty and Understand Thoroughly Things from the Ground Up.  Do not stay in the office and just look at reports, for they are not real and often hide the things that you really must know.  

By Andy Ng, Chief Trainer at Asia Trainers, whose course on How to Be a Better Manager has now reached countries of Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tanzania and soon Ghana. Other related articles in management:

1. The 5 Things that Everyone Look For in a Manager
2. 5 Common Myths and Truths of Management
3. Bosses are the problems and here are the solutions
4. Becoming a High Value Middle Manager
5. How to Delegate Effectively
6. 10 Easy Ways to Get People to Change Happily and Willingly
7. The 5 Most Inspiring Words and Phrases that People to Die For You
8. The 7 Praises that Actually De-Motivate People Badly
9. People are not stupid, they're just deluded and ignorant