Are You Making These 5 Mistakes in Your Management?

A wise manager learns from his mistakes.  He know that management has more leverage than others, and a wise manager will produce much more results than 100 hardworking staff.   As covered in our courses How to Be a Better Manager (details at here) and other courses, the following are the 5 most common mistakes made by managers:

1. Too Close and Cannot See Things from a Distance.  

As a manager, you need to be close on the ground, but you have to see things from a distance to get the right perspective.  This skill is called equanimity, which is an equalness of mind not affected by experience and feelings. Like if you need to discipline your staff, you need to be tough and not soft-hearted.  Also, getting too close to the staff may encourage some of them to climb over your head

2.  No Clear Targets for Your People.  

People do not work towards grand visions, goals and mission but clear targets that they can relate to everyday.  The best way to do this is to have a KPI (Key Performance Indicators) system whereby you solve problems using pre-set goals and objectives.

3.  Being Shaky and having Blurred Visions.  

A manager must stand firm and cannot be shaken by negativities from people.  He must see things that people cannot see, and have visions that are clear and transparent.  Only then can he motivate his people and not demotivate people (read here for Demotivating People article)

4.  Seeing things through Wide-Angle Lens and not enough focus.  

To solve problems, a manager must focused on the cause of the problem, not the symptoms of the problem.  And he must focused on the solutions, not the problems.  The best way to solve problems is to adopt a systems approach where you first look for systems problems before blaming people

5.  Giving Up Too Early.  

This must be the biggest failure of managers where they resign (and change jobs) or resign to fate. They somehow conclude that things cannot be changed and they just accept whatever is the situation.  In short, they give up their dreams, goals and aspirations and flow with the mediocre.  As what Lao Zi said, often it is at the most difficult moment that we have to push through and persevere if we want to achieve breakthrough.  If not, there will be breakdowns!

By Andy Ng, whose new course How to be an Effective Manager is confirmed on 30 December 2014 Tuesday 9 am to 5 pm.  Limit to 30 seats, and you can register via online at here or email to andy@asiacoachingtraining.com or call 6225-1784 (8 am to 8 pm daily).  Related articles:

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• How to be happy at work with karmic management
• Stop managing and start coaching
• Maximising Your PIC Claims legally
• Five Ways to be a Great Boss