You Can Be a Rock-Star Manager With These Positive Management Skills
Optimize team management in minutes with ManageBetter. Start your free trial now and join Uber and Microsoft in boosting performance, gathering insights, and generating reviews—all AI-powered, no writing required.
What is Positive Leadership?
Positive leaders are at the top of their game, standing out above all of the rest.
Imagine a bell curve where the majority of leaders land somewhere in the middle. Positive leaders are the select few on the right tail of the curve, making up the highest percentiles.
What does positive leadership look like in action? It looks like leaders who care, who empower their teams, and who support their employees.
They excel because they employ positive management skills that help lift up and energize their team.
Positive management skills include:
Inspirational motivation
Emotional intelligence
Coaching and supporting
Crystal clear communication
Modeling behavior
Positive Management Skills
Inspirational Motivation
Managers are highly successful when they invoke a sense of awe and inspiration in followers.
Make yourself worthy of being looked up to and your team will want to to follow wherever you lead. Inspire them to move and act upon the most pressing needs to achieve goals and move the mission forward.
Don’t let the hum-drum of routines allow people to settle, bring in some inspiration!
Emotional Intelligence
Sometimes referred to as showing empathy, emotional intelligence means you recognize and manage your own emotions as well as the emotions of other people.
This ability helps you develop interpersonal relationships and draw upon the shared bonds you have with others.
You don’t have to be a mind reader, just use emotional intelligence to get a sense of how to best approach things with your people.
Coaching and Supporting
The ability to coach people is not a skill that comes naturally to everyone. Great leaders have built up this important skill and realize how imperative it is to group performance.
Employees will need your support. Not just the basic level of support that is expected from every manager, but an understanding that you stand behind them and will be there when they need you most.
When you notice that someone is struggling or could be doing something better, don’t hesitate to coach them. Help them recognize and understand the issue and guide them as they work out next steps
Crystal Clear Communication
There is only one way to get things done quickly and efficiently. That is to be extremely clear and direct in your communication.
People want to know what you want and how you want it done. Leaving things open to interpretation just makes room for error.
Be clear, concise and direct when communicating instructions, feedback, or pretty much anything.
Modeling Behavior
Quite simply, be a role model! People learn best from you when you show them what you want rather than just tell them.
You can give all sorts of feedback and expect reports to act upon it, but they are most likely to do so if they have a visible example to work from.
Maybe you are not necessarily the role model in every case. In those times, find a teammate that you want your employee to emulate. Point out the behaviors that you admire in that person and ask the other employee to observe how they do things.
Sharpen Your Leadership Edge: Join 3,000+ executives receiving weekly, actionable insights from industry experts. Subscribe free to The Thoughtful Leader and elevate your team's performance.
