
Being the boss is difficult. You know this and you may have been looking for ways to improve your skills. Your wait is over! In the book "Mind Tools for Managers", James Manktelow and Julian Birkinshaw give a set of lessons that will leverage your results with a more effective leadership.
The effective boss is able to inspire people with an attractive set of social skills and stay on top of practical details to enable the team to achieve its goals. Encouragemen t and motivation is essential to achieve it!
Most managers are not properly trained for the job, but now every manager can be the kind of boss who makes the difference.
Got interested to overcome your obstacles and become a reference in leading teams? Stay with us in this summary and discover how!
Launched in 2018, "Mind Tools for Managers" was written by James Manktelow and Julian Birkinshaw and is a tool belt for bosses - those pragmatic people who need to get the best job out of their teams in imperfect circumstances.
Based on research with 15242 business leaders worldwide, each chapter provides succinct and step-by-step explanations of each skill, 100 in total, so you can become a better boss.
James Manktelow wrote, edited and contributed to more than seven books and e-books on management and leadership, including "Manage Your Time" and "Manage Stress". He is also founder and CEO of MindTools. com and a writer.
Julian Birkinshaw is the author of fourteen books, including "Fast / Forward", "Becoming a Better Boss" and "Reinventing Management".
In addition, he is professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, dean of management programs and academic director of the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of the London Business School.
If you want to be a better manager, or even become one, here is an easy-to-access solution manual that will show you the way of the stones, so that you can become an excellent manager.
To be a good leader, you need good results. To achieve it, you must have an effective coordination, managing time, your team, clients, among other crucial skills that you will learn here!
Do you have no time to read now? Then download the free PDF and read wherever and whenever you want:
Have you ever worked on a role that was not suited to your personality? Have you ever managed people who worked hard, but didn't have the right mindset for the job they were doing?
James Manktelow and Julian Birkinshaw says that this can be an unfortunate and underperforming situation for everyone involved, which is why it is so important to understand your own personality and shape the way you manage properly.
One way to avoid these situations is to be aware of and use the big five personality model, which addresses what researchers call the five personality dimensions:
The Big 5 model is useful because it is actionable and because there are many online tests available for it. So, how should you use the results?
If you think your conscience is low, you need to act firmly. If you don't change that, you won't get far in your career, because people won't be able to trust you to do things.
Likewise, low levels of pleasantness and high levels of neuroticism will make you uncomfortable to work, especially in high stress workplaces. There are strategies that you can learn to manage this.
After using the test, think about what you have learned from it and make appropriate plans to address these learning points.
There are several useful techniques for identifying things that are going wrong in an organization, and they are very useful. However, there is also a completely different approach - appreciative research - that focuses on what is going well.
For example, imagine that you are running a wellness center and are struggling to keep members. In addition to focus on solving the problems that are causing people to leave, you can ask longtime members what they love about the club.
You can work with your team to actively market these things to attract new members who will appreciate the things you are already doing well.
Appreciative inquiry is often conducted using a 4-D approach - discover, dream, design, and deliver. In this summary of the book "Mind Tools for Managers", we are adding a definition stage, producing 5 D's:
You can help your team members develop self-confidence in the same way that you do with yourself.
In other words, you can help them understand and capitalize on their strengths, set clear goals for the future (including those that will create those strengths), reflect on their past successes, and develop the skills and connections needed to be recognized as the right person for the job.
James Manktelow and Julian Birkinshaw state other things you can do as well:
Just as we need to avoid superficial overconfidence in ourselves, we need to keep our people grounded and help them develop adequate levels of self-confidence.
Do this by giving a lot of feedback and using the approaches described. Also make them aware of the "Dunning-Kruger" effect (the tendency to overestimate our own abilities when our competence is low and to overestimate the abilities of other people when our competence is high).
So, what are your organization's core competencies? You can probably create a long list of things that your company does well. Prahalad and Hamel, two experts on the subject of organizational skills, offer three tests that you can use to separate interesting resources from genuine core competencies:
Often, you will find that your most important competencies are actually bundles of related things, rather than something narrow and specific.
So, how can you use the idea of essential skills to improve your business and advance your own career?
Start by identifying competencies that will make the biggest positive difference for your organization's future and looking for opportunities to develop them further.
From a personal career point of view, it is worth aligning your work and your self-development with the main competencies of your organization.
There's not much point in becoming an in-house expert in an area where your company doesn't particularly care (and may end up outsourcing) when you can use the same amount of effort to develop skills that help you succeed in a highly visible environment.
Going deeper into the question of how to motivate teams and develop leadership, the book "Start with Why", written by Simon Sinek, is ideal for those who aim to inspire others and succeed at work. In this journey, the author highlights the importance of knowing your "why", that is, your purpose and your final mission.
In "The Effective Executive", Peter F. Drucker clarifies that executives can be brilliant, imaginative and informed, yet still be inefficient. Effective executives are systematic. They work hard in the right areas and their results define them. They are knowledge professionals who help the company achieve its goals.
The book "Smart Collaboration", by Heidi K. Gardner, emphasizes the importance of cultivating intelligent collaboration with your employees. Thus, there is a team formed by great professionals aligned in order to expand their horizons, innovate, work as a team and win customer loyalty.
There are many situations where you must take a collaborative approach to negotiation. You are looking for a successful outcome, but you also want to maintain a strong, ongoing relationship with the other person. This is where win-win trading is a great technique to use.
The starting point is to prepare yourself completely. Think about this:
The most important of these steps is where you invent options for mutual gain. Spend a lot of time doing this and you can get results that delight both of you!
Are you ready to apply these skills in your management life? Did you find this content useful for your purpose? Leave your feedback in the comments!
In addition, if you got interested to buy the book's full edition, just click on the image below::