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As a manager, it should be your number one priority to ensure you are delivering the best value and performance expectations for your organization, your team, your stakeholders, and most importantly yourself. To be effective in your job, you need to prioritize setting goals, not only for your business department, but for your own career development. It's essential to set goals that boost your effectiveness as a manager and improve your career prospects as well.
As you will likely be already contemplating the new year and considering your New Year's resolutions, here are five management goals that absolutely need to make your list:
This is a crucial skill to develop, as many employees are bored during team meetings, all hands meetings, and presentations. This is often due to the one-sided nature of these meetings which encourages little interaction or engagement. Or it could be down to a number of factors, such as it being scheduled as a meeting when it could have been an email update, or lack of clarity as to what the impact or relation of the meeting is to the attendees.
You need to focus on switching up your meeting game by introducing interactive elements to break up the time, finding creative ways to make the meetings more fun through icebreakers, and only scheduling meetings when they are absolutely needed, seeking alternatives to meetings where possible. Also, remember to prepare a clear written agenda and distribute to attendees in advance, pace each element of the discussion, and email action items or resources at the end.
Your staff deserve your whole-hearted input and insight. They need to understand how to deliver their work effectively, and equally, you need to understand the key drivers of their performance so that you can manage and motivate them to achieve high performance levels and deliver on set targets. While it may be difficult to find the time, especially if you manage an exceptionally busy area of the business, it is nonetheless critical to your team's collective performance and growth. Try to section out time blocks in your calendar to accommodate these regular one to one meetings in advance. This also enables you to establish trust with your employees and furnishes you with opportunities to coach and develop them in their career journeys. Look for trusted employer evaluations and seek their guidance on how to handle an employee-employer relationship.
Communication is key in almost every aspect of business. As a manager, you'll be communicating with your boss, senior stakeholders, peers, employees, customers, and partners. If you frequently experience misunderstandings at work or have negative relationships with any of the above groups of people, prioritizing developing your communication skills and active listening skills this new year will pay dividends for your career and reduce tensions at work, or the likelihood of missed deadlines and projects being slowed down.
In your role you have control over the morale of your team to a certain extent. We've already seen the negative effects of toxic work environments and how they produce low team engagement, negatively affect employees' mental health, and lower productivity, while representing a bad public image of an employer.
A 2021 Harvard Business Review study showed that approximately 68% of Millennials and 81% of Gen Zers left their jobs due to the negative toll on their mental health. Since Gen Z make up the fastest-growing generation to make up the workforce, this poses a huge talent gap issue and can be problematic for your department's operations. Make it your goal this new year to foster a space where all your employees feel psychologically safe, where they have a degree of flexibility to work in a format that is conducive to their circumstances and mental health, and where team members mutually support and empower each other in a competitive and fun environment.
It should be your mission as a manager to find effective ways of working; observe the way processes are currently carried out and ask yourself, "How can they be streamlined to reduce inefficiencies and save resources? How can I save time and reduce unnecessary effort for my team?" If your processes are unnecessarily complicated, find and implement technology-enabled tools to empower your team. For example, with AI you can help your team augment their work and replace their manual tasks, also known as "work about work," with something more meaningful and creative. You may use tools like a time tracking software for employees to help you manage your employees and their tasks.
Setting meaningful goals as a manager is not an activity reserved for the start of the New Year alone; it should be part of your ongoing strategy for continued professional development. By actively working towards these five goals, you not only expand your managerial skills but are able to contribute significantly to your organization's success.
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Rachel WellsFollow
As the 23-year-old Founder and CEO of Rachel Wells Coaching, I am dedicated to unlocking career and leadership potential for Gen Z and millennial professionals. I am a corporate career... Read More
