There’s a huge difference between a good manager and a great manager. The difference lies in subtle details and skills, but they have a huge impact on your career. By developing good management skills, not only will you make your job easier but will also help you advance your career.
According to the World Economic Forum, People Management is among the top 10 skills needed for the fourth industrial revolution. Even if many business processes and operations get automated, the requirement for competent management professionals will increase because that’s something out of automation’s grasp.
This brings forth the question, “How can I improve my management skills?”
To answer this question, we have assorted the following tips and methods. They will help you cultivate the required behavior and skills for becoming a great manager:
How to Improve Your Management Skills?
1. Improve Your Decision-making Skills
Decision-making skills refer to the ability to select between two or more alternatives to get the optimal result.
Whether you manage a team or lead an entire department, you’ll need to know how to analyze business problems and formulate plans to solve them. You must be able to consider different factors affecting your decision and the things that will get affected by your decision.
You can strengthen your decision-making abilities by enhancing your problem-solving and leadership abilities. Start analyzing small problems and see if you can find the best solution for them. Decision-making skills take time to improve, so you’ll need a lot of patience while improving them.
2. Develop self-awareness
What separates great managers from good ones is a high level of self-awareness. Self-awareness plays a key role in multiple avenues of your daily tasks and duties.
It is directly correlated to your emotional intelligence, which is simply your ability to identify your and other people’s emotions. To become an excellent manager, you’ll need good emotional intelligence.
Professionals with good emotional intelligence would handle difficult situations better than those who lack this ability. Self-awareness will help you identify your reaction to your emotions, and you can start observing those reactions in others to determine their emotional state.
An amazing way to enhance self-awareness is meditation, as its primary goal is to help a person observe and understand their innate desires, behavior, and actions.
3. Cultivate Trust
Harvard Business Review found in research that employees working at companies with high trust have more energy at work, less stress, and higher productivity.
Trust is a vital aspect of people management. Hence, you should focus on developing deeper and more engaging relationships with your team. You can do so by having small talk before meetings and striving to learn more about their lives outside of the office.
It will also develop empathy among your team members and enhance their camaraderie, another important quality needed for a team to succeed.
4. Communicate Effectively
As a manager, you must know how to communicate properly with your team. This role requires you to tackle business problems with your team, and as a leader, you’d have to ensure they function smoothly.
To fortify communication, conduct meetings regularly. They don’t always have to be meticulous, but they would ensure that every team member is on the same page as others.
Provide updates and reiterate your plans with your employees continually.
Read: When is the right time for me to get an MBA
5. Work on Personal Branding
Everyone has a personal brand. Your personal brand is the image or impression people have of you in their minds.
You should have as much control over your personal brand as possible. By controlling how others view you and your work, you’d be better able to manage your team.
Developing a personal brand isn’t as tricky as it sounds. You should start with working on your appearance. What kind of a manager do you want to seem like? Do you want to be a passionate and creative professional or a trustworthy and authoritative manager?
Be cognizant of the tone and the words you use while communicating with people. Be mindful of what you share on social media since your potential employers also look at your social media presence before recruiting you.
How Do We Help?
There are a lot of things you must do to improve your management skills. It’s a constant effort. This is why becoming a good manager can seem pretty daunting without the necessary guidance and support.
The most efficient way to enhance your management skills is by having a mentor. A mentor will identify your weaknesses and help you work on them to make you a better-equipped professional.
If you want better results, you can opt to get an MBA. Master of Business Administration or MBA courses are explicitly made to develop strong management expertise in students and prepare them for the future’s leadership roles.
At upGrad, we offer a Global MBA program with Liverpool Business School. An MBA course will provide you with the required guidance and give you a structured curriculum to develop these management skills.
Checkout: How completing an MBA degree help grow your career?
Highlights of our program
Our Global MBA course is an 18-month long program that offers six industry-relevant specialization tracks – Marketing, Finance, Analytics, Operations, HR, Strategy & Leadership.
upGrad has learners from 85+ countries across the globe, so you’ll be a part of a global learning experience. As you interact with students and professionals from different countries and backgrounds, you will not only learn new things related to specific domains, but also learn about multiple cultures. All in all, It will be a wholesome growth experience for you.
The program includes over 40 live learning sessions, 20+ projects, and a 4-month long industry project. It aims to enhance your management skills and expertise by covering the following subjects – Business Communication, Sales and Distribution Management, Marketing Management, Market Research, Financial Accounting, Corporate Finance, Operations & Supply Chain Management, HR Management, Business Strategy, Business Leadership, and Business Analytics, to name a few.
The program is created for mid-level managers, senior management executives, and entrepreneurs who want to make professional progress. On completion, you’ll receive dual alumni status of LBS and IMT, Ghaziabad.
Following are some essential features of our Global MBA:
Minimum eligibility
You must have a bachelor’s degree with a minimum of 50% marks and at least two years of full-time work experience to be eligible for this program.
360-degree Career Support
Personalized industry mentorship – Students receive one-on-one mentorship on their desired domain and obtain personalised feedback on their course progress. Each student has a dedicated career mentor who helps monitor their weekly job application targets and guide them on the career transition journey.
Resume review – upGrad’s dedicated mentors offer highly specific inputs on your resume structure and content.
Company-specific preparation – upGrad promises company-specific to learners by granting them access to a curated pool of interview resources tailored for particular companies. This enables students to get interview-ready for their desired company.
Dedicated mentorship
Earlier, we discussed the importance of having a mentor and how they can help you cultivate the required habits to develop good management skills. In our MBA program, you will receive guidance from industry mentors and expert faculty members.
You’ll get one-on-one feedback on your submissions and personalized feedback to help you improve. During the live sessions, you can resolve doubts and ask important questions to industry experts.
The dedicated mentorship will help you thrive as a management professional as you’ll learn faster and more efficiently.
Conclusion
You can improve your management skills by working on your personal brand, enhancing your communication skills, and sharpening your decision-making abilities by solving everyday challenges (issues or challenges you face in your daily routine).
Getting an MBA will greatly help you in this pursuit, so we recommend checking out the course we mentioned above. If you have any thoughts on this article, do let us know in the comments.
Should you pursue an Executive Management program to get better jobs in Management?
If you have over 5 years of work experience and are seeking leadership or senior management roles, then an Executive MBA or an EMBA may be the solution because the potential advantages of such a qualification in India hold massive value.
The career prospects of such professionals are greatly enhanced by completing the EMBA. With the rich knowledge that you will gain by pursuing this program and if you keep hanging on to your job, it will not be long before you are sitting in a management position in the company.
What is the advantage of pursuing an Executive MBA?
Most companies in India assign a lot of value to a candidate or an employee with an MBA qualification. Other than that, the course content of Executive MBA programs is wholly designed keeping in mind the fact that it will be experienced working professionals who would be enrolling on these courses. A lot of focus is on the latest industry developments and trends.
Post completing this course, any mid-level employee that had limited knowledge of how businesses functions will be more knowledgeable and be equipped to take up top managerial roles.
What are the course durations of an Executive MBA?
There are various types of Executive MBA’s being offered by educational institutions in India. You may opt for a one year program that is a pretty intensive course running on a very tight schedule. This program is ideal for those candidates who are looking to enhance their talent for absorbing managerial proficiencies in a short span of time. A two year course is a little more relaxed which may suit working professionals.