What is a manager?
The word "manager" is Anglo-Saxon. In French, it is used to designate a leader, a team leader or an executive in an organisation. There is then the manager at the head of a project team or a local team and then the manager within a management team who then becomes the "executive".
The team manager leads a team and is the intermediary between the employees and the management. A large part of the motivation of his team rests on him, which is why his role is so important. But being the head of a team is not something you can do overnight. It requires a lot of skills and qualities that can take a long time to achieve.
The qualities of an effective manager
There is no real typical portrait of a good manager. However, certain qualities are essential for a team to flourish. Indeed, the manager can mobilise these qualities:
- Recognising and valuing the work of their employees to motivate them
- Embodying the company's values, highlighting its positivity, giving meaning and importance to team members
- Availability to support the team in its work
- The ability to delegate in order to strengthen autonomy and empower teams; the manager must trust his or her teams and must know how to distribute tasks according to the skills of the members of the team
- The ability to adapt to each team member's personality, so he/she must adapt his/her management according to the profiles
- The ability to communicate with the team to establish a climate of trust and maintain a strong bond with each member
- Organisation to ensure the smooth running of daily tasks, as the manager often has several projects at the same time
- The ability to stand back, manage emotions, stress and detect potential tensions and of course to manage any conflict within the group.
Having these qualities is essential, but the cohesion and leadership of the team must also be felt through practices. The manager has several tools and methods to lead his team successfully:
- The 5, 10, 15, 30 method: this is the minimum cumulative time to be given to employees, i.e. 5 minutes per day, 10 minutes per week, 15 minutes per month, 30 minutes per quarter. This allows the manager to set benchmarks and the employee feels taken care of and listened to.
- The daily meeting: this is a short meeting of less than 10 minutes to review the previous day's tasks and announce the day's tasks in a concise and synthetic manner.
- SMART objectives: Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. Good management means setting objectives that are clear and understood by employees. The manager must therefore make sure that his objectives are SMART.
- The dashboard: this enables the team's performance to be monitored. A dozen or so indicators for employees to follow will be sufficient. These indicators must be linked to the company's strategic objectives and the updating of this table depends on the activity concerned. It is a tool to be used continuously to have an accurate view of the success of each team member
- The annual interview: this meeting allows the manager and the employee to review the past year, future objectives and potential training needs.
These qualities and methods are of course not the only ones available. There are many ways of managing a team in the best possible way and, above all, it is necessary to adapt to each employee. Training for the manager, as well as for the team members, seems to be important to continuously develop the skills of each individual.
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