How do you keep yourself relevant as a manager?

How do you keep yourself relevant as a manager?

Far too many managers rely on “being born” as a manager. Most of us rely on our skill sets gathered through our experiences and end up considering ourselves as being great leaders. Maybe it is true and maybe we are only mediocre. It might be great employee’s driving the works or a lucky strike. Maybe our surroundings are not being honest and telling us where to improve or maybe we are as great as we think we are.

How do we truly know when we are great or mediocre?

The skills as a manager is, like with any sport, much reliant on the amount of hours you put into training. A wide range of leaders carefully neglects this effort. They hold on to previous successes and forget why they achieved greatness.
This isn’t a surprise to me after being in the business for more than 25 years. How can any manager continuously improve when most managers are not expected to get any education at all? Short-term education in any specialist job is often at least 2 years of training to start with and followed by continuous learning.

Why not strive for more?

Don’t employee’s deserve to better themselves? Are we so caught up with our current successes and let them get the better of us? Are we so great that we can’t improve?

The best managers strive too be a little bit better every single day.

They do it because the job as a manager and leader is one of the most complex jobs that exist. They know better than anyone that their skill sets and relevance will decrease if they aren’t attentive and aware at all times.

You are leading and managing people, so find out what “people” is, how they function inside and out and what you can do to support people to be the best they can be. That is your job and the goal of you having that job is, that you are the guarantor of long-term productivity, performance, creativity, innovation and continuous improvements.

 

Study what great managers do, learn on the job and receive feedback from people around you, and especially from your employees. If they trust you enough to tell you their honest opinion, you will learn a lot. On-the-job training is by far the best learning of all. However, in between you need inspiration to add more perspectives to increase your personal performance as a leader and manager.