TEN FACTS ABOUT SUCCESSFUL MANAGERS

MANAGERIAL SKILLS AND HABITS


Every field of human endeavor needs great leaders and managers; great organizations are willing to pay what it takes to get good managers; you too can be a successful one only if you are ready to work on yourself. The following are the identified characteristics of successful mangers under three basic categories.

A. Basic knowledge and information that managers must have or may need to use in making decisions and taking action.

1. COMMAND OF BASIC FACTS: Successful managers know what’s what in
their organization. They have a command of such basic facts as goals and plans (long -and –short –term), product knowledge, who’s who in the organization, the roles and relationship between various departments, their own job and what is expected of them. If they don’t have all this information at hand, they know where to get it when they need it


2 RELEVANT PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE: This quality includes
technical knowledge, (e.g., production technology), marketing techniques, engineering knowledge, relevant legislation, sources of finance, and knowledge of basic background management principles and theories (e.g., planning, organization, and control).

Special skills and attributes that directly affect behavior and performance.

3. CONTINUING SENSITIVITY TO EVENTS: Succesful managers’sensitivity
to events enables them to tune into what is going on around them. They open themselves up to hard information (such as figures and facts) and to soft information(such as the feelings of others.).Managers with this sensitivity respond appropriately to situations as they arise.


4. PROACTIVE INCLINATION TO RESPOND PURPOSEFULLY TO
EVENTS: Effective managers have goals to achieve rather than merely
responding to demand. They plan carefully in advance, but they also respond
emergencies .When making such responses, effective managers consider
long term aims and goals. Less successful managers respond to pressures
in relatively uncritical ways. This ability includes qualities such as seeing a
job through, being dedicated, having a sense of mission, and taking
responsibility for things that happen rather than passing the buck.


5. ANALYTICAL, PROBLEM-SOLVING AND DECISION/JUDGEMENT-
MAKING SKILLS: Managers concern themselves with decision making
skills. Managers concern themselves with decision making. Therefore, they must
develop judgment –making skills, including the ability to cope with uncertainty.
they need also to strike a balance between allowing subjective feelings to guide
them without completely throwing out objective logic.

6. SOCIAL SKILLS AND ABILITIES: Managers need interpersonal skills to
communicate, delegate, negotiate, resolve conflict, persuade, sell, use, and
Respond to authority and power.

Personal Qualities:

7. EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE: Emotional stress arises in managerial positions
positions because they work in situations that involve authority, leadership
power, interpersonal conflict, meeting deadlines, all with some degree of
uncertainty and ambiguity. Successful managers need resiliency to cope.

8. MENTAL AGILITY AND CREATIVITY: Mental agility includes the
ability to grasp problems quickly, to think of several things at once, to switch
rapidly from one situation to another, to see quickly the whole situation
(rather than ponderously plough through all its components), and to “think
on one’s facts”. Creativity means the ability to come up with new responses and to
recognize useful approaches. It involves not only having fresh ideas, but also the
ability to recognize good ideas when they come from other sources.

9. BALANCED LEARNING HABITS AND SKILLS: Successful managers learn
independently. They take responsibility for the rightness of what they learn, rather
passively depending on an authority figure or expert. Successful managers can
think abstractly as concretely. They relate concrete ideas to abstract ones (and vice
versa) rather quickly. This ability sometimes known as a “helicopter mind”
enables them to generate theories and to develop their own practical ideas.

10. SELF – AWARENESS: The way managers view their roles affects their values,
feelings, strengths and weaknesses, an a host of other personal factors. Therefore,
we must help them be aware of their abilities and the part they play in determining
leadership behavior.


KEY WORDS: managers, professional, skills, abilities, success, qualities, achievement, marketing.