What Makes a Manager Good? 16 Qualities of a Good Manager (Explained)

Qualities of a Good Manager

What makes a manager good? Being a manager means accepting the responsibilities and authority to execute the given tasks. Every manager needs to have the necessary skills and qualities to achieve organizational interests effectively.

Good managers have the potential to change the future of the organization for the better. The qualities set by managers can make all the difference. Here are 16 qualities of great managers that you can consider to increase your excellency in the management profession.

A Good Leader

A manager should be a good leader. You as a manager should also possess all the necessary qualities of great leaders. Managers do not remain to manage employees only considering the established rules and regulations.

You should be strong enough to guide, motivate, inspire, and provides reasonable feedback and necessary support to make your employees execute the task successfully. A good leader always leads his followers by example. You should set a good example that can influence people to follow you.

Builds Good Relationships

A good manager also holds the quality of making good relationships in the workplace. You should realize that the organization runs with coordination, mutual understanding, and teamwork.

A good relationship is built on trust and understanding. You should be able to build good and productive relationships between employees, management, and different business units.

Related: The 10 Roles of a Manager in an Organization

As a saying goes “Teamwork makes dream work”. You should maintain team spirit in the organization. Build effective teams and be a great team leader.

Emotional Stability

Emotional stability is a part of emotional intelligence. You know, the hardest part of being a human is being a human. We all have the same emotions. We all feel sadness, joy, happiness, anger, fear, and so forth. But how we respond to these emotions defines who we are.

Emotional stability refers to the ability to control different emotions for good reasons. A good manager needs to have stable emotionality.

In the organizational periphery, you need to deal with different conflicts, disputes, and uncertainties that can be from outside factors and employees inside. Emotionally intelligent managers know other emotions and have control over their own and they do not let their emotional feelings control them.

Good Communicator

Being a good communicator is one of the must-have skills of a great manager. Effective communication is the key to transmitting the right information to the right person/place.

It is also a foundation for a strong relationship between management and employees. Managers need to communicate with their employees in a way they feel comfortable.

Today communication does not remain face-to-face you should also be able to use different communication ways like email, chats, body language, gestures, and much more. The right message lets employees to better understand and work as intended by the message.

Good Decision Maker

The right decision is the key to achieving desired goals. Understanding the effects of different organizational units and external factors is essential for good decision-making.

The decision to be good should be executable. Make sure your decisions have the potential to be true in the coming days. Make decisions by a thorough study of the organization’s internal factors and external factors. In doing so SWOT Analysis and PESTLEG Analysis will let you make the right decisions.

Welcome Ideas

Great leaders welcome the ideas of their employees in the formulation and execution of plans. You should realize that 4+5 =9 is not the only solution there can be 1+8=9, 2+7=9, and so forth.

You should make your mind open and accepts the ideas presented by subordinates. When they feel their ideas matter in making plans they have a sense of responsibility, they feel that it is their plan, and are self-motivated to give their best.

Related: What is Participative Management?

Analytical Skills

Being a manager is respectful as well as a complex task. You should be good at analyzing different situations and information within and outside the organization.

Your analytical skills depend upon how effectively you collect information, analyze them, and extract the important ones that really solve the problems. You should be able to read different reports on your organization’s past performance and understand the trend where the organization is going.

Fair Treatment and Evaluation

Everyone deserves respect. You should be fair in treating and evaluating employees’ performance. Because a good manager always appreciated the right employees.

The biases and favoritism should be ignored in the evaluation. You should understand everyone is important and their hard work should be praised.

After evaluation should provide necessary feedback to them, make sure to appreciate the hardworking employees, and give useful suggestions to poor performers.

Also Read: What is Inclusive Workplace?

Transparency

Transparency refers to the visibility of everything that happens.

Employees love to work in a transparent working environment. They want to know what is going on and how they are doing. They want to know the truth. They want you to have transparent with them.

Should realize that your employees are mature persons, they feel happy with the truth even if it hurts instead of fakeness. You should be honest with them and share the truth about them and the organization.

Conflict Management

Conflicts are inevitable parts of the working environment. Since every employee has a different attitude, values, personality, views, etc. their uniqueness sometimes bring conflicts in the organization.

You should know different conflict resolution techniques and try to shift the conflicting points towards the organizational interests. Should try to make employees unique points their strengths for achieving goals collectively instead of sources of conflicts.

Related: How to manage and resolve workplace conflict?

Strong Vision

Qualities of a good manager include matching his vision with the organizational vision. Since the company’s vision needs to be inspiring. A good manager’s vision also needs to be inspiring.

Be confident in your vision and express it in a way that inspires and motivates employees to work with you. Employees know all things in this modern time and when they believe in the vision of the company they will invest more because they know that makes the difference.

Empathetic

Empathy refers to the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their positions. Successful managers have good empathetic sense.

You should be able to understand how your employees are feeling, see things from their eyes, and take actions they want you to take. It is part of the emotional intelligence that lets you manage your employees emotionally.

Accountable

Being accountable means you should be answerable for the consequences of your actions and decisions. Your level of accountability reflects how trustworthy you are.

Employees do not want to be accountable for other actions. They seek justice. You should be able to point out the right employees as right is right and wrong is wrong. You must be accountable for your actions and make accountable others for their actions.

Delegation

You know that as a manager you can not do all the tasks yourself sometimes you have to pass over your task to your subordinates with the necessary authority. Successful managers know when and how to effectively delegate authority and responsibility to subordinates.

Related: Delegation in Management

Delegation is an effective way you can reduce your work burdens. But while delegating make sure the person is capable enough to execute the given responsibilities.

Develops Employee Careers

It is a vital quality nowadays a manager must possess. It is obvious that employees come to the organization to earn bread and build their careers. Most employees expect a good career from their company.

You should arrange necessary training and development programs for employees. Help them to build different skills in the relevant fields so they can be prepared to move on easily.

Because being a good manager does not always mean managing and keeping the right employees it also includes opening a door for employees to enhance their skills for better careers.

Adaptive

From our list of 16 qualities of a good manager, the last one is being adaptive. The business environment is uncertain and very dynamic is an undeniable truth of this modern time.

People are changing, business practices are changing, management practices are changing, customers’ expectations are changing, and everything is changing so fast. Being static on a single position or plan does not get success today. The best way to be competitive today is to be prepared to walk in the changing environment.

Qualities of a Good Manager: Conclusion

These 16 are some of the essential qualities of an effective manager. But these 16 are not all, there can be many more. Someday your managerial position may require different managerial qualities.

But the good thing is you can always learn and develop the necessary qualities. You should be updated on changing business practices and learn new ways to be an influential manager.

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