To manage well, you need a Management Credo to guide yourself personally, your actions, and your decisions. Here are the basics:
• Understand the individual.
An individual's values determine what actions will result.
• Build relationships.
What is important to another person should be important to you as manager.
• Attend to the little things.
These are actually the big things in relationships.
• Keep your commitments.
Breaking a promise is a major contributor to lack of trust.
• Clarify expectations.
The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in ambiguous, conflicting expectations around roles and goals. Making an investment of time and effort up front saves time and avoids major problems later.
• Show personal integrity.
A lack of integrity can undermine almost any effort you attempt.
• Integrity requires conforming reality to your words.
Keeping promises will fulfill someone else's expectations.
• Apologize sincerely and don’t wait.
Although not necessarily in this order, these are personal and active professional values to attain to:
Value One: Manage Self
Managing ourselves focuses on preserving and enhancing relationships and accomplishing results, thereby maintaining balance. When communicating we often prescribe before making a proper diagnosis. We don’t listen to others because we don’t control ourselves. Whatever the orientation of the person we are dealing with, the relationship is key to turning the situation around and can be managed through our own self-control.
Value Two: Listen Emphatically
Emphatic listening is listening with the intent to understand another person's frame of reference and feelings. Emphatic listening is accomplished using the ears, eyes, and heart. Skills of empathic listening are built on personal character which inspires openness and trust. Emphatic listening takes time; but not as much time as correcting misunderstandings.
Value Three: Diagnose Before You Prescribe
An effective manager seeks to understand the needs, concerns and situations of staff and customers: “An amateur sells products, the professional sells solutions”. As we appreciate people, they will appreciate us. Patience in all things preserves all things.
Value Four: Synergize
Synergy is all about valuing differences; respecting them; building on strengths; and compensating for weaknesses. High trust leads to high cooperation and communication. A manager who is truly effective possesses the humility to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through communication with others.
Value Five: Be Proactive
Pro-activity means that we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. What makes pro-activity indispensable is the fact that pro-activity is grounded in facing reality while also understanding we have the power to choose a positive response to our circumstances. The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct it, and learn from it.
Value Six: Be Accountable
In organizations, and in our personal lives, lack of accountability is a highly contagious disease. The willingness to be accountable for what we do, and what we fail or refuse to do, is a crucial sign of character. Being accountable is one of the fastest ways to earn respect and trust, and it puts an individual in control of his/her life. Responding accountably to life's challenges gives us the power to change things.
Value Seven: Be a Steward Delegator
Effective managers use Stewardship Delegation which focuses on results as well as methods. People are able to choose a method to achieve specific results. Stewardship Delegation requires a clear, upfront mutual understanding of and commitment to expectations. It offers a real opportunity for real progress and can help establish healthy team connections.
Value Eight: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
Civility doesn't apply to only words. Being civil requires paying attention, listening, showing respect for people's time and space, and speaking kindly. Those we work with and work for have worth and value and deserve to be treated as we would like to be treated in turn: with consideration, patience and respect. Because what goes around comes around, responding to others as we desire to be responded to is good medicine and good management. Allowing for the benefit of the doubt gives time for investigation, contemplation, and a carefully thought out response.
To work well with others, you need a Management Credo. Become a living and breathing one yourself!
Image: http://www.employee-performance.com/blog/?p=2482
References: Seven Habits, n.d., Schilling, The Power, 2009.
