Seven strategies that will make you a better manager

Joe B. Hall is a management consultant, motivational speaker and president of Top of the Hill, Inc., a Fernandina Beach, Florida, training and development firm. Over the years, he has studied successful managers – trying to get an idea of what makes certain people succeed in management while others fail.

He developed a list of characteristics that successful managers share. If you work to develop these characteristics yourself, you should have a long, happy career:

Be responsible for your employees’ successes and failures
The best managers firmly believe that they are ultimately responsible for the outcome of everything they manage. If an employee does a great job, you are responsible; if an employee fails miserably and has to be fired, you are equally responsible.

Lower your expectations of others
Accept the fact that not everyone can perform the way you did when you were in their position. That’s why you’re a manager and your employees are not. Do not set your employees up to fail by setting expectations too high.

Allow people to improve their jobs
Don’t set iron-clad rules as to how people can do their jobs; allow them flexibility to improve and increase their productivity. You’ll be surprised how many employees can improve their jobs once you encourage and motivate them to think creatively.

Challenge your assumptions
Step outside yourself and look at the way you think. Do you always expect employees to take advantage of you? Do you think people are generally lazy? Don’t get in “thinking ruts” that affect your ability to manage.

Establish written performance standards
Show and tell your employees exactly what you expect from them. They can’t strive for excellence if they don’t know what your definition of excellence is.

Walk the walk and talk the talk
In other words, lead by example. Don’t break your own rules; do the things you tell employees to do.

Motivate employees to take action
If you don’t have the time to motivate employees (or are not good at it, for whatever reason), hire someone else to do it for you. Bringing in a motivational speaker a couple of times a year can do wonders for morale and productivity.

Reprinted with permission from the Manager’s intellegence Report, www.ragan.com

Use this system to create and deliver effective presentations

Often, when creating a business presentation, finding a way to organize the information is the hardest part. Raymond Olderman, author of 10 Minute Guide to Business Communication, gives managers a very simple, four-step process for organizing the material in a presentation:

Step 1: List your points.
Make a list of every single possible point you want to cover in the presentation.

Step 2: Group related points.
Go through your list of points, and create topic groups. Put each of the points into a related topic group – listing the points in order of importance within each group.

Step 3: Indentify your objectives.
What are you trying to do with this presentation? Write down your objectives at the top of your list of topic groups.

Step 4: List topic groups in order of importance.
With your objectives in mind, make a list of your topic groups – putting the most important group first. By the time you do all this, you will have a “presentation map” that will guide you through the presentation – and make sure you make all of your key points.

Reprinted with permission from the Manager’s intellegence Report, www.ragan.com

Use this company’s service standards to improve relationships with your customers

The Home Depot takes great pride in how it serves its customers. That’s a big part of the reason the home improvement company keeps growing. Here are several of the company’s customer service “rules” that you can put into place at your own company – regardless of whether or not you are in retail:

Educate employees from Day One
The minute a new employee starts at The Home Depot, that person knows how important customer service is at the company. Managers tell employees that service is what keeps people coming back – more so than even quality goods and low prices.

l Don’t wait for the customer to come to you
Home Depot employees are encouraged to wander the aisles, looking for ways to help customers. They approach customers, and make sure each one is finding everything he or she is looking for.

Go beyond “Can I help you?”
That sentence is not proactive enough for The Home Depot. Employees are encouraged to ask more pointed questions, such as “What do you need that I can help you find?”

Look at a complaint as a “gift”
Home Depot workers actually seek out complaints, because they see a complaint as a way to make improvements.

Share customer service ideas
Once a month, call the employees together, and ask them to share good customer service ideas with each other. That way, everyone is always improving.

Make sure different departments work together
Often, customer service breaks down because different departments can’t agree on who should do what. Make sure your departments know that the customer is everyone’s top priority, and that everyone has to work together to provide the best service possible.

Reprinted with permission from the Manager’s intellegence Report, www.ragan.com

The Chamber set out in the early 1990s to offer a curriculum of education whereby individuals could obtain professional designations, with the aim of raising the general level of professionalism within Egypt and improving the general business environment.

The Chamber established the following objectives for its Professional Designation program:

• To establish a series of managed studies within which various professions are recognized. The Professional Designation program will identify each profession’s role, its underlying body of knowledge and a course of study by which such knowledge can be acquired
• To encourage higher educational standards in the various professional fields
• To establish an objective measure of an individual’s knowledge and competence in the selected field of study
• To encourage continued professional development