Being a Good Manager

Many factors contribute to being a good and effective manager.

Being a manager requires many skills to be able to manage a whole system to perfection. A manager must have the time management skills, organizing skills, communication skills, and being able to resolve conflicts to the best of his ability. But there are three main things that truly make up a good manager: Managing time, setting realistic goals/tasks, and being able to effectively communicate and motivate the employers and employees. The first characteristic any good manager would say he has is time management.Being a manager is stressful enough when dealing with an entire store or company, but when deadlines are not meant things tend to fall apart.

A manager must budget his time wisely to keep the company flowing smoothly. Good time management can lead to greater effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity around the work place. According to Drew Guarini of The Huffington Post, 53% of managers say the hardest part of being a manager is “having to cover multiple jobs” and another 50% said the hardest part was “not having enough time to get everything done.”Therefore, time management to a manager is not an easy skill one can just pick up without experience. This skilled must be sharpened over the years as one begins to realize what time management skills work for specific types of businesses and different sized businesses.

Good time management then leads to the next main characteristic: setting goals and tasks. Setting goals for a company or even a small business can lead to either a huge success or a complete failure. A wise manager will set many goals for a business that are realistic, not easy nor hard.The goals must be obtainable so the employees know the manager is setting good goals.

Once these some of these goals are reached, trust is gained in the workplace between the workers and that greats a great business all because a manager set up some goals. There are three types of goals managers use: short term, medium terms, and long terms. According to businessplancollege. com, short term goals are set to around one year, medium goals are usually completed around 2-3 years, and long term goals are typically done in about 5 years.

There are more short term goals than medium goals, and more medium goals than long term goals. Short term goals are usually the initial funds needed to start up a business and the money to keep a business going. They are also marketing goals, like selling so much of a certain product by the end of the year. The medium goals are broad goals and sometimes are merged with long term goals. They can be marketing goals or a more physical goal such as expanding the size of the company, increasing the amount of customers, or increasing the amount of products being sold.A business typically sets up one long term business goal at a time, making a new one once the other is done, since it can take 5 years or more to complete.

These goals can be making the business grow from a small business to a corporation, making the company’s net worth a certain amount, or be able to sell the whole company before the manager turns a specific age. The short term goals should be easier than the medium term goals and the medium term goals should be easier than the long term goals.However, none of them should be easy; they should be a challenge so the manager has something to strive for. With great time management and great goals, employees and other businesses will begin to take pride in one’s business. When the business begins to get a lot of customers, it will need a lot of workers. This leads to the need of supervisors and other managers in a business.

An effective chain of command will need to be established. This leads to the final characteristic: effective communication. The way a manager talks can change the entire outlook for a company.Effective communication isn’t just needed in the workplace with the customers and employees, it will surely be needed to gain suppliers, investors, banks, etc. Effective communication or ineffective communication can be the difference in losing an entire shipment of product from a supplier or getting the new, top product into the company. It can be the difference between getting a loan with too high off interest rate that someone cannot afford to pay back or the loan that started a small business that one day turned into a global corporation.

The staff at ehow. com came up with great steps to having good communication in the upper management. One step they suggested: “Take complaints from clients or employees seriously. If you've failed to deliver on a promise or made a mistake, find a way to rectify the situation, compensate the customer or institute a new, more effective system. Small complaints may seem trivial, but they can cause dissension on your staff or affect your business’s reputation” (ehow.

com). Although this paper goes into great detail about how to become a great a manager, that’s not all there is to it.These three characteristics by themselves can make a good manager, but when one combines all three they can become a leader. A leader is someone who doesn’t try to manage a system, but actually tries to influence the workers.

That leader will motivate people and get them to believe in him and even have faith in him. A leader is the true title that belongs to great managers. These people are the ones that started from the bottom with an idea that no one believed in, but then they were able to change the world with that small idea because they realized that managing a system is great, but that’s not the top.Being a manager is hard work whether someone starts their own business or if someone is promoted into that position. It requires a lot of dedication, work, energy, and time.

But with the skills described in this paper, one can go to become a good manager. And if one truly wants to become the next Donald Trump or Bill Gates, then they must embrace the life of a leader and keep pushing themselves towards greatness. Only then will one become a great manager.