5 Roles to Successful Management

If you think that management is just the role of management, good thing you are reading this because it goes much further than that. It used to be that a manager just had to allocate resources and make sure that everyone was doing the work on time and often, management received a lot of criticism, as Peter Drucker pointed out ‘So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.’ Unfortunately, a manager’s job is not getting any easier. A manager’s skill set is needing to increase because of all of the changes in the workplace and ensuring that their team has the necessary resources and knowledge to stay relevant. Hopefully through explaining each role and why it’s important in the workplace will help you understand the changes necessary to be a great manager of today.

Coach Role

Employees are now being expected to be much more adaptable and consistently learning with the newest technology shifts of today. Usually, a lot new hires have the right technical skills but lack the correct behavioral skills according to Leadership Coaching LLC. The impact of this change leaves a lot of new hires joining companies in a sort of uncut format. Managers are now being required to ensure that their direct reports have the necessary skills to be effective in their current job requiring one on one coaching. Behaviors such as prioritization, managing deadlines, communication and being able to organizing effectively in their work. An example of this role is helping a new employee with professionalism and helping them become self-aware of their job capabilities.

Leader Role

The leaders aspect of a manager sets organization team vision, establishes clear outcomes of where the team needs to go, and how each employee can contribute. For vision, a manager must be able to figure out the most efficient way to accomplish the assigned team’s OKRs or goals. Ultimately, the managers are responsible for the team’s results so they will need to constantly be evaluating what the right path towards the goal given. If you default to the leader role, avoid giving too much vision but little direction, concepts and limited structure. The manager leader role is more important today, due to employees looking for more direction and being able to new tools and technology that can better assist their team.

Mentor Role

A mentor is someone who advises on their own personal or professional experience. As a manager knowing how to mentor their direct reports is extremely important now in today’s changing environment. Harvard Business Review found that the number one thing that millennials look for in new work revolves around their ability to grow in a particular position. Some of the drawbacks of overusing mentoring is by over telling people what to do, giving them too much advice, consequentially creating a lack of accountability and overreliance of their direct report.

Trainer Role

Employees need to learn new skills than ever before which means that training employees is at an all-time high. Mangers are now expected to help their employee be able to implement the correct practices by training them in new skills sets. How managers show up as trainers vary, sometimes it is talking or other times its physically showing someone how to perform a job correctly. An example of where this is useful is onboarding new hires onto an unique technology platform. However, in the cases where a manager does not know how to do a required task of the direct report, a manager’s job will then become finding their direct the necessary tools in order to perform their job effectively. One of the drawbacks of overtraining too much is trying to teach an employee everything and identical to mentoring is that an employee can become too over reliant on their manager’s input.

Manager Role

A manager’s role is practices and implements policies and procedures, mitigates organizational risk, essentially making sure that the work is getting down. Managers deploy the vision. This will involve tracking each employee’s KPIs and ensuring that the team is on track with the team’s goals. An example of this is on a team where a couple of employees are missing deadlines because the excessive errors, the manager will need to take a closer look and create an approval process to help the employees get their work done effectively and on time.

When you take all 5 roles into account, you will need to balance between each one of these roles. Each management position will require more of a role than another, however, it’s very important to know that the scope of the manager role reaches beyond measuring KPIs and reporting results to the executive team. As Peter Drucker put it best ‘it[management] involves developing people.’