Tips from the STC team

NETWORK

Make friends on the way up, because you don’t know who you will need on the way down.

Networking is essential. Don’t just look down and in at your team. Look up and out. Build relationships with other team leaders, with senior managers, with other departments, with customers, suppliers – anyone who might be useful to turn to when you have an issue that needs to be resolved. A lot of being a manager is getting things sorted out. Knowing people who like you and respect you is usually a very good start!

Tom, Senior Consultant

BE CONFIDENT

Management and leadership are so much about confidence. People need to believe in you as a manager – your team members do, your managers do and the rest of the business does. So, think about how you look, how you speak, the words you choose, the way you come across. Make sure they all add up to a clear, confident and concise message.

This is particularly true if you are not happy with the performance or behaviour of a team member. Don’t ignore it until it is unbearable – nip it in the bud; deal with it now. Be fair, be respectful and be confident. One word to them now, will say you 1000 words later.

And if you are not confident? Bluff it till you are!

Michelle, Operations Manager

BE KNOWLEDGEABLE

Understand the facts. Be curious – ask why. Too many people work on assumptions or gut feel. There is knowledge and information everywhere you look in business. Find it, read it, interpret it. If you get monthly updates on the performance of your team, study them with care and use them to make decisions on how to get better. If you don’t have statistics – create them.

Paul, Finance Trainer

BE ORGANISED

An organised manager has a world of advantage over a dis-organised one. Disorganisation wastes so much of your time and is frustrating too. So do yourself a favour, take the time to create a system – a place for everything and everything in its place. Know where your notes are from the last meeting, where your team’s PDPs are kept, where you filed your bosses last email. And once you have a system – stick to it!

Andrea, Admin Lead

MANAGE YOUR TIME

The number one core skill of a successful manager is Time Management. Be an expert in prioritising your tasks and planning your time. This gives you control. If you don’t you are forever chasing your tail, which is stressful, unproductive and means you live a life being totally reactive.

Get on the front foot. Plan ahead. Use a to do list. Schedule your tasks. Say No when you have to and manage your interruptions. It is your time – choose how you spend it. That way you don’t miss deadlines and always turn up on time. Make time for yourself to be successful. When you have time, you can innovate, create ideas, develop, people and drive progress.

Harvey, IT Lead

BE ENTHUSIASTIC

Just go for it. Throw yourself in. There is no substitute for enthusiasm. Grab the job and do it like you want to do it. If you get it wrong, you learn; if you fall over, you get up. Just make sure you get up more times than you fall down! Enthusiasm helps you learn, and it also gets you better results.

But it is more than just enjoying it. As a manager and a leader, you need to inspire people – inspire them to perform better, inspire them to change and adopt new ways of working, inspire and influence them to accept your proposals. Emerson said: Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, and I agree. If you have no enthusiasm, you are a non-manager and it is less likely you will succeed in these things. But when you have enthusiasm, you inspire your team, you win the support of your customers, you build your profile in the business, you get more of your own way, more of the time – and, when necessary, people will forgive you more often. So, run with it, drive with energy and make every day a good one.

Diana, Senior Project Manager

FOCUS ON QUALITY

Whatever you create, do it well and be proud of it – stay true to yourself. Use IT to your advantage – learn it better, find out what it can really do and use it to save you time, give you better information and impress the people you interact with.

Anouki, Digital Content Manager

BE A COACH

Don’t just be a manager – be their coach. Coaching and developing your people gives them greater skills, greater satisfaction and greater success. It means they do not bother you with their job, so you can get on with your own. And coaching is an empowering, inclusive, positive style of leadership. What could be better?

I was tempted to use the Confucius quote: Every truth has four corners; as a coach I give you one corner and it is for you to find the other three. That for me is great leadership. Give your team a template, a framework, a process and then ask them for the other three corners – ask them how they will use them, how they will improve them and what more they can achieve with them. Get them involved and engaged – then getting them to be accountable is easy. Be a coach – it makes work better for everyone.

Matt, Training Consultant

PLAN

Plan, plan, plan! Before you do anything, think it through, create a step by step plan so that you, and anyone else involved knows what you are doing. Look for any weak links in your plan and strengthen them, or at least be prepared for them. If you think carefully, you can often predict the future – you can see what is coming before it arrives. Be prepared!

And then act swiftly. JDI – don’t waste time, get on with it. Implement it as rapidly as you can. If it is a new idea, a new way of doing things, a new hire, a new customer, a new anything, it might be disruptive, but the sooner you get into it, the sooner you get the disruption behind you – as people like to say nowadays: If you are going to fail then fail fast, because that gives you more time to put it right. But . . . if you have thought it through carefully before acting swiftly, you won’t fail at all – so the adage should say: if you are going to succeed, then succeed quickly – and often!

Rob, CEO