It is fair to say that there are few things more important to the long-term success of a company than the quality of its managerial staff. You might have the most amazing team of thinkers and entrepreneurs, and a dedicated team in the trenches, but if the managers connecting those two worlds are out of whack, a lack of communication and chaos will reign supreme.
Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis depicts a struggle between a distant corporate head and the more guttural, downtrodden working class – an analog for class struggle in Weimar Germany. As the film’s famous ethos goes, the mediator between the Head and Hands must be the Heart.
Managers need to be that mediating heart within their companies, which in turn means they must be as efficient and effective as possible.
Identify Your Managerial Style
The first step to doing that is to identify your managerial style. Are you more hands-on or hands-off? Are you more driven by your personality or expertise? What about your employees, what type of managerial style do they prefer?
Identify Pros and Cons with Your Managerial Style
While there are no wrong answers to those questions, it is vital to understand and work on the potential cons to your managerial style. If you’re too hands-on, you can seem like a micromanager and controlling. If you’re too hands-off, you can seem distant and uncaring. As in Lang’s film, “mediation,” and the moderation that comes with it, is key.
Identify Your Coaching Patterns and Techniques
Once you have identified your managerial style and the pros and cons that come with it, you’ll want to look a bit more deeply into the coaching patterns and techniques you use. How do you tend to try and motivate your employees? What do you do to try and get the most out of projects? How do your managerial skills help you in accomplishing that, and when might other managerial approaches be more beneficial?
The answers to these questions are infinite and taking the time to parse them one by one is the first step towards becoming a better manager.