Management Development - How to Be An Effective Manager

by Lucy Cadman @ Developing People


I know I go on about it a lot when writing my blogs, but I really am lucky to be managed at work by such an effective manager. My boss is capable of seeing that every job gets completed effectively by the right person, that all problems are addressed and resolved swiftly, and that the working environment is a happy and productive one.

To be an effective manager like this, it is important to recognise the good habits that belong to the areas of personal effectiveness and priority management. It is equally as important to recognise that the opposite of these good habits are the bad habits that can sneak up on us all sometimes, and start to make us ineffective almost without us realising!

Here are five steps towards being an effective manager:

1. Use a diary, and plan your work schedule
It may sound simple and obvious, but using a diary effectively can have a massive impact on how you utilise your time. It is no help to your effectiveness to complete one task and then spend the next half hour deciding what to do next! A previous boss of mine taught me how to use a diary, and her words still ring in my ears ten years later – “Action every single item in your diary for today, either by crossing it off as completed or by bringing it forward to another day, but do not ever let anything vanish from your diary unless the task is totally complete and requires no further follow up at all”.

She showed me that a diary is not just for out of office appointments, but can be used to plan the tasks of each day and week to use your time to maximum effect, and to help you keep clear time for priorities, including those which sometimes crop up unexpectedly. It also helps to ensure that your “important but not urgent” tasks still see the light of day. Remember - If you don’t have a plan for where you want to be … don’t be surprised if you arrive somewhere you don’t want to be!


2. Maintain a clear environment
One of my colleagues works from home, and every time she visits the office, she never fails to exclaim in surprise at the tidiness of my desk. I am not sure whether her surprise is based around the fact that I can manage to maintain such a tidy environment, or whether it has some roots in astonishment that I have managed to train my boss to be almost (well, nearly … maybe not quite!) as tidy and organised as I am – a skill for which he has in all honesty never previously been renowned!

An effective manager operates a “clear desk” policy. Make sure that everything you need regularly is easy to find and close to hand, and that things which are not needed so often are towards the back of your desk or filed away in draws. Have an In Tray, an Out Tray, and ensure that your Out Tray is empty at the end of each day. Do not leave your desk covered in papers at the end of each day, as you will find it surprisingly unattractive to return to the next morning, and you will waste valuable time in sorting out yesterday’s work today. Efficient administration and filing systems are invaluable.


3. Delegate efficiently
Delegation does not simply mean “ordering someone else to do it”. When used effectively, it is a key tool for an effective manager. My boss is the King of Delegation as he is not only able to pick the right person for the right task, but he can also assign tasks without any air of “offloading” them, and even more importantly, he then has the capability to take his hands off the task entirely instead of trying to tinker with the results in advance of them being presented – something that as a control freak, I must confess I aspire to being able to do.

Delegation is about entrusting responsibility and authority to others, who then become responsible to you for their results. It gives more time for you to spend on important priorities, increases your own effectiveness and impact, develops others and equips them to solve their own problems, enables decisions to be made nearer the “front line”, and promotes involvement and motivation amongst your staff. Management is about getting things done through others – it is not about doing everything yourself!


4. Remove all interruptions
The two biggest distractions preventing people from getting immersed in their work are emails and the telephone. As a bit of a technical “geek”, I am all too easily distracted by the sight or sound of an email arriving in my inbox. I could quite cheerfully tell the phone to go to … erm, somewhere lovely for a permanent holiday … but I cannot resist the allure of sneaking a peak at every email when it arrives. My boss is the opposite – he finds it harder to resist the phone, but is capable of showing great self-restraint in only checking his emails two or three times a day at the most. Between us, we make a combination of good practise!

Turn off the “ding” sound when you receive an email so that you are not tempted to look straight away and break your concentration – set aside time at the beginning, middle and end of each day for reading and replying to emails, and do not look at them at any other point. Likewise with the telephone – batch outgoing calls together rather than making them randomly throughout the day, and where possible, turn your telephone to voicemail and collect messages at stipulated points throughout the day. Operate a “stand up” policy when colleagues enter your workspace – if you remain standing whilst they are talking, they will get the message that you mean to be brisk and brief so that you can get back to the task you were completing.


5. Do not accept responsibility for the problems of your staff
For a kind and caring manager, this can be a tricky one, but you do yourself and your staff no favours by taking over responsibility of their problems. This can be a fine line to walk between showing concern and support without overstepping the bounds of professionalism, but having experienced the boss who phoned me a week after I had undergone major surgery to ask why I wasn’t back in the office at one end of the scale, through to the boss who was quite prone to shed a tear with me if things were tough at the other end of the scale, I can vouch for the fact that the middle line is actually the best place to be from an employee’s point of view.

Help your staff by all means, but the moment you let their problem become your problem, you will have one more problem than you had before – if you do this for ten staff every week, you will have gained over 100 problems in the space of three months! Instead, meet with them at an appointed time, and help them to resolve the issues themselves – you will be one problem lighter, and they will feel a sense of achievement for having ultimately dealt with things themselves.


Keep these five tips in mind, and you will be well on your way to be an effective manager with a good work/life balance, who achieves great results and motivates their workforce to even better things each day.