If you want your employees to appreciate you and trust your judgment, you need to give them reasons to. A valued manager is one who leads by example and treats everyone in the workplace fairly. In order to be an effective manager, it’s essential that you’re conscientious of how you’re presenting yourself.
Take Initiative
Being a manager doesn’t mean having people work for you. It means having people work with you. Delegating tasks is just one of your obligations. You should be the person who is working the hardest. This means you ought to come in early, stay late, and complete projects well before you think you need to. When your staff comes to understand how much pride you put into working hard, they’re much more likely to take after you.
Ask for Suggestions
As a manager, you’ll be unable to please everyone, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get everyone’s respect. For your opinions to be valued, you have to demonstrate to your employees that you value theirs. Have an anonymous suggestion system. It can be done via a suggestion box or a computer program. Let your employees know that you will take their criticisms or concerns with maturity and consideration and that they will not be reprimanded for doing so.
Attend Leadership Workshops
You likely have your own system of leadership, but it’s worth branching off and considering other methods. Mangers know that leadership workshops can help them become the best leaders possible. These are pivotal in bringing forth new ideas to ensure harmony in the workplace. You don’t need to abandon your old methods either. Instead, you can adapt them to incorporate new ones. Plus, you can impart your own wisdom on others, to help business leaders across the country succeed.
Keep Relationships Professional
In the workplace, you are in charge. This means you’ll sometimes have to make tough decisions or ask people to do things you know they won’t want to. While you should treat all your employees with respect and fairness, you should also make it clear that you are the boss. If something needs to be taken care of by a specific employee and they aren’t following instructions, you have the right to reprimand or terminate them. You should be on friendly terms with your employees, but you should also remember that being their boss supersedes being their friend.
Don’t Show Favoritism
This is also part of keeping your relationships professional. While there are likely to be employees with whom you get along better than others, you need to set aside personal feelings in the workplace. View everyone’s work performance objectively and remind yourself that professionalism, not personality that matters. If you tend to get along with someone but they’ve recently begun delivering sloppy work, you can’t be afraid to gloss over this. If you do, you’re demonstrating your standards aren’t particularly high and you threaten to bring down the morale of the office if others catch wind of your biases.
Give Specific Compliments
“Specific” is the operative word here. If you’re just handing out compliments like they’re nothing, your employees are going to quickly realize how insincere you are and reject them. Instead, you should commend for things that apply only to them. If you have an employee who has become more assertive in their sales technique, tell them that, rather than just saying something meaningless about how they’ve been working hard.
Respect is something that has to be earned in order to be received. As a manager, you can’t expect your employees to respect you simply because you are the manager. You need to show them you value them and that you care about your work. If you do, they’ll show the same appreciation towards you.
