As a manager, your goal is no doubt to be a great leader -- to inspire your team to perform at its best while helping your employees learn, develop new skills, and grow professionally. But if you fall down in these responsibilities, you'll risk losing valuable players on your team, thereby kicking off a dangerous cycle of disruptions in workflow and poor morale.
You might think your behavior and management style alone wouldn't be enough to drive employees away, but a whopping 49% of working professionals have left a job because of a challenging boss, according to staffing firm Robert Half. If you don't want that to happen on your team, the solution is simple: Don't be a bad manager. And if you're not sure what that means, here are some initial guidelines to follow.
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1. Be open to new ideas
Great bosses don't just dictate and teach, they also accept new solutions and learn things from their employees and peers. If you want to be regarded as a good manager, make sure not to shoot down your employees' ideas just because they've never been tried before or because you're convinced your own solutions are ideal. Instead, be open to suggestions, even from those folks on your team with limited experience.
2. Avoid losing your cool
It's not always easy to stay calm when an employee of yours misses a deadline or botches a major presentation that hurts your team. But one of the worst things you can do as a manager is lash out at your employees when things don't go your way, or even when someone blatantly messes up.
Yelling at and berating your employees won't help them learn from their mistakes. If that's the route you take, you'll only end up alienating them.
3. Don't micromanage
There's nothing wrong with keeping tabs on your employees and checking in on major projects and deadlines. But once you cross the line into micromanaging, it's hard to recover.
Constantly breathing down your employees' necks won't make them more productive. If anything, it could make them less motivated to work hard. Uphold that habit long enough and it could also set the stage for a series of resignations.
4. Make yourself available
As a manager, you're probably very busy on the job, whether it's meetings or the administrative tasks that people in your position tend to be burdened with. But if you don't carve out time to be there for your employees, they aren't apt to take kindly to it.
Therefore, schedule time for team meetings, and make yourself available on a one-on-one basis as situations warrant it. If you don't, your employees might quickly grow frustrated, especially when they feel unsupported in the face of challenges.
You don't want to be the reason your best employees up and quit. If you're really serious about being a strong manager, ask your team how you're doing, and take that feedback to heart. A few changes on your part could spell the difference between losing key performers and retaining the talent you worked hard to onboard in the first place.
