What Managers Should Be Doing Every Day

What are managers’ key day-to-day activities? Solving unexpected problems, ensuring their teams meet deadlines, stay on budget and maintain standards? Hill and Lineback (2015) believe that managers should focus on three key activities every day:

Building trust

Trust is the foundation of all influence. You can build trust with colleagues by demonstrating competency and character. Competency doesn’t mean being the most knowledgeable domain expert; it means understanding problems well enough to make sound decisions. Character means making decisions based on shared values and business interests rather than self-interest.

Building a real team and managing through it

Teams bond through shared values and purposes. A true team is like a members’ club where every member has a strong sense of belonging. They encourage acceptable behaviour and reject actions that don’t reflect shared assumptions and values. Managers can build strong teams by using daily problems and crises to remind team members of the team’s values and purpose.

Building a network

Build relationships through every opportunity that routine activities offer—meetings, corridor conversations, comments on Slack messages—to develop and maintain relationships with colleagues outside your team.

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