Sunday, October 3, 2010

Effective Leadership/Communication skills needed for a Manager

Recently, I got promoted to a development manager and being primarily a technical guy before, I'm trying to improve my leadership/communication skills. Below is my personal notes (gathered from various sources) on the qualities to possess to become a great manager.
  1. Technical Subject knowledge - Need not be expert in all areas, but need to understand things well enough to make better decisions.
  2. Be assertive, not aggressive though.
  3. Be cool under pressure.
  4. Competent.
  5. Integrity/Honesty.
  6. Ability to delegate tasks.
  7. Conduct meetings effectively (proper agenda, starting/ending on time, insisting full participation etc.,).
  8. Empathy - Understand and relate to individual's issues.
  9. Body language and tone is important (sometimes more than content).
  10. Tone is very important in meetings, conference calls and even on the email.
  11. Smile (even on the phone) helps a lot.
  12. Different people in the team want/appreciate different things. Need to understand that and communicate appropriately. There is no one way to communicate to a big diversified team.
  13. Create a positive atmosphere for the team and promote collaboration.
This list is not comprehensive by any means and just serves as a reminder/personal note to me at this point, so that I can improve in these areas. Just thought to add it as a post, in case it might help someone else. If you have other points, feel free to add comments.

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