A business becomes sustainable if it has nurturing and thriving competent managers.
It is the business leadership team’s responsibility to plan, strategically develop and allocate resources, coordinate and control the various functions of a business. Many C-level executives often make important decisions that impact a company’s performance as well as reputation in the industry. Therefore, such decisive people in the organization must have a blend of managerial and leadership characteristics – in short, an entrepreneurial mindset.
Here are the crucial skills an organization’s Human Resources and Talent team must look for in candidates appointed to top management roles.
Aligned to Vision and Mission
The vision of the company should be ingrained in the mind of each employee, especially the leadership team. Visualizing the company’s vision and helping others understand it requires foresightedness and the ability to identify future opportunities and challenges.
This is a crucial question HR must ponder: If a manager is not a firm believer of the organization’s vision and mission, how can he or she lead the team?
Managers who have a clear and broad vision can drive the team’s best efforts to enable maximum learning and impact. These managers instill brand loyalty in their employees by helping the team document its role in the company’s vision.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a crucial lesson in vision alignment as well. With their backs against the wall, the management with an understanding of broad vision and mission was able to find opportunities to scale the business by building new products or solutions.
Ability to Lead and Motivate Teams
One of the crucial aspects of growth in Human Resources over the past few decades has been the importance of people. From just being a step up the ladder for a company’s success, today employees have evolved to become the pillars of an organization. Today, business is a team sport – success in any form is best when it is shared. Successful businesses consider people to be their most valuable assets.
Managers can delegate and help the team perform to the best of their capabilities. The best performers thrive in an environment of support and recognition and become the micro-entrepreneurs within the organization. Such managers ensure that the team structure has clearly defined roles and responsibilities. The employees should have regular one-on-one sessions with managers and be up-to-date on their roles and duly recognized for their work and growth prospects.
Ability to Express
For an effective business manager, the ability to express is essential. Good communication skills, both written and verbal, are synonymous with management. The ability to express views, opinions, thoughts, and ideas plays an important role in a manager’s personality.
Many managerial attributes like initiation, delegation, negotiation, arbitration, and a variety of interpersonal skills depend largely on a manager’s ability to express. Although they come under soft skills, these skills contribute a lot to hardcore business activities and management. From the acceptance of a challenge to the rejection of a non-viable plan, a manager’s assertiveness helps him or her immensely in taking the right and timely decisions.
Aside from this, assertiveness is also useful in encouraging bonding among team members and group cohesion. The quality of assertiveness reveals the manager’s passion and conviction for work and the organization.
Power of Self-Actualization
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs emphasized that understanding the self and realizing one’s worth is the crux of self-actualization. Through self-actualization, a person realizes his/her genuine strengths and unique qualities that set him/her apart from the crowd.
Managers with a deeper understanding of self-actualization have a better probability of accomplishing professional as well as personal goals. This also translates into the team where the manager leads by example.
Ability to Measure Results Effectively
In an uncertain world, the most thoughtfully projected strategies may fail and that is part and parcel of any business. But the mark of a good manager is when they have measured this failure to create long-term lessons and are aware of mistakes to be avoided for better performance.
This is crucial because in the age of data and analytics, everything is judged by its return, and human resources, especially managers, are no exception. They are valuable to the organization as long as their output is measurable and profitable. And, they cannot be profitable until and unless they become efficient at measuring results of other resources, effectively and accurately.
To put it simply, a manager must have a measurable impact on the organization with his presence and activities.
