management tips

Many times, we feel it's better to do all the critical tasks ourselves rather than relying on others. This is not at all true, by delegating we are in a better position to monitor and focus on the more strategic decisions. Have trust in your team and believe that they can deliver the best.

We must not compromise on 3 basic characteristics; honesty, hard work and quality. Demonstrate and cultivate this culture in your team, set the high moral and ethical values in the system, this will create huge difference in the long run.

Leaders set their own examples, and earn respect from others. Each one of us has leadership qualities in certain areas, we just need to explore and nurture it. Help your team to take lead in any of their strength areas; this will help you to get better results and long term association with your team.

Never ever compromise on discipline, if you set a meeting at a certain time, make sure that everyone is on time, latecomers can't be allowed in the meeting even if there are valid excuses. We must promote respect for each other's time. Just imagine if you have called 10 members and you start meeting late by 5 minutes, you have wasted 50 minutes of organization's precious time, same way it's equally important to end meetings on time.

We must own the outcome of our actions and decisions, some of the decisions will go wrong and we must own responsibility and not blame the entire world for that. Most of the innovations and improvements are result of some of the failures, so don't be afraid to take risks and own responsibility of the outcome.

Let's accept we are in a competitive world, our performance is not judged by how good we have done but how better we are than others. Do not hesitate to rate your team on a scale of 1 to 10, in different areas. The idea here is to make everyone aware of the fact that we have to compete in this world in every area of life.

Sometimes you have to bury the past and look forward, remember we are here for a cause. Let's not waste our time to settle scores and waste organization's time. We have to stay focussed and spend most of our energies in right direction.

Learn from others mistakes and try not to repeat the same yourself. Remember we are always short of time and we can't afford to waste time on already invented best practices. This does not mean you don't experiment; the message is to avoid wastage of time on things which are already available.

Needless to mention, we all are born with so many strengths. We have to realize our strengths and exploit them rather wasting too much time to focus on our weak areas. It's true we can overcome many of our weaknesses but to get the result we need to keep working on our strength areas.

I know, it's easier said than done, in a competitive world where each one of us is trying to take short cuts to reach to the top. As a manager, you own the responsibility to discourage this and promote openness and getting straight information from your team member rather than trying to create indirect communication channels.