Love of working with people

Most managers will spend a majority of their time managing people, and everything that is connected with people, even more so in the knowledge industry.

Do you find yourself talking to people all the time? Do people tend to bring their problems to you? And when they do so, do you see it as adding value to finding a solution, or do you see that as a headache which you shouldn't have to deal with?

If you find satisfaction in just being with people and helping them achieve their results, you have a primary quality to be a manager.

Going to parties and having a good time with people also displays that you love being around people and surely shows your love for food or drink, but not the essential part of helping people achieve their goals.

Although all interactions count, including phone conversations, e-mail, or Instant Messenger, it's the face time that has the most impact. If you'd rather spend your time in your own office by yourself, perhaps a manager role isn't for you.

You can, of course, force yourself to spend time with people as part of the job requirement, but unless you really enjoy that time, it will be hard to sustain and excel as a manager. You may end up limiting your interactions to a select few, where comfort levels are high, at the risk of alienating others.

Global managers today get less and less face time with some of their team members, sometimes as little as 12 hours in the entire working year. Without the love of working with people, the interaction with remote workers can really become difficult, as it'll take an extra effort to be connected at a deeper level than just work.

If you like to work with people, you are likely to be high on empathy. When people approach you with a problem, you may feel the problem to be your own. Even before the person tells you there's a problem, you already know there is a problem by the look on his/her face, the voice, and the body language. Your body language will be inviting and welcoming. While the person describes their problem to you, you listen intently and non-judgmentally, even supporting them so that he/she is encouraged to open up. If you are high on empathy, you may also have a feel of what kind of suggestion will work with this person and how it should be put across. You follow up and when you see the person getting over the problem you feel a sense of satisfaction.

Empathy also helps in understanding and working in a diverse environment, for example, working with people who grew up culturally different from you. Especially in India, there is a high degree of diversity with people from different backgrounds, and also while the working population is highly skewed towards men, women have a growing presence, especially in the knowledge industry.

Easy to approach

While you may love to work with people, the people around you should also love to work with you, and a measure of that is the number of people who feel comfortable coming up and talking to you.

A non-threatening, if not friendly, demeanor would certainly help. But even more important is the rest of the interaction that will follow. Do people come to you for problem solving and leave with more problems to solve? Do they come to you to share the overload of work and leave with more work to do? Is there a fair give and take in your interactions with people?

Farmer mentality: sow, nurture, grow, reap

There are thousands of types of jobs, but none of them is as involved, as complete, and perhaps as spiritual as farming. It requires hard work, investment, belief, knowledge, teamwork, patience, faith, ownership, and a sense of creativity. And of course, the elements of risk, especially in India where farmers still depend on the monsoon.

Farmers go through a cycle of preparation, investment, nurturing, protection, seeing it grow, and then enjoying the benefits of all the effort. They go through this year after year and while they make it better every cycle, they take the losses when decisions go bad. Nevertheless, the basic approach remains the same.

Managers need to develop the traits of a farmer. You need to have a sense of preparation and investment, since it's the most basic, key part of the process and then wait while nurturing and supporting for the benefits to roll in. This needs to be done with every person, process, and project.

Core values: honesty, integrity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, consideration for others, and more

There is no substitute for core values like honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness. These are very important for any employee in general, and are even more important for managers, as managers have a high impact on people and processes.

There will be many challenges that will come a manager's way and many decisions that managers need to make. Core values will be a guide in all of these. Many questions cannot be answered by looking at the rulebook, but very easily answered by using the value system yardstick. There will be lots of opportunities for a manager to make quick gains, by using a shortcut and possibly lowering the value standard. This would usually be impossible to sustain, and will come back to haunt you in the longer term.

Consider this: Vijay comes to his manager's office and expresses the monetary problems he is facing. He is a good contributor and quite important to the current project. Vijay mentions that he has an offer for about 30 percent more than what he makes right now and although he likes the company, he'd like to resign. The manager's options are to relieve him in a month's time or promise him more than 30 percent in a few months' time when the annual salary revision is due. The manager knows that it may not really be possible to give Vijay 30 percent because the expected budget may not allow that; however, Vijay may stay until then and the project will be past the critical stage. At the same time, the manager is not breaking any rules, as he is fine with giving Vijay a 30 percent raise if the budget is available, plus the manager can always say that upper management rejected the change.

Even simpler situations such as taking a day off for being sick while you are really not or using the official network and resources to watch adult material or taking office stationary home are all situations which call for basic values to be applied.

Values are the foundation of good behavior and nothing less is expected from a leader.

Tolerance for ambiguity and patience

We all know: the better the map, the easier it is to follow, but unfortunately the working map in an organization is not always clear. Sometimes the destination is not clear and there are multiple ways to get there and also, there are too many detours. You'd be lucky if the map does not change half way through. It would be great if the directions to follow were clear, but who is supposed to make it clear and easy to follow? A manager needs to deal with this ambiguity — find the best way given all the other factors.

Ambiguity is the order of today's knowledge industry. A lot of things are fuzzy and need definition. It takes time to remove some of the fuzziness, and a manager needs to deal with it. It will require tolerance for fuzziness and patience to figure it out.

Some people are pre-disposed to display patience, and others can learn to be patient. Patience defines the quality of your daily interactions, your responses, and some people believe, your respect towards others' opinions. Simple day-to-day necessity, like good communication, requires you to be patient. Patient people wait for others to complete their thoughts so they can take the time to respond well and with complete information.

Good communication skills — especially listening

Communication is the bread and butter for a manager. There is a lot of information which needs to be processed and communicated by a manager in all directions, to his directs and beyond, to his management chain, and also to many other parallel groups.

Communication is NOT smooth talking. Many people confuse good communication with fast talking or smooth talking, where one person dominates a discussion and the other party.

Good communication is not a love of talking. A rather quiet person, who can listen to others and respond with clarity, is a much more powerful communicator than somebody who simply loves to talk.

Communication includes all forms of communication, the usual written communication such as e-mail and formal memos, letters, and so on. New age communication such as SMS, Instant messaging, and so on, and verbal communication, via phone or video conference and with the person face-to-face.

Body language is also part of communication, although it's becoming less of a factor given that a majority of communication is not face-to-face anymore. Even people who sit half a floor away communicate via e-mail or IM. The tone of your voice over phone or tone of your instant message plays an important part in perception of the message.

Good communication skills also include understanding your audience and communication in such a way that the audience can understand and communicate back to you. As such, your communication style will change a little based on the audience it's intended for.

Finally, the single biggest factor in good communication is listening. Unfortunately, the importance of listening gets lost very often and a large population of people suffer from a lack of listening.

Especially in India, people tend to cut into a discussion or start talking before the other person has finished, and perhaps get impatient to answer with the assumption that they know what the other person is talking about. Indian managers do need to work twice as hard to develop good listening skills.

Team building — hiring, retaining, developing good people, and nurturing team spirit

Another key competency for a manager is to be able to build teams. Although, at a literal level, a team is made up of a set of people, in reality a team isn't really a team without the binding glue called team spirit. A manager is as good as the team he/she builds. A manager's capacity and ability to deliver is equal to the capacity and ability of the team.

To start with, building teams requires good hiring skills. It requires:

Besides having a team, it is important to configure a team. For example, a team of 10 people may need to be balanced in terms of experience, youth and freshness, and a variety of technical skills.

A team needs to have defined positions and each team member should know what role and position he/she is supposed to play.

Finally, a manager needs to create an environment to foster team spirit and bonding, so that a set of people works as a team and not as multiple individuals.

Once a team is in place, a manager needs to constantly nurture the team and also the individuals. Most people love to work in a team, but they are individuals too and have unique needs and aspirations. This will lead to better retention, which is a definite success criterion for a manager in today's knowledge industry.

Performance management

Ensuring good performance and consistent performance from every individual is a core competency of a manager and absolutely essential for success. In a way, performance management is a side effect of many other competencies, such as result orientation, communication, project management, people skills, and so on. A balance and purpose in all these skills will bring about good performance automatically.

Performance management is the long-term management of performance of the individual and the overall team.

Problem solving

One of the key competencies for a manager is to be a problem solver. A manager is in a unique, perhaps the best, position to solve a problem. Close enough to the ground realities to understand the basics of the problem, and far enough away to understand the big picture and consequences.

He/she has the resources, technical and physical, which may be required for problem solving. He/she needs to rally his/her team and the supporting cast to come together to solve problems.

The nature of the problem could be technical or administrative or personnel-related. Given the job profile, a manager may face more technical problems, hence technical and analytical skills may be most important, or most of the problems may be co-ordination-related, hence communication and organizing skills may be most important. Regardless of the skills required, everybody expects managers to be problem solvers.

Approaches to problem solving may differ and the working style to solve problems will also differ from one manager to another. It is often seen that two managers from the same organization and even performing similar roles have very different styles of problem solving, and both may be successful at it. However, the popularity score of one may be different than the other.

Always an eye on the ball — results orientation

Everybody loves a positive result. And consistent good results are very highly valued in the business world today.

Achieving results is not easy, as most managers end up with a lot of different priorities and little time. Besides, fire fighting has become part of the daily routine for many a manager. It is very easy to get busy in the daily work and lose sight of the end results to be achieved.

Besides, in today's dynamic environment, even simple tasks may not turn out to be simple, and unexpected problems show up all the time. In today's knowledge industry, the biggest problem is loss of people, which creates multiple problems of overload, transition, and commitment.

Successful managers will keep an eye on the ball, where things are and where they are going, and carefully chart the course so the end results are met.

A manager's success will be partly defined by the quality of results and partly by the journey to the result. If the journey to the good results is not great, it'll leave a bad taste for all the people involved, and will make it harder to repeat a good performance, hence impacting the consistency of a manager.

Decision-making

Decision-making is one of the casualties of today's knowledge industry. Since there are many players in the decision-making process, the decisions get put off for another discussion. In general, many people seem to shy away from making a decision, since decisions bring a responsibility with them and perhaps an onus to follow through. Do you tend to avoid decision-making by either waiting it out till somebody else makes it or getting into an analysis paralysis?

Decision-making will typically involve:

Most of all, decision-making requires someone to be ready to take on the responsibility of the decisions and not be fearful of getting blamed. Some of these abilities are a result of exposure to decision-making as we grow up.

Especially in India, parents tend to bubble wrap the child from the vagaries of the real world. There are many kids who go to college and still have their wardrobe being decided by their mothers. Many have their parents accompany them when they go to a new town, so they can be helped. Thankfully, a large number of people do get the independence to make their own decisions, at least enough of them.

A manager is expected to make decisions and stand by them. Not all decisions require a detailed process and are done as a matter of routine. But even routine decisions are required to be consistent. For example, a simple decision of approving casual leave for a team member requires you to be consistent about when and how often casual leaves should be taken. One team member should not be questioned more than the others unless there's a good reason. Decisions based on core values will tend to be consistent.

There are decisions that have a long-term or high impact and require a detailed analysis. For example, policy decisions and financial decisions usually have long-term impact. Some decisions may not have a long-term impact but may impact a large number of people across multiple teams. For example, a simple decision to have everybody verify and confirm some personal data seems to be a simple one and perhaps takes only about 5 minutes of an individual's time, but when calculated across a 50,000 people organization, strain on network resources, follow-up, and reporting, the cost of such a decision is not trivial.

A manager's decision-making abilities will be tested everyday and are instrumental in the successes of the team and the manager.

Project management and execution — delivery

Most managers will have some delivery responsibility, either it's product features, projects in IT organizations, or better service efficiency in KPO/BPO industry. Every individual in the team has some measurable deliverable, and the manager will have a sum total or a larger than sum deliverable.

In order to make successful deliveries, effective project planning and execution skills are necessary. While most organizations have set processes and planning tools, these are best utilized in the hands of an effective manager. Also, all good processes and tools leave some flexibility to be exploited by a skilled professional.

Finally, a plan is just a map on paper, and ground realities will almost always force you to re-calibrate and adapt to changes as they happen around you. In today's complex networked world, problems will show up that'll force you to re-plan and re-evaluate the goals, and sometimes reset the expectations of the stakeholders. These are skills that are most likely acquired through experience.

However nice and loved a manager is and however smart and educated he/she may be, the ultimate test is the delivery test. If a manager can't deliver, there isn't much point in having him/her around in that role.

In order to deliver, a manager needs to understand the success criterions or parameters of success that are expected. For example, an important software module, a fairly complex piece of code, may be delivered on time with bulletproof working and great performance, however, it may fail the success criteria of maintainability and being easy to debug, or security, if these were not taken into account.

Some of the skills tested for execution are:

Delivery is what the organization is set up for. All other competencies and skills are really for achievement of delivery.

Grip on technical knowledge/domain

A manager is not about just managing people or processes or spreadsheets or outcomes. A manager needs to know the product in great detail, including technical or specific domain-related details.

If you are managing a team of technical people and managing a technical product, there is little chance that you'll command respect from your team and peers if you aren't able to keep up with the technical details. It'll also be extremely difficult to contribute to your team members' work and estimate or evaluate the work being done or make decisions if you aren't at the desired level of technical expertise.

It also applies to managers who manage a work process. Without the domain knowledge and in-depth process understanding a manager will find it hard to manage.

In India, a lot of people become managers very early in their career, and tend to lose touch with the technical aspects. Although they manage since they have a strong foundation in technical aspects and started in the trenches, they would be able to do even better if they had the inclination to be connected technically too.

Think customer — customer orientation

Good managers understand their customers. They understand the impact of the work on a customer's business. They understand how the work being done may benefit or may harm a customer's business. After all, customer benefit is the underlying theme of all work being done.

From a very simple perspective, everything that an organization does is meant to eventually deliver value in shape of products or services to the end customer. The customer pays for it and must get what he/she needs from the products an organization is selling. Customer orientation is a key competency for any organization, and almost all managers get evaluated on this. Unfortunately, many a times, customer orientation tends to get lost in the layers of the organization.

Managers are expected to understand who their customers are. Customers can be internal or external.

In the product development organizations, the end customer may not always be visible, but internal customers should be. Sometimes, organizations choose to use the word consumers instead of customers, especially in the case of product development teams that are responsible for building framework or infrastructure that other higher-level products may use. For internal support organizations, like network support, other internal organizations, which are users of the network, are the customers. In services organizations, the end customer is the client people are working for, but there's also the client's customer that needs to be kept in mind. In BPO organizations, like telephonic support for a PC maker, the employees are the closest to the end customer. In outsourced BPO operations, the customer is the client and client's customers.

Typical expectations from managers on customer orientation are as follows:

It is often not easy to know what will eventually have the most impact on the end customer, since the eventual impact on the customer is a combination of many things that an organization does, it is extremely important that managers understand the impact their work can or must have on the eventual customer.

A very typical example is the way User Interfaces get designed in a software product. A simple "Order Entry" form may have many fields that are laid out in a single form. The layout of the fields is extremely critical to the productivity of a user. If an operator is taking the orders over the phone, the layout will be very different than the order being filled out online, directly by the buyer. A smart manager would think about the usage of the product and not only try to create a form that simply lays out all the details of the form, as listed in the requirements document.

Any discussion on managerial competencies would be incomplete without understanding emotional intelligence. While the concept of emotional intelligence was being researched and talked about for a long time, it became a big topic of interest after the publication of the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and the subsequent bestseller book, Working with Emotional Intelligence.