• Look at the notes about the qualities of great managers. • Some informat

M: Many people today ask how they can become a great manager. My lecture today will discuss some essential qualities of a great and effective manager.
     Generally, a good and effective manager should be very good at the following essential tasks.
     First, great managers accept blame. When someone from head office visits and expresses displeasure, the great manager immediately accepts full responsibility. In everyday working life, the best managers are constantly aware that they selected their people and should have developed them. Errors made by team members are in very real sense their responsibility.
      Second, great managers give praise. Praise is probably the most under-used management tool.
      Great managers are forever trying to catch their people doing something right and congratulating them on it. And when praise comes from outside, they are swift not merely to make the fact known, but to make clear who has earned it. Managers who regularly give praise are in a much stronger position to criticize or reprimand poor performance. Moreover, great managers put themselves about.  Most managers now accept the need to find out not merely what their team thinks, but what the rest of the world, including their customers’ need. So MBWA, i.e. management by walking about, is an excellent thing.
      Another important point is that great managers exploit strengths, not weaknesses in themselves and in their people. They see strengths in themselves as well as in other people, as things to be built on, and weaknesses as something to be accommodated, and if possible, eliminated. The last but not the least, great managers make themselves redundant. What great managers do is to learn new skills and acquire useful information from the outside world, and then immediately pass them on, to ensure that if they were to be run down by a bus, the team would still have the benefit of the new information. So great managers are always on the lookout for higher-level activities to occupy their time, while constantly passing on tasks that they have already mastered.