How to be an effective manager

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon Aug 12, 2007

The key to being effective as a manager is to achieve your targets as efficiently as possible. The first step is to set clear goals. Then you have to allocate all the resources necessary to achieve your goals. Of course, you need to set the right targets in the first place. Efficiency alone won’t make you effective if you achieve targets that are of no interest or value to anyone. But, let’s assume that you have set desirable targets. In this case, the objective is to maximize efficiency and this means making sure that you have the best price you can get for all the material you need to use, you get your budget right and you make the best use of the people required to do the job.

You can’t really be an effective manager unless you are reasonably well organized. If you are not, you might get the results you want but not make best use of all your resources. You might waste too much material, break your budget or not get the best performance out of the people working on your project.

Organizing complex projects so as to manage them well requires sophisticated information technology. You need to know what factors have the greatest impact on performance and how to measure them.

To manage people effectively, you need to get the balance right between performance measurement and empowerment. This means trusting people to do the right things independently and allowing them some freedom to measure their own performance.