Learn management skills online [2020]

Today, having good management skills is vital for any job. When talking about management in terms of managing a business, then good people management skills become essential for every successful manager. Yes, you can burst with great business ideas and good strategies. But your business most likely will fail because of poor people management skills. If you couldn’t find the right people or were not able to retain the talent, your business can experience some inevitable losses.

Since the nature of management is quite diverse, a set of management skills you need to acquire fully depends upon the kind of management role you are in. Management skills can be technical in nature but some skills are soft. So, having a broad insight into many business functions such as finance, accounting, operations, marketing makes a good general manager even better in his/her decision-making and leadership abilities. 

In the end, good management skills are less about “doing” anyone’s thing. It is more about how you can convince others to rally around your initiatives. Read this blog post, if you’re looking for some good strategies on how to develop or increase your ability to influence people with excellent management skills. Also, we’ll give you some great info about learning management skills online with awesome online courses. 

How Good Are Your Management Skills?

Let’s take a look at some major aspects that will tell you whether your management skills are good or they need to be updated. 

So, a good manager should have:

• Analytical mind. You need to be good at analyzing data. A good manager should be able to not just evaluate information from the mammoth amount of data available, but also be able to produce a correct insight using that information.
• Emotional intelligence. Your ability to manage your emotions and those of others – your colleagues and (most importantly) your clients.   
• Ability to manage working relationships. Since management is very client-focused, it requires building a large amount of relationship with the client. You should have a good ability to establish a good working relationship with clients based on the credibility of your business.
• Ability to handle stress. No secret, managerial work involves long hours and stress. If you want to be good at management, you should be prepared to handle that stress and be able to encourage your co-workers to deliver good quality work within the timelines.
• Ability to work in a team. Good business is always about good teamwork. Good managers spend most of the time supervising their teams because the final deliverable to the client would involve the collective efforts of all team workers.
• Ability to learn fast. The learning curve in management is very steep. The manager needs to be able to quickly grasp new concepts, especially now when so many “new normals” came into play during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Keep on updating your management abilities and learn management skills online. And it doesn’t really matter whether it is industry knowledge you need or knowledge of software tools, etc., you can always find just the right online course for boosting your skills.

A Model of Effective Management

Management is generally a process of evaluating the workload to be performed, schedule to meet, and resources available to complete the work on time. The most important skills for effective management are: 

• Understanding the resources available; 
• Connecting with people performing the work effectively;
• A clear understanding of how the interactions occur among them;
• Keeping people engaged; 
• Verifying quality in the process; 
• Ensuring the final product or service meets client expectations.

However, just being responsible, open, supportive, and encouraging seems to be not quite enough. Obviously, there are other aspects that are needed for having truly effective management skills to produce excellent results. What else is there? 

• Planning. There must be a plan of intent and action.
• Organization. Organization of work, resources, and time to achieve the plan. This could be either yours or your teams.
• Communication. You must communicate with stakeholders – your teammates, your boss, or your direct reports. This also includes the motivation of people to achieve their desired goals.
• Measure. Everything of consequence must be measured. It does not mean that it must show up as a discrete metric. In fact, the most important things can only be described as better, higher, bigger, etc. It could be as simple as “gaining confidence to manage peers” to as grand as “achieve best in class performance” though you will need to flesh out success criteria.
• Feedback. Use this to inform modification of the plan, reorganization of resources, communicate changes and measure.

How To Make Top-Performing Employees Stay

Employee retention has become one of the most concerning topics these days as people tend to switch jobs more often. Switching jobs has become a rather common thing these days. In most cases, it happens by wish and sometimes because of dissatisfaction with the current job. If your company is huge, then losing a small number of employees once per quarter seems like not a big deal. But if your business heavily depends on everybody’s input, people’s retention becomes a reason to worry. 

Here are a few tips on how you can work on employee retention, while some may be familiar, some would be new. Nevertheless, the goal is to inspire long term loyalty from your best employees.

Provide good compensation and other benefits. Remuneration is one of the prime reasons why most employees switch jobs. Therefore, ensure that you offer them fair going wages for their work, and in addition to this, you should also offer them other competitive benefits from time to time. Good remunerations and other privileges make employees stick to one organization for a long time.

Reward employees who excel. Show your employees that they are valued and appreciated by offering them recognition to celebrate their success and efforts. Praise your employees with tangible gifts and in turn, you would be rewarded with their loyalty.

Encourage a positive atmosphere. Nothing shuts down a workplace faster than a toxic or otherwise untenable work environment. The problem may be employees, but the biggest and most impactful source can be yourself. So, if you don’t deal with problems, the employees will start to look around for other workplaces. 

You can address signals to your staff in a positive manner and encourage them to focus on doing a good job instead of being worried too much about not being laid off. For example, ask employees how their weekend was and ask whether there is anything that they are concerned about at work. It can be checking up on anything like the bathroom’s supply of toilet paper and whether it has been replenished since the last time they complained.   

Give them a chance to invest in the company.  It doesn’t mean that your staff should start doing things for you or start buying your stock. This means let them provide input and partner up with them on things like buying better tools or hardware, etc. Employee discounts are a typical example. If they want to buy products from your own company, then encourage them to do so by offering good discounts. Don’t be greedy and don’t shoot yourself in the foot over a few dollars.

Look for ways to make them feel happy. Compliment your employees for small successes, but don’t fake praise. Invest in the company in ways that improve employees’ lives. No, that does not mean free phones and company cars for the janitors. This can be providing WiFi for free or offering free coffee. The occasional cookies or donuts, or other snacks can make someone’s day and make people happy. Let employees enjoy communal resources and care for each other by being responsible for what is freely given to them.    

Focus on their welfare. If employees seem to be working past lunch hours, insist they take a break and tell them to relax. Nothing raises the spirits of employees like a boss that wants them to take good care of themselves and less concerned than the few extra dollars they will be wiring in during that time.  

How To Handle Toxic Employees

Often, managers are stuck with disgruntled people for a host of different reasons. This is almost universal and happens across a wide range of industries, no matter the size and scale of the organizations. And you know, most of the time this usually happens for a good reason. 

There are plenty of managers who don’t pay attention or simply do not have the ability to listen to the staff they manage. Some employees are stuck with managers that do not listen at all or unable to engage in a conversation or a dialogue. This can be a major reason why people feel grumpy at work and fill the workplace with toxic behavior.

So, managers should take extra care that they don’t engage in monologue when they want to “talk”. Make sure you’re the one talking more when talking to your “toxic” employees but don’t engage in the monologue. Exercise your emotional intelligence by building your ability to listen. You’d be surprised with the ideas your people can give you if you’d just take the time to sit down and actually listen to their needs and concerns.

Here are a couple of other hints on how to handle toxic employees, if you got any:

Listen to what your team is saying. Let them have a safe place to speak out and share their thoughts and ideas. It might be helpful to have a small talk with staff individually just to check-in and ask them how they’re doing. Make sure that they’re not running into any issues. And if there are any – ask what you can do to help.

Support their career advancement/development. You will always have an employee or two that may want to try or learn new things. Be sure to support them in their personal and career development. Harness their skills and be sure to pave the way for them to navigate through easily.

Don’t fix everything all by yourself, let them fix it. The best skill you can have as a manager is to learn the line between fixing and helping. If you’re always fixing the problem, your team will never know when/how to manage the issue correctly. Start out by guiding them towards figuring out the issue on their own. Let them know that they have the right skills for fixing everything up and should be able to figure out exactly what to do. Be sure to acknowledge and praise the fact that they’ve tackled the problem all on their own.

Keep in mind that toxic employees don’t suddenly change personalities or work ethic overnight. So, if something is going on, take an opportunity to understand with great empathy how you can help the employee through the situation.

Learn Management Skills Online On Grinfer

Ultimate Leadership & Management Training Course

Learn leadership and management skills with the online course “Ultimate Leadership & Management Training Course” created by a professional marketing expert and business consultant, Paul Cline. In this course, you will learn how to create a business culture where people love to come to work, boost employee performance, get the best results out of all your employees, recruit and train the best new employees, and more! 

Business Management

Learn business management principles with the “Business Management” online course created by a passionate business consultant and teacher, Greg Vanderford. In this course, you’ll learn how to motivate your staff, recruit top-quality employees, effectively run meetings, set compensation, control costs, increase sales, manage cash flow, and much more! After taking this course, you will know how to accomplish your goals and make you an effective business manager operating within any business model.

Introduction to Product Management

Learn the essentials of product management from a professional product manager, Keiarra Ortiz-Cedeno. She has created her online course specifically for those who want to get a broad overview of the skills required for breaking into product management. In this course, you will learn such topics as design visioning, design thinking, pricing strategy, decision modeling, brand building.  After taking this course,  you’ll be able to conduct a user interview, conduct user testing, build a roadmap, and more!  

How To Communicate Effectively in your Business

Learn how to improve your communication skills including speaking, listening, writing and presenting skills from a professional online business school Skillay Academy! In this course, you will learn how to speak clearly and concisely, listen carefully and professionally, write effectively, write quality content, prepare effectively for presentations, and deliver a quality presentation. By the end of this course, you will become a better communicator, you will be able to determine what you can improve and where you can focus in order to be successful.

Effective remote work with Microsoft Teams

Learn the basic knowledge and skills required for implementing Microsoft Teams in their daily activities from a professional IT manager and startup mentor with 30+ years of total experience in IT and 15+ years as a project and portfolio manager, as well as consulting services, Danil Dintsis. In this course, you will learn how to create a team in Microsoft Teams, manage members and chats in Teams channels, Assign tasks in Teams, Manage access to video recordings, and much more! This awesome online course is super valuable for companies and their employees as a “how to” tool in Microsoft Teams.

Business Management: Motivating Workers

Learn effective strategies that work well for motivating your staff! In this course, you will learn how to increase the level of motivation for your workers, learn about management theories of Taylor, Herzberg, and Maslow, how to boost motivation with financial and non-financial incentives, and more! By the end of the course, you will be able to manage your staff to increase job satisfaction, financial results, and improve the overall environment of the workplace. 

Bottom-line

It does not matter whether you have an official managerial post. Even the entry-level staff can be managerial in their work and behaviors. Finding a good mentor always works great! Talk to any successful manager who is willing to provide mentoring time. So, gain knowledge from other successful experiences, read the literature on management and the humanities, and learn management skills online. 

Management is a social activity, and not only occurring in the business. The neighborhood association, the non-profit organization, the army captain, these all have activities that require management to be effective. You’ll get a much better conceptual understanding of what you need to work on by reading the literature (books, blogs, articles, white papers, etc.) and taking courses online. So, learn management skills, master them, and appreciate your organization in a broader context!  You can improve your management skills with online courses available on the Grinfer learning platform. Just go to the Grinfer’s website and pick anything that you like!