A great manager is someone who can implement the best business management practices and motivate their teams to achieve set goals. Business management consists of the process through which businesses get their employees to produce the best results using the least effort and resources available to them. Without an effective strategy, your business can’t survive. Good business management involves leveraging strategies that have been proven to work excellently and produce positive results. The difference between failing and becoming successful may just be a matter of using the right strategy. Here are some key business management strategies that top managers use to transform a struggling business into a productive and profitable business.
1. Employee Engagement
Dissatisfied employees don’t care about performing their work correctly or as expected. They only think about getting their paycheck and promoting their own interests. As a manager, one of the things you should do to effectively manage your business is to ensure continuous employee engagement. Employee engagement basically the emotional commitment that a worker has to a company and its goals. It is this commitment that makes employees care about their work and organization. Engaged workers don’t perform their work to get a paycheck, qualify for the next promotion, or fulfill their own interests. But they work towards achieving the goals of the organization. Moreover, they are not only emotionally committed but also loyal to the organization.
Top managers capitalize on employee engagement to manage their businesses effectively in order to thrive and survive. By engaging employees, you will influence your workers to care about your business vision. Engaged employees are not just productive and enthusiastic. They are also less passive such that they become responsible and attract fresh talent to your business.
Successful managers ensure employee engagement by assigning everyone the appropriate role, training employees, checking in often, and holding regular discussions about engagement. Besides, they improve employee engagement by ensuring that their employees know what is expected of them, have necessary resources, and the workplace supports employees to thrive in their roles.
2. Rewarding Employee Performance
Top managers recognize that rewarding employee performance is essential in improving productivity and maximizing profits. As such, they usually establish a reward system for employees. This system refers to programs established by an organization to reward employee efforts and commitment. A strategic employee rewards system mainly addresses four areas: appreciation, recognition, benefits, and compensation. No one likes it when their effort or work is not recognized. When managers reward their employees for their hard work, dedication, and achievement, they make them feel valued.
Some managers fail because they overlook the positive impact of rewarding employee performance during their business management training. But successful top managers use reward systems to motivate employees to be more productive and achieve greater success. In doing so, they gain a competitive edge and keep their companies on the top. There are different ways that these managers use to reward workers for their excellent work. Some common forms of rewards are money, off days, recognition for a job well done, end of year parties, and a trip to a specific destination.
But aside from the ones mentioned above, there are other creative ways to reward employees. For example, investing in the employee’s continued education through leadership courses and training can also be an excellent way to appreciate all their hard work. This can help demonstrate that the manager is interested in their employee’s career development.
Another method of rewarding great employees for outstanding performance is to publish their accomplishments on an employee appreciation board. This allows a manager to present their excellent work so other employees can praise and appreciate them, resulting in improved self-confidence.
By doing all these things, a manager can offer rewards to top-performing employees without any hassle. Since finding new workers and training them effectively takes time and is costly, top managers retain employees by rewarding them for their great performance. Rewards offer employees a sense of purpose and meaning to continue doing the best at work. There are no set standard rewards for employees. So, each manager sets rewards based on the nature of the work performed as well as the needs of the workers.
3. Being Accessible
Being accessible to both employees and customers is another business management strategy used by top managers. Accessibility plays a huge role in the performance and productivity of employees as well as addressing customer issues and concerns. If workers and customers feel that their manager is available to discuss problems with them as they arise, they develop the sense that their manager is caring and performing a great job. Otherwise, if a manager isn’t accessible, they feel that he/she doesn’t care. Moreover, they develop the sense that their manager isn’t focused on the work at hand.
Top managers make their employees and customers know they are accessible in different ways. They put in place multiple channels through which they can be reached. This could mean making their cell phone number known to workers and customers and ensuring to carry their cell phone every time. Checking emails regularly is another way that top managers use to know problems and concerns sent to them. Managers with many channels through which people can contact then appear more accessible. Some managers are intentionally unavailable because they dislike the idea that clients might approach them with inconsequential or seemingly small problems.
4. Being Vulnerable
Vulnerability is a great tool in the toolkit of any emotionally intelligent top manager. Courageous managers leverage their “woundedness” into genuine innovation, connections, and learning. Successful executive managers do not lead as anonymous figures in the lives of their employees. Rather, they manage their businesses by getting to know their workers and engage with them. In fact, they consider vulnerability as important in team dynamics. This is because teams can’t build trust without being able to speak openly and convey their ideas to their managers. Employees feel more comfortable when they work with a vulnerable leader. In particular, they are sensitive to signals of trustworthiness in their managers.
A servant leader, for instance, who embraces value-based leadership and authenticity yields more constructive and positive behavior in workers. With such leadership, employees develop a greater feeling of trust and hope in both their managers and the organization. Trust in a leader boost employee performance. This is because when employees remember that their boss resonates with them, they develop strong social connections and positive emotions with him/her. But why do some managers fear being vulnerable?
Well, some are afraid that employees will who they really are or they will discover a vulnerable or soft spot and take advantage of it. But successful top managers do not think this way because it isn’t necessarily true. Instead, they embrace vulnerability since it makes their workers see them as human beings. That way, employees get closer to them and become more open. These managers also find it easy to share advice.
5. Staying Committed
Although successful top managers have different personal attributes, they excel in remarking, honoring, and making commitments. Managerial commitments can take different forms including public statements, hiring decisions, making partnerships, and capital investments. However, each of these types of commitments exerts enduring and immediate influence on a business. The commitment of a leader shapes the identity of a business. Some managers are unaware that commitments are very powerful. When managers lack commitment, they cause lasting constraints on their organizations and operations. This makes it very hard for them to respond to changes in competition and markets.
Being committed is one of the effective business management strategies. Commitments are a means through which managers ensure that businesses secure the resources they need to survive. Employees, customers, and investors are likely to shun any business whose leadership isn’t committed. Business strategy execution is not always an easy task. Commitment is not just necessary but also a powerful tool that helps organizations to beat the competition. Committed top managers influence their team members to trust one another. In doing so, they eliminate conflict and stifle productivity.
Through commitment, managers encourage their workers to be devoted to their work. In most cases, employees emulate what they see their leaders do. With this understanding, successful executive managers are always committed to their work. They ensure to perform their responsibilities as required. Thus, commitment is a powerful business management strategy that can turn around productivity and sales.
On the other hand, staying committed means raising a leader’s awareness and generating the responsibility of taking necessary business actions. When a leader is committed, they can reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, helping them think differently and make decisions that deliver more positive outcomes.
However, staying committed to that purpose may take time and effort. This is where executive coaching enters the picture. It helps executives uncover their leadership potential, allowing them to influence employees to get the jobs done. Also, executive coaching helps leaders learn to consider other perspectives to understand behavioral patterns in work necessary to implement the desired changes within a certain period.
6. Seeking Clarity
Lack of alignment among executives is a common problem in many companies. These leaders either do not work towards the visions of their companies or don’t understand what those visions are. But successful top managers ensure effective business management by seeking clarity. They ensure alignment with the core principles of their companies by asking these questions:
- Who must do what?
- What is most important, right now?
- How will we succeed?
- What do we do?
- How do we behave?
- Why do we exist?
Businesses cannot achieve success if managers don’t develop and share a clear sense of vision as well as business values and strategic goals. Without clarity, a business lacks direction and purpose. Successful executives achieve clarity and run their businesses smoothly by defining issues mediately they arise without hesitation. This involves knowing the objectives and goals they have set for a sales season or project and focusing on them to the end.
They achieve success by outlining the goals they aim to achieve in advance and doing a continuous assessment on whether they are achieving them. If not, they quickly and decisively address hindrances. So, if they are not reaching their goals, or what they planned isn’t being met, they always identify underlying issues and come up with remedies that will get back their businesses as usual. Thus, seeking clarity allows managers to shift immediately based on the market to keep their businesses running smoothly.
7. Facilitating Training
The role of a manager isn’t necessarily to conduct the actual training but instead to facilitate employee training. Successful executives do not assume that someone else in the company will make sure that training is done. Rather, they engage and work with direct reports, set training objectives, and acquire resources required to offer training. Besides, they identify or create development opportunities for their workers and assist them to see the value of improving their abilities.
With proper training video creation, managers can give their employees a better sense of support, resulting in increased job satisfaction. They can also provide them with an opportunity to gain skills that can help enhance efficiency and productivity, increase engagement, and encourage leadership among their employees. On the other hand, training may cover different topics including customer service, effective communication, process efficiency, and project management. Managers play an important role in transferring skills and knowledge from textbooks to on-the-job tasks, ensuring a comprehensive pretraining, actual training, and post-training process.
Effective top managers understand that a positive learning culture originates from the top. It has much to do with their attitudes towards training. This trickles down to lower-level managers and ultimately to other employees. So, if a manager disregards training, employees will do the same. To ensure there is continuous training and development, successful executives ensure that employees understand the benefit of training both to their career as well as the business. Besides, these managers know why and how training should be properly aligned with the objectives of the company.
With proper training, managers can give their employees a better sense of support, resulting in increased job satisfaction. They can also provide them with an opportunity to gain skills that can help enhance efficiency and productivity, increase engagement, and encourage leadership among their employees.
On the other hand, training may cover different topics including customer service, effective communication, process efficiency, and project management. Managers play an important role in transferring skills and knowledge from textbooks to on job tasks. This may take different phases including pretraining, actual training, and post-training. During pretraining, managers set learning goals and expected outcomes. This is followed by actual learning. After training, managers follow up with employees to ascertain they are applying what they have learned.
8. Holding Regular Meetings
No process, activity, or action is more central to establishing healthy business than holding meetings regularly. Top managers become successful by:
- Holding separate meetings for strategic and tactical business planning
- Ensuring that there is adequate time is allocated for debating, resolving as well as seeking clarification on major issues their business
- Assessing a tactical agenda after reviewing its progress against goals
- Meeting with employees quarterly outside the company to assess industry and market trends
Meetings offer a company a regular forum for planning, seeking clarification, reviewing whether activities are aligned to strategic goals, and solving problems. Besides, they allow employees to realign principles and offer direction on business practices. To succeed in managing businesses effectively in the modern competitive world, top managers must ensure to meet regularly to plan effectively in order to make a meaningful impact in their area of specialty.
As a manager, meetings will help you to develop authentic connections with junior employees. Moreover, meeting your employees regularly helps to know the challenges they encounter every day. This way, you gain a better understanding of what your workers encounter every day. That enables you to care for them better by coming up with solutions that will make their work less challenging.
Conclusion
Top managers become successful by making deliberate and well-thought-out move to position their businesses strategically in the market. These are some of the main business management strategies they use to ensure that their organizations are running smoothly. Most importantly, they use them consistently to realize positive results. Managers cannot succeed in navigating their businesses through everyday challenges without relying on these and other proven strategies. If your business is struggling, it’s never too late to try out these strategies.
