Becoming a manager and rising up the corporate ladder is a dream for many of us, but it isn’t always easy.
Many problems can come between you and your career goals, including overcoming personal issues such as undesirable personality traits. If you exhibit them, you might find that you get passed over for more senior roles, which will set your career plans back.
Even when you are in a managerial or supervisory role, you might still find barriers to being effective as a manager.
These can include issues around your behavior and personality traits that you’re missing and are affecting your performance.
While personality traits might sound permanent and unchangeable, they’re not, and there are ways you can cultivate them.
This article explores the key personality traits that every manager in any business or niche needs and how you can start to cultivate them.
Organization And Time Management Skills
Most managers have to organize many projects at the same time, as well as support their team and report to their superiors. You need to make sure that you can manage your workload when you’re a junior team member. Make sure that you highlight your organizational skills and show your working methods to your more senior colleagues to highlight your efficiency. If you can show that you have exceptional time management and support your fellow team members when they need them, you can improve your chances of earning a more senior position.
Calmness Under Pressure
Being a manager can be extremely stressful at times, so you need to learn how to stay calm. If you tend to get angry and frustrated at any small issue, you need to learn to control this urge, as it can make you look unprofessional and cause stress to your staff. Should you struggle to deal with your emotions, consider exploring anger management courses. ZandaX is an established training provider, offering an online anger management course that you can fit in around your role, learning to control your emotions quickly and put your new skills into practice. You’ll then be able to manage your emotions and deal with challenging situations more effectively. After all, you can’t completely avoid stressful and difficult situations, but you can improve how you handle them to remain professional no matter what happens.
Effective Communication
Effective communication in all forms, including written and spoken, is essential for any successful manager or team leader. If you can’t communicate, then you won’t be able to get your point across correctly, and you could find that your team becomes inefficient. Also, you might accidentally offend others, which could lead to low morale among your staff. So, it would be best if you practiced communicating to ensure that you are clear and professional. Learn about how to communicate in various situations and study the way others speak and write so that you can learn from them. You’ll then be able to communicate more effectively and showcase your professionalism, which could help you to highlight your suitability for a more senior role.
The Ability to Listen
Communication is important for managers, and an often-overlooked part of this is learning to listen to those around you. Many business experts believe that listening is the key to being a good manager, so if you’re not a skilled listener, then you need to practice. It’s vital to take on board what’s being said, make meaningful changes, and respond appropriately. Practice active listening to ensure that you understand how to have meaningful and professional conversations with others. It will also help if you also learn from your own experiences, both with good listeners and bad ones, to better understand how some situations make people feel. You will learn a great deal from these experiences.
Adaptability And Flexibility
While these tips will help you improve your managerial practices or learn the personality traits you need to improve your chances of earning your dream job, you need to remain adaptable and flexible. The business market is constantly changing, and some new technologies and techniques could benefit your team. As such, you need to make sure that you stay flexible and remain committed to finding new ways to better your team and achieve the success you want. If you rest on your laurels once you have the job you’ve always desired, you might find that you get surpassed by someone else or that you struggle to maintain your past success by doing what you’ve always done.
So, as you can see, there’s a lot to consider – from using your time effectively, through anger management and communication skills to listening and flexibility – but the benefits of your work will pay dividends in the future. It might take some time and hard work, but eventually, you will be in a better place to achieve your professional goals.
