10 Hopeless New Year Resolutions For Managers

I’m sure you’ve attempted to make some New Year Resolutions, some you might not have even broken yet. Below we list some you will be wasting your time making. How do we know? – because each year we hear managers say these are the things they are going to do better at, but seem to find very hard to achieve:

1. Demonstrate more leadership and less micro management. If anything this seems to be getting worse not better. Few managers seem to be able to inject greater leadership into their working practices.
2. Consistently make a more value-added contribution. Stand out from the crowded mediocre manager space through your insight and original perspective, rather than simply stating the obvious, confusing quality with quantity or producing poorly thought through ideas.
3. Trust people more.
4. Communicate more effectively. This is always near the top of the complaint list when employees are surveyed. Why is this so difficult? Note to self: there is no necessary relationship between how many minutes (hours?) a day you spend emailing/blackberrying and how well you communicate to your people.
5. Spend more time with customers and less behind a desk.
6. Pay more attention to success inputs rather than just measurable outputs. Profits, sales, GP etc are all consequences of doing something. Focus more on the doing. This seems to defeat many managers.
7. Design more effective bonus schemes, ones that promote the right behaviours as well as performance.
8. Smile more, not when it suits you, but when it would make a real difference to the meeting or situation.
9. Increase your learning.
10. Work less hard. Perspective is everything, many managers fail in obtaining some. Modern business life makes it very difficult to calibrate work rate or hours expended.

If you can apply even half of the 10 you will stand out from the crowd.