Managing people is an art as well as science. Only a few managers fully understand their responsibilities to boost motivation level and overall mental well-being at work. If you are the one who had the misfortune of having a bad boss, then you know how much management can affect your career path and stress level at workplace.

In this blog, I will discuss a few key habits of effective leaders that can turn you into good manager/team lead. 

Habits of Effective Leaders

1. Always Ready to Give Credit

A manager’s job is to help his/her resources to accomplish their tasks, praise them and foster a positive and transparent work culture. Instead of showing off their own accomplishments, great managers take it as their job to recognize the accomplishments of their resources.  

Research shows that praising and appreciating employees lead to high level of job satisfaction that ultimately leads to positive work culture and high employee engagement. A survey of more than 4 million employees from more than 10,000 companies across different industries reported that employees who received recognition and are satisfied with their job had higher personal productivity. These employees were highly engaged with their teammates, were less likely to quit their job, received higher loyalty and satisfaction scores from customers.

How to make this habit stick?

Praising your employees and fostering a culture of gratitude can increase happiness, reduce stress level, improve employee motivation, performance and foster a more collaborative work environment. Make appreciation and recognition a habit. Set aside time for weekly meetings to review your team’s accomplishments. Don’t overlook the essential and behind-the-scene work that keep things running smoothly to build momentum on your team that will lead to big success.

2. Always Ready to Admit Mistakes

When you make mistake as a leader, the worst thing you can do is to overlook it. This will give an impact to your team that either you are ineffectual or simply don’t care about the results. This undermines mutual trust and respect with your team.

To overcome the situation, explain the reasoning behind your decisions, move towards improvement and handle the situation if things went wrong. Learn from your mistakes in the future to improve things.

How to make this habit stick?

Great managers understand that building trust is crucial to create a strong work relationship. An ideal leader is the one who is fearless, infallible and trustworthy. A few studies show that trust and openness is the foundation of all strong relationships. Workplace relations are also build on mutual respect, trust and willingness to be vulnerable.

A transparent and open culture will lead to great employee engagement. That’s why ideal leaders build a trait of transparency to get trust and respect. Learn from your mistakes and take them as an opportunity and build a stronger work culture.

3. They are Always Willing to Take Risks

Promoting the practice of taking risks is essential to building a positive learning culture that brings creativity and innovation. This enables the team to execute projects faster with the known fact that there is no guarantee of perfection.

Removing the humiliation of failure helps your team feel more relaxed in taking new initiatives without the fear while keeping their jobs on line.

Admitting failure so easily can build a culture that embraces the possibility of failure in order to achieve great results. But that doesn’t mean that employees are allowed to take any risks. When mistakes are made that can easily be avoided, your team is solely responsible for this. When there is a room for improvement, it’s a manager’s responsibility to communicate to their resources.

How to make this habit stick?

Despite pointing out someone, or playing the blame game, effective leaders build trust and promote creative risk taking by converting failures into learning experiences. Praise your team for taking risks, as appreciation in the form of an official award, memo or a well-placed comment can make things better. Moreover, to minimize the risk of failure, it is advised to review the project progress in every now and then so that you can control things that can make it worst.

Regardless of the outcome, take this as a learning opportunity. Figure out things that went wrong and try to improve it for the next time. Do whatever you can do as a manager to support your team and encourage them.

4. Employees’ Growth Always Matter to Them

Encouraging your employees to take risks and making it OK to fail doesn’t mean you never give them negative feedback. If there is some room to improve team’s performance, help them grow in their skills and responsibilities.

Great managers know how to give direct guidance to help their team to achieve their goals and become more successful.

How to make this habit stick?

Be proactive about working with your team and carefully identify the areas for improvement. Share the quarterly plan with your team for their professional development to gain the expertise they need to improve or learn. Find out the ways (conferences, webinars, coaching, online training courses, and eBooks) to help them to proceed. Always ready to come up with a solution and address the issue immediately.

5. Remove Productivity Barriers

Eliminating roadblocks is the key to improving motivation and engagement among them. A research on workplace productivity suggests that praising employee does not mean giving them ribbons, giving freedom does not mean giving team free rein. It is actually money that raises more creativity.   

To stay your employees motivated and engaged, employees need to know that you are here to overcome the hurdles that are keeping them from moving forward and achieving their goals.

In fact, great managers establish themselves as resources, helping and encouraging employees to complete their projects on time.

How to make this habit stick?

Set aside time on a regular basis to review project reports with each of your resource that directly reports you. Organize one-on-one meetings with your team and directly ask for feedback to improve things.

6. They Don’t Interrupt your Social Life

There are a few researchs that show that a worker’s health and happiness is not solely based on a nice-to-have at the workplace. Promoting a well-balanced team actually, has a significant impact on them. Most of us think that success is the only thing that keep us happy all the time.

However, a research suggests that having a well-balanced social life and a healthy relationship with your spouse can improve your performance in many areas of lives, including work. It’s peace of mind which is actually the key to success at work.

Taking time for social activities allows employees to recharge, relieve stress, promote physical health, fosters greater creativity and ultimately boosts workplace productivity. Working for long hours lowers productivity that is the reason, many companies are now focusing on managing and prioritizing work-life balance of their employees. It encourages managers to promote a culture of work-life balance with their actions. If your team is burnt out or stressed, they won’t be able to give 100% when it comes to managing projects on time.

How to make this habit stick?

As a manager, you have to make work-life balance a priority. As it is simply not telling your team to disconnect. It’s all about actually disconnecting yourself. Ensure you don’t stay back to get more things done. If something comes in your mind that you need to follow up on, jot it down in a task manager like and discuss it in the morning. Take time for social activities that replenish your mental energy, creativity and focus.

Work life has a great impact on our health and happiness. Being a manager, it is your responsibility to create a culture that keeps employees engaged in tasks they find meaningful.

It takes years and sometimes even decades to become an effective manager. There are no shortcuts; building these habits are a good place to start.