50 GOLDEN TIPS FOR MANAGERS

1) Remember customer or client is the most important part of any organisation.

2) Spend at least 5 minutes each day for handwritten thank-you notes.

3) Treat others the way you want to be treated.

4) Remember that success is getting up just one more time than you fall down.

5) Look at problems as opportunities.

6) Don’t always look for one right answer.

7) Change is a door that can only be opened from inside.

8) Be open and accessible. Walk around your department at least once daily and your company once a week.

9) Improve your communication skills.

10) Praise in public criticize in private.

11) Decide when to advance and when to retreat.

12) Cut down on memos. Have more face-to-face communication.

13) Remember friends come and go but enemies accumulate.

14) Say, “I don’t know” when you don’t.

15) Learn how to say ‘No’ to avoid over-commitment.

16) Smile. It is contagious.

17) Carefully manage your time. It’s your scarcest and least renewable resource.

18) Be humble in victory and gracious in defeat.

19) Spell and pronounce names and titles correctly.

20) Have someone you may confide in.

21) Start applying the lessons learned from training seminars the first day back at work.

22) Network with people outside your field.

23) Be curious and open-minded.

24) Schedule free and quiet time to think and plan without interruption.

25) Be an active listener.

26) Be a mentor to someone on the way up.

27) Celebrate the personal and professional accomplishments of your staff.

28) Use ‘We’ rather than ‘I’ when talking about your firm.

29) Keep all promises. Don’t promise more than you deliver.

30) Be proactive. Don’t wait for your ship to come in; swim out to it.

31) Strive for total quality/continuous improvements at all times.

32) Bring more humour into your workplace.

33) Recognise that consistently high performance may only be achieved if you take the time to recharge your batteries.

34) Never underestimate the competition.

35) Remember that you never get a chance to make the first impression.

36) Be on time for appointments others have with you and for those you have with others.

37) Start and end meetings on time. Use a written agenda.

38) Practice what you preach. Walk the talk.

39) Answer questions. Question answers.

40) Realise that anger is a powerful weapon that should be discharged rarely.

41) Apologise when you are wrong.

42) Recognise that what is popular is not always right and what is right is not popular.

43) Both are wrong. Not taking action when it is required and taking action when it is not required.

44) Ensure planning is both top-down and bottom-up.

45) Accept that you are not responsible for everything that goes wrong (and right) in the area you manage.

46) Be wary of quick fixes. Band-Aid solutions rarely last very long.

47) Don’t dwell on the past. Learn from it and move on.

48) Learn how to read the body language. More than 80 percent of a message is not conveyed by words.

49) Accept that some days you are the crow and some days you are the statue.

50) BECOME Number 1. Watch out Number 2, always.

ALL THE BEST

Subramanian K S