What sets the great boss apart from the average boss?

There are as many styles of management as there are managers, there is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: They discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it. Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you can’t play if you don’t know how each piece moves. More important, you won’t win if you don’t think carefully about how you move the pieces. Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.

The job of a manager, meanwhile, is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance. Managers will succeed only when they can identify and deploy the differences among people, challenging each employee to excel in his or her own way.

The Four Levers

What you should know about your direct Reports. — Do try this

• What are his or her strengths?
• What are the triggers that activate those strengths?
• What is his or her learning style?
• What are his or her Weaknesses

To identify a person’s strengths, first ask, “What was the best day at work you’ve had in the past three months?” Find out what the person was doing and why he enjoyed it so much. Remember: A strength is not merely something you are good at. In fact, it might be something you aren’t good at yet. It might be just a predilection, something you find so intrinsically satisfying that you look forward to doing it again and again and getting better at it over time. This question will prompt your employee to start thinking about his interests and abilities from this perspective.

To identify a person’s weaknesses, just invert the question: “What was the worst day you’ve had at work in the past three months?” And then probe for details about what he was doing and why it grated on him so much. As with a strength, a weakness is not merely something you are bad at (in fact, you might be quite competent at it). It is something that drains you of energy, an activity that you never look forward to doing and that when you are doing it, all you can think about is stopping.

Although you’re keeping an eye out for both the strengths and weaknesses of your employees, your focus should be on their strengths. Conventional wisdom holds that self-awareness is a good thing and that it’s the job of the manager to identify weaknesses and create a plan for overcoming them.

The 12 Key Qualities Shared by All Good Managers

• Good managers are great leaders
• Good managers show empathy
• Good managers are skilled at delegating tasks
• Good managers have high EQ (emotional intelligence)
• Good managers are knowledgeable
• Good managers capitalize on the strengths of their team members
• Good managers mentor and develop their teams
• Good managers set clear expectations
• Good managers take accountability for their teams
• Good managers promote an open-door policy
• Good managers strive to relate to the challenges of their employees
• Good managers is fair in evaluating performance

You can read in detail about these qualities here — Link

Article Source

Harvard business review Article — What Great Managers Do by Marcus Buckingham