It is on the management to plan, strategically develop and mobilise resources, coordinate and control all the functions of a business. C-level executives often make crucial decisions that influence a company’s performance as well as reputation in the market. This doesn’t come easy. Therefore, such decisive people in the organisation should have a blend of managerial and leadership characteristics aka entrepreneurship mindset.

Here are the crucial skills for top management. How many of these are in your managers?

Aligned to vision and mission

Vision of the company has to be ingrained in the mind of each employee, especially the leadership team. Envisaging the company’s vision and helping others to understand it requires foresightedness as well as the ability to decipher future opportunities and challenges.

If a manager is not a firm believer of the organisation’s vision and mission, how can s/he drive the team?

It has been seen that managers who have a clear and broad vision are able to drive the team's best efforts for maximum learning and impact. These managers instill brand loyalty in their employees by helping the team document its role in the company’s vision and the path to make maximum out of it. These managers are firm believers of creating money through value.

 The pandemic was a crucial lesson for this vision alignment as well. With the backs against the wall, the management with understanding of broad vision and mission was able to find opportunities to scale and build new products or solutions.

Ability to lead and motivate teams

One of the crucial growth in human resources over the past decades has been the importance of people. From just being a step up the ladder for a company’s success, today employees are the pillars of an organisation. Today, business is a team sport - success is best when it’s shared, whether it’s the spotlight or accolades - financial and social. Successful businesses reckon people as their most valuable assets, accrediting them for success more than strategies.

Managers have the ability to delegate and help the team perform to the best of their capacities and capabilities. The best performers thrive in the environment of support and recognition, and become the micro- entrepreneurs within the organisation. These managers ensure that the team structure has clear roles and responsibilities. The employees should have regular 1:1s with managers and be up-to-date on their roles and recognised for their work and prospects of growth.

Ability to express

For an effective business manager, the ability to express is the key to impress. In fact, good communication skills, both written and verbal, are synonymous with management. The ability to express views, opinions, thoughts, and ideas play a pivotal role in the manager’s personality.

Many managerial attributes such as initiation, delegation, negotiation, arbitration, and a host of interpersonal skills depend largely on a manager’s ability to express. Although they come under soft skills, they contribute a lot in hardcore business activities and management. From acceptance to a challenge to the rejection of a non-viable plan, a manager’s assertiveness helps her/him a lot in taking the right and timely decisions.

 Apart from this, assertiveness is also useful in team bonding and group cohesion. It depicts the manager’s passion and conviction for work and organisation.

Power of self-actualisation

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs emphasised that understanding the self and realising one’s own worth is the gist of self-actualisation. Through self- actualisation, a person comes to know her/his genuine strengths and unique qualities that differentiate her/him from the crowd.

It is not always essential to improve weaknesses, but more important to play the strengths to the best for the business and self. Eventually, the person works upon these qualities to hone them further and derive the best results using these traits in a professional landscape.

Managers with deeper understanding of self-actualisation have better probabilities of accomplishing professional as well as personal goals. This also translates into the team with the manager leading by example

Ability to measure results effectively

In the uncertain world and black swan events, the most thoughtfully projected strategies may fail and that’s part and parcel of a business. But the differentiation of a good manager is when they have measured this failure to create long-term lessons and are aware of mistakes to be performed better.

This is crucial because in the time of data and analytics, everything is judged by its return, and human resources, especially managers, are no exception to it. They are valuable to the organisation as long as their output is measurable and profitable. And, they can’t be profitable until and unless they become efficient at measuring results of other resources, effectively and accurately.

So, a manager must bring a measurable impact on the organisation with his presence and activities.