We all know that leadership is very important. However, management is the bridge between leadership and what your organisation is trying to achieve. Leadership decides on the destination, but you need good management skills to get there.

Management is crucial and there are certain techniques that I found to be extremely effective throughout my retail management career. Regular follow-ups were one of the management skills that allowed me to hear how my team were getting on. It also helped them to set and keep to their goals.

Follow-ups

Follow-ups are hard – They have a bad reputation of being dull and not very exciting. However, once you’ve set some objectives and targets to achieve they become a lot more productive. Establishing regular and rhythmic follow-ups (I think weekly works best) allows you to keep up to date with how staff are achieving their goals.

Generally managers make meet-ups less often, like once a month, which inevitably peters out. If you can follow-up weekly instead, like Slimming World or Alcoholics Anonymous it’ll be easier to stick to.

There’s a reason those organisations get together weekly. It’s to follow-up on their agreed actions, behaviours, strategies and to establish numbers. Numbers are a crucial aspect because what gets measured, gets managed, and what gets managed gets affected.

So many organisations could improve by making their staff 1-to-1 meetings more productive. Rather than just using the meetings as a general catch-up their would be huge benefits from discussing actual achievable targets.

Summary

Make regular follow-up meetings a new part of your management strategy and see what a huge difference it makes. It will allow your teams to feel as though they have more of an opportunity to voice their concerns, allowing for goal-setting with quantifiable results.

For more management skills follow Instil on LinkedIn.

Contact Instil and ask how we can help your management staff.