Are you a facility manager who wants to improve your leadership skills? If you are, there are steps you can take to become a more efficient and effective manager while advancing your career and ensuring you meet company goals. The right manager can encourage employees and cultivate an atmosphere of dedication and loyalty. If you are seeking out ways to be a better leader and serve as a role model to your employees, here are six leadership tips for facility managers you may find useful.
1. Optimize Resources
When thinking strategically, you must consider how to manage staff, technology, and budgets most effectively and efficiently. To do this, you must become adept at identifying areas for improvement, analyzing data, and making informed decisions. By thinking strategically about resources, you can lower costs, cultivate long-term sustainability, and optimize efficiency.
2. Communicate Effectively and Directly
Communicating effectively and directly is key to being a good manager. It is a core ability that all managers must possess, and it can help you better supervise teams, coordinate activities within your organization, and interact with stakeholders. Here are three key aspects of effective communication.
Conflict Resolution
Can you resolve conflicts in a professional and timely manner? Conflicts in the workplace are inevitable, and as a manager, you must be able to address them in a calm, collected manner. By encouraging open communication, peaceful resolutions, and open dialogue, you can promote harmony and cooperation among team members.
Collaboration
Managers are often responsible for supervising various groups of employees, and often, these groups are responsible for performing different tasks. An effective facility manager will know how to encourage these groups to work together to achieve company goals.
Stakeholder Engagement
As a manager, you may be responsible for keeping stakeholders informed. These stakeholders may include clients, vendors, and senior executives. By fostering strong relationships with these individuals, you can gain their trust, collect essential feedback, and ensure everyone is working toward common objectives.
3. Delegate Properly
No matter how smart or talented a manager is, no one can do it all. For this reason, you will need to learn how to properly delegate tasks to others and ensure everyone plays a role in your company’s success. Managers who have difficulty delegating to others often find it nearly impossible to meet productivity goals and produce high-quality work. Learn about each of your team members’ strengths and weaknesses and assign them tasks accordingly. Although you may feel tempted to wear every hat as a manager, doing so can be detrimental in the long run.
4. Motivate Employees
Motivated employees are more likely to meet company goals and enjoy doing so. In other words, if you want your employees to do their best, you will need to know how to motivate and encourage them. Offering positive feedback and communicating appreciation are two easy ways to do this. You can also offer reasonable incentives for meeting goals or completing tasks. At a core level, employees will also feel more motivated if they feel they are working in a respectful and fair environment.
5. Be Flexible
Flexibility is a core trait of a competent manager. If you can’t adapt to new circumstances quickly, you will have a difficult time managing others. A strong facility manager can assess and understand each new challenge as it arrives and adjust their strategy to meet these challenges head-on. Knowing how to pivot in a professional setting is of the utmost importance for any facility supervisor.
6. Exercise Emotional Intelligence
Exercising emotional intelligence is essential if you want to be a great manager. Understanding the emotions of others can give insight into the state of your workplace and the headspace of your employees. Without emotional intelligence, it can be immensely difficult to resolve conflicts, encourage collaboration, and motivate employees to do their best. Often, emotional intelligence gets overlooked in the business world, but using your knowledge of people and emotions to your advantage can help advance your managerial career.
Use Leadership Tips for Facility Managers to Your Advantage
Using the leadership tips for facility managers above is a great place to start as a supervisor or facility owner. Here at Benton Roofing, our leaders employ a wide variety of tools to ensure our roofing customers feel satisfied and come back. Contact us today to request a quote.