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Developing managerial skills is important for all professionals. According to the World Economic Forum, people management is one of the top 10 skills needed to thrive in today’s workforce. Additionally, research by Gallup shows companies with talented managers experience greater profitability, increased levels of productivity, and higher employee engagement scores—highlighting how vital management can be to an organization’s culture and success.

Whether you’re an aspiring or seasoned manager, there are steps you can take to improve how you oversee and guide people, products, and projects. Here are seven ways you can become a better manager and advance your career.

How to Improve Your Management Skills

1. Strengthen Your Decision-Making

Sound decision-making is a crucial skill for managers. From overseeing a team to leading a critical meeting, being an effective manager requires knowing how to analyze complex business problems and implement a plan for moving forward.

In the online course Management Essentials, the following components—referred to as the “three C’s”—are presented as essential building blocks for a successful decision-making process:

• Constructive Conflict: This involves engaging your team members in the decision-making process. It invites diverse perspectives and debate, and stimulates creative problem-solving.
• Consideration: All stakeholders involved in a decision should feel their viewpoints were fairly considered before a solution is determined. Without this sense of acknowledgment, they may be less inclined to commit to and implement the solution.
• Closure: This is a function that ensures stakeholders are aligned before proceeding. It requires defining what constitutes a project or initiative as “done” within a set period, determining if anything remains to be accomplished, and ensuring everyone agrees as to whether the outcome was a success.

By ensuring your decision-making process encompasses these qualities, you can become a key contributor at your organization and influence the context in which decisions get made.

2. Cultivate Self-Awareness

A high level of self-awareness is critical for managers, and it’s what separates high-performers from their peers in the workplace.

This core tenet of emotional intelligence requires introspection and an honest evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses. Through engaging in self-assessment and turning to trusted colleagues to gain insight into your managerial tendencies, you can chart a path for your professional development that hones in on areas where you need to improve, enabling you to bring out the best in yourself and others.

Related: Emotional Intelligence Skills: What They Are & How to Develop Them

3. Build Trust

Trust can reap numerous benefits in the workplace. According to research outlined in the Harvard Business Review, employees at high-trust companies report:

• Less stress
• More energy at work
• Higher productivity
• Greater engagement

Seek to forge deeper connections with your colleagues by engaging in small talk before meetings and learning more about their lives outside the scope of their work. In addition, encourage inclusive dialogue about personal and professional differences, and be open to diverse viewpoints in discussions.

Doing so can cultivate empathy among your team, leading to a greater sense of camaraderie, belonging, and motivation.

Related: 4 Tips for Managing Global Teams

4. Be a Better Communicator

Strong communication skills are a hallmark of any successful manager. Being in a managerial role involves tackling complex business situations and ensuring your team has the information and tools required to succeed.

When facing such challenges as navigating organizational change, be transparent about the tasks at hand and instill your team with a shared vision of how your company can benefit from the impending transition. Continually provide updates and reiterate the plan for moving forward to ensure your employees are aligned and understand how their work factors into larger corporate objectives.

5. Establish Regular Check-ins

Make it a habit to regularly check in with your employees outside of their annual performance reviews. According to research by Gallup, team members whose managers provide weekly feedback are over:

• Five times more likely to strongly agree they receive meaningful feedback
• Three times more likely to strongly agree they are motivated to do outstanding work
• Two times more likely to be engaged at work

Keep the conversation informal when delivering feedback to your employees, and focus on the person’s progress toward organizational goals, rather than their personality. In addition, help them set an action plan for moving forward, and affirm your role as a trusted advisor as they tackle next steps.

6. Carve Out Time for Reflection

Beyond regular check-ins, set a consistent cadence for reflecting on and reviewing your team’s work. In one study by Harvard Business School Professors Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano, it was found that call center employees who spent 15 minutes reflecting at the end of the workday performed 23 percent better after 10 days than those who did not.

In a video interview for Management Essentials, HBS Professor Amy Edmondson says reflection is crucial to learning.

“If we don’t have the time and space to reflect on what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, we can’t learn,” Edmondson says. “In so many organizations today, people just feel overly busy. They’re going 24/7 and think, ‘I don’t have time to reflect.’ That’s a huge mistake, because if you don’t have time to reflect, you don’t have time to learn. You’re going to quickly be obsolete. People need the self-discipline and the collective discipline to make time to reflect.”

Schedule reflection sessions shortly after the completion of an initiative or project and invite all members of your team to participate, encouraging candor and debate. Hone in on problems and issues that can be fixed, and plot a corrective action plan so that you don’t encounter the same pitfalls in your upcoming undertakings.

7. Complete Management Training

Beyond your daily work, furthering your education can be an effective way to bolster your management skills.

Through additional training, such as an online management course, you can learn new techniques and tools that enable you to shape organizational processes to your advantage. You can also gain exposure to a network of peers with various backgrounds and perspectives who can inform your managerial approach and help you grow professionally.

For Raymond Porch, a manager of diversity programs at Boston Public Schools who took Management Essentials, engaging with fellow learners was the highlight of his HBS Online experience.

“My favorite part of the program was interacting with my cohort members,” Porch says. “I received valuable shared experiences and feedback, and was able to be a thought partner around strategies and best practices in varying scenarios.”

Related: Are Online Classes Worth It? 12 Pros & Cons of Online Learning

Elevating Your Management Skills

An ability to manage people and implement projects on time and on budget is a business skill that all professionals should strive to master. Through sharpening your soft-skills, building self-awareness, continuing your education, and other strategies, you can gain the skills needed to excel as a manager and lead both your team and organization to success.

Do you want to become a more effective leader and manager? Explore our online leadership and management courses to learn how you can take charge of your professional development and accelerate your career. To find the right course for you, download the free flowchart.

If the only time you think about working on your performance is before the annual performance evaluation, you are not alone. Most of us today prefer to stay quiet and let someone else point out possible improvements in their work. The reason? Well, it’s a simpler choice. However, let’s think about this carefully – you’re talented, you’re productive, you’re good at your job, but how will you grow into it if you are not focusing on improving yourself.

No matter how skilled or productive you are, there’s always a possibility to do a job better than before. Keeping an eye on enhancing your skill set and exploring ways to learn something new is the initial step towards becoming a better version of yourself. It not only helps to increase your work performance but also creates potential opportunities for your professional development.

Help employees work better together with ProofHub.

Considering the importance of constant and never-ending self-improvement, we’ve gathered a few work management tips that will surely go a long way towards boosting your performance and value in the workplace.

10 Ways You Can Improve Your Work Performance Today:

1. Set clear milestones

Setting clear milestones is important in both personal and professional life. As human beings, we have a habit of shooting for the stars and the same reflects in the goals we set. Now, it’s ok to be a little bold but when it comes to “goals”, it’s much better to think clearly and be realistic.

Pro tips:

Setting goals is often an overwhelming process. So what you need to do is break your big personal and professional projects into smaller chunks and set your goals accordingly. Doing this will help you stay motivated and keep your energy levels up throughout the journey. Further, setting clear goals will make it easier for you to keep track of your progress. Allowing you to celebrate every small victory you achieve. While setting milestones, keep the following tips in mind:

• Keep your eye on the deadline
• Save all the important dates on an online calendar
• Improve your project evaluation skills
• Treat every milestone as a learning experience

2. Plan and prioritize

If it seems like you’ve heard this point before, you’re right. Organizing, planning, and prioritizing are a crucial part of our daily routine. In fact, there are several articles over the internet that provide valid reasons for the same. These are some simple workplace habits and time management tips that help you get things done in time and improve your overall work performance.

Pro tips:

Before you start your day, go through the list of tasks or activities you have planned for the day. Now, use a project planning tool to establish a due date and priority status for each one. After that, take the most urgent and essential tasks into consideration and get them completed as soon as possible. Here are a few tips that may help you along the way:

• Understand the difference between “urgent” and “important”. Always focus on tasks that need immediate attention
• Try ordering your tasks by estimated effort
• Uncertainty is a reality. So, be flexible and adaptable – but keep priorities in mind

3. Plan your meetings well

Meetings are powerful, but they are widely misunderstood. Planning and scheduling meetings is a common practice in almost every workplace. That’s why it is important to carefully plan each meeting in order to make it “most effective”.

Pro tips:

Take all the time you need to plan your meetings, but keep them short. Make sure that all the necessary elements are in place before the meeting starts. Set a clear agenda for the meeting and communicate the same to all the participants so that they can come better prepared. Additionally,

• Before sending invites for the meeting, ask yourself if it’s really needed
• Check everyone’s availability and pick the best time for the meeting
• Provide as much detail as you can for pre-preparation
• Save a time slot for meeting and sum it up in the given time frame

4. Communicate better

Communication is a two-way street. Effective communication is a practice that makes you certain about things at work, learn new and improved ways to achieve better results, and finally, improve overall work performance. Remember, every opinion matters and it can certainly help you take your work performance to a new level.

Pro tips:

Consider injecting a powerful team communication app or tool into your workflow. Evaluate the various choices available in the market, including team messaging app, discussion boards, group chat apps, video conferencing tools, etc. Identify what tool or software would work best for your team and then use it to successfully collaborate within the workplace. And while doing this, keep the following points in mind:

• Don’t just start evaluating the available option, put a proper collaboration strategy in place first
• Consider which tool will meet your long-term business requirement
• Analyze feedback from customers who have previously used your preferred tool

5. Conquer difficult tasks first

This point is directly related to our above point “plan and prioritize”. Obviously, you can’t do every task or activity at the same time. That’s why it is important that you figure out what tasks should be completed first and what tasks can be postponed or delegated during the project planning stage.

Pro tips:

Try ranking each task in your to-do list according to its specific importance and urgency. Keep the “most important tasks” at the top and start checking off items in your list from top-down. The idea behind this tip is very easy – if a task seems somewhat torturous to you, ease off your mind by getting rid of it as soon as possible.

6. Don’t lose focus (eliminate interruptions)

Workplace interruptions or distractions come in all shapes and sizes. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been interrupted or who interrupts you the most during the day. What matters is how you avoid workplace interruptions and improve your work performance. Remember, workplace interruptions are dangerous. They make you lose focus, waste time, and in the end, disrupt your work management and cause a delay in projects.

Pro tips:

If you want to avoid interruptions or distractions at work, then you need to stay away from your phone or email. Turn off the notification and keep your eye on successfully completing the tasks at hand. Also, learn to say “no” when necessary. You can and you must say no to anything or anyone who can interrupt your day. Apart from this, here are a few easy habits that will help you stay focused at work:

• Turn off distractions during work hours (smartphones, social media sites, office chit chats, and more)
• Take short breaks between work – listen to your favorite song or go for a short walk

7. Acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses

The word “perfect” is too good to be true. There’s no way for you to be perfect in everything. We all have weak spots and it’s important to acknowledge them in order to identify improvement opportunities. Additionally, every individual has his/her own strengths i.e something that they are exceptionally good at. Now, in order to bring improvement to your everyday work performance, you need to cherish your strengths and overcome your weaknesses at the same time.

Pro tips:

Never settle for “quite okay” when you can achieve “awesome”. Be your own critic and keep evaluating your performance for potential improvements. If you’re pretty good at something, then do whatever you can to be the best at it. Wondering how to figure out your strengths and weaknesses, here are a few ideas that you may want to try:

• Find patterns in your performance
• Decide what you enjoy the most at work
• Practice Reflective Best Self (RBS) exercises – find out what other people think about you
• Make a note of how you respond to situations that require action, thought, and insight

8. Be aware of your limitations

While it’s certainly important to constantly find a way to polish the areas you are not doing so well, it is also important to be aware of your own limitations. Never fall victim to habits like multitasking or procrastination. Work on one task at a time and do everything to keep it less stress and less prone to mistakes or rework. Keep things clear in your head and you will be able to accomplish much more than expected, much faster.

Pro tips:

Understanding your limitations isn’t easy. In fact, you will never be able to understand them until you go beyond them. In simple words, you have to draw a line between being productive at work and being stressed at work. And how will you do that? Well, here are a few things you can try –

• Say “no” and keep the peace
• Back off when things get relentless
• Don’t be too ambitious, be realistic
• Discover your sweet spot and avoid burnout

9. Finish what you start

Another thing that is likely to affect your productivity and performance at work is leaving things unfinished. Do you remember how many times you’ve started working on something and then abandon it shortly after? If this often happens to you, then it’s time to change. Don’t make it a habit to leave things in between. If you’ve started a project or task, make sure that it reaches the last, final stage with utmost quality.

Pro tips:

Set rewards for yourself. Make it a habit to celebrate success and reward yourself whenever you successfully complete a project or task. Doing this boost your work performance and you will always have something to look forward to at work.

It’s a proven fact that when you provide the right kind of tools, your team’s overall performance improves by leaps. Recent research and studies clearly reflect that the majority of organizations are shifting to cloud-based tools and technology to leverage their many benefits. It has also been predicted that in the coming years IT will be a strategic enabler of modern businesses – and 81% of organizations are agreeing to it.

Pro tips:

Keep yourself and your team up-to-date with the latest tools and technology. Explore the multitude of choices available in the market and evaluate the best with respect to your specific business needs. Find a cloud-based project management software that simplifies project management, facilitates clear communication, eliminates conflicts, and keeps your productivity high, every day. Here are some basic questions that will give you a better idea of how you can find the right tool for your business and your team:

• What are your business’s key processes and how they can be improved using online tools and apps?
• Are you already using a business tool? If yes, then is it delivering results as per your expectations?
• How much are you willing to invest?
• What kind of training or support services do you expect?

Top choice: ProofHub

“The one place for all your projects, teams and communications”

ProofHub is an all-in-one project management software that works as a central place for managing and delivering projects. With ProofHub, you (and your team) can:

• Create effective project plans
• Collaborate seamlessly
• Keep things on track
• Better manage the work process
• Centralize important files and documents
• Ensure efficient time management
• Boost overall workplace productivity

And more …

Things don’t change, they remain as they are. It is you who has the ability to change and grow into something better. So, if you’re good at your job and you want to stand out in it, take the initiative and start working on your work performance. Consider the above tips and make sure you put them into practice in a way that’s best for you and your career.

Vartika Kashyap

Vartika Kashyap is the Chief Marketing Officer at ProofHub and has been one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2018. Her articles are inspired by office situations and work-related events. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click.