10 Qualities of a Good Manager By Bill Gates

RECENTLY I wrote about 10 qualities of a good employee, which prompted quite a few people to ask about the attributes of a good manager.

There isn't a magic formula for good management, of course, but if you're a manager, perhaps these tips will help you be more effective:

1 Choose a field thoughtfully. Make it one you enjoy. It's hard to be productive without enthusiasm. This is true whether you're a manager or employee;

2 Hire carefully and be willing to fire. You need a strong team, because a mediocre team gives mediocre results, no matter how well managed it is. One mistake is holding on to somebody who doesn't measure up. It's easy to keep this person on the job because he's not terrible at what he does. But a good manager will replace him or move him to where he can succeed unambiguously;

3 Create a productive environment. This is a particular challenge because it requires different approaches depending on the context. Sometimes you maximise productivity by giving everybody his or her own office. Sometimes you achieve it by moving everybody into open space. Sometimes you use financial incentives to stimulate productivity. A combination of approaches is usually required. One element that almost always increases productivity is providing an information system that empowers employees.

When I was building Microsoft, I set out to create an environment where software developers could thrive. I wanted a company where engineers liked to work. I wanted to create a culture that encouraged them to work together, share ideas and remain motivated. If I hadn't been a software engineer myself, there's no way I could have achieved my goal;

4 Define success. Make it clear to your employees what constitutes success and how they should measure their achievements. Goals must be realistic. Project schedules, for example, must be set by the people who do the work. People will accept a "bottoms-up" deadline they helped set, but they'll be cynical about a schedule imposed from the top that doesn't map to reality. Unachievable goals undermine an organisation. At my company, in addition to regular team meetings and one-on-one sessions between managers and employees, we use mass gatherings periodically and E-mail routinely to communicate what we expect from employees. If a reviewer or customer chooses another company's product, we analyse the situation. We say to our people, "The next time around we've got to win. What's needed?" The answers to these questions help us define success;

5 To be a good manager, you have to like people and be good at communicating. This is hard to fake. If you don't enjoy interacting with people, it'll be hard to manage them well. You must have a wide range of personal contacts within your organisation. You need relationships - not necessarily personal friendships - with a fair number of people, including your own employees. You must encourage these people to tell you what's going on and give you feedback about what people are thinking about the company and your role in it;

6 Develop your people to do their jobs better than you can. Transfer your skills to them. This is an exciting goal, but it can be threatening to a manager who worries that he's training his replacement. If you're concerned, ask your boss: "If I develop somebody who can do my job super well, does the company have some other challenge for me or not?" Many smart managers like to see their employees increase their responsibilities because it frees the managers to tackle new or undone tasks. There's no shortage of jobs for good managers. The world has an infinite amount of work to be done;

7 Build morale. Make it clear there's plenty of goodwill to go around and that it's not just you or some hotshot manager who's going to look good if things go well. Give people a sense of the importance of what they're working on - its importance to the company, its importance to customers;

8 Take on projects yourself. You need to do more than communicate. The last thing people want is a boss who just doles out stuff. From time to time, prove you can be hands-on by taking on one of the less attractive tasks and using it as an example of how your employees should meet challenges;

9 Don't make the same decision twice. Spend the time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don't revisit the issue unnecessarily. If you're too willing to reopen issues, it interferes not only with your execution but also with your motivation to make a decision in the first place. People hate indecisive leadership; However, that doesn't mean you have to decide everything the moment it comes to your attention. Nor that you can't ever reconsider a decision.

10 Let people know whom to please. Maybe it's you, maybe it's your boss, and maybe it's somebody who works for you. You're in trouble and risking paralysis in your organisation when employees start saying to themselves: "Am I supposed to be making this person happy or this other person happy? They seem to have different priorities."

I don't pretend that these are the only 10 approaches a manager should keep in mind. There are lots of others. Just a month ago I encouraged leaders to demand bad news before good news from their employees. But these 10 ideas may help you manage well, and I hope they do.

Bill Gates
Reference : http://www.btimes.co.za/97/1102/tech/tech6.htm

10 Qualities of a Good Employee By Bill Gates

I'm often asked how to be a good manager, a topic I've taken on in this column more than once. Less often does anybody ask an equally important question: What makes a good employee?

Here are 10 of the qualities I find in the "best and brightest" employees, the people companies should attract and retain.

If you have all of these attributes, you're probably a terrific employee.

First, it's important to have a fundamental curiosity about the product or products of your company or group. You have to use the products yourself.

This can't be stressed enough in the computer world. It also carries special weight in other knowledge-based fields where technology and practices are advancing so fast that's it's very hard to keep up. If you don't have a fascination with the products, you can get out of date--and become ineffective--pretty quickly.

Second, you need a genuine interest in engaging customers in discussions about how they use products--what they like, what they don't like. You have to be a bit of an evangelist with customers, and yet be realistic about where your company's products are falling short and could be better.

Third, once you understand your customer's needs, you have to enjoy thinking through how a product can help. If you work in the software industry, for example, you might ask: "How can this product make work more interesting? How can it make learning more interesting? How can it be used in the home in more interesting ways?"

These first three points are related. Success comes from understanding and caring deeply about your products, your technology and your customers' needs.

Fourth, you as an individual employee should maintain the same type of long-term approach that a good company does. Employees need to focus on lifelong goals such as developing their own skills and those of the people they work with. This kind of self-motivation requires discipline, but it can be quite rewarding.

Management can also encourage motivation, of course. If you're in sales, quotas are important tools for measuring performance, and it's great when employees beat a quota. But if beating your sales quota or maximizing your next bonus or salary increase is all that motivates you, you're likely to miss out on the kind of teamwork and development that create success in the long term.

Fifth, you need to have specialized knowledge or skills while maintaining a broad perspective. Big companies, in particular, need employees who can learn specialties quickly. No one should assume that the expertise they have today will suffice tomorrow, so a willingness to learn is critical.

Sixth, you have to be flexible enough to take advantage of opportunities that can give you perspective. At Microsoft we try to offer a person lots of different jobs through the course of a career. Anyone interested in joining management is encouraged to work in different customer units, even if it means moving laterally within the organization or relocating to a different part of the world.

We try to move people from our product groups out into the field and move field people into the product groups. We have many people in our U.S. subsidiary from other countries, and we have many U.S. employees who work for subsidiaries in other nations. This helps us better understand world markets, and while we do a pretty good job of cross-pollination, there's still not quite as much of it as I would like.

Seventh, a good employee will want to learn the economics of the business. Why does a company do what it does? What are its business models? How does it make money?

I'm always surprised to learn of a company that doesn't educate its employees in the fundamental financial realities of its industry. Employees need to understand the "make or break" aspects of their industry so that they know what it is about their own job that really counts. Of course, employees have to be willing students who direct attention to the areas where it makes the biggest difference.

Eighth, you must focus on competitors. I like employees who think about what's going on in the marketplace. What are our competitors doing that's smart? What can we learn from them? How can we avoid their mistakes?

Ninth, you've got to use your head. Analyze problems but don't fall prey to "analysis paralysis." Understand the implications of potential tradeoffs of all kinds, including the tradeoff between acting sooner with less information and later with more.

Use your head in practical ways, too. Prioritize your time effectively. Think about how to give advice crisply to other groups.

Finally, don't overlook the obvious essentials such as being honest, ethical and hard working. These attributes are critical and go without saying.