Are you a good manager?

The CADDManager Blog reports on a study of 1800 U.S. workers. The results? 92% of managers rate themselves as “good” or “excellent.” But, only 67% of employees report working for a manager that “good or excellent.”

It’s a good time to think about this as we head into some quiet time for the holidays. What could you as an employee do to make your manager even better? I truly believe that employees are part of the training corps for their managers. (I’ve taught a few managers a few things, I think!) And, managers, what can you do to better serve your employees?

I’ll give the latter group some hints from my nearly 20 years in this biz. I’m lucky as I’ve had some great managers all the way back to my first job. Here are some of the things they did that made them great in my eyes:

1) got me the hardware I needed to do my job
2) gave me enough rope to hang myself, but checked in periodically so I didn’t
3) trusted me to take on an outside assignment (teaching geography) while keeping up my 40 hours working in an organic chem lab (that was grueling; good thing I was 26 and stupid!)
4) made it clear their job was to enable me to do my job
5) gave me the time/resources to learn more at formal classes and on my own

Some of those people I’ve lost touch with; others have risen (no suprise to me) up the food chain to manage larger teams and even whole companies.