Welcome to our series on management essentials skills, focused on helping managers, executives and entrepreneurs get and stay effective. We will cover management skills, management techniques, as well as best practices we’ve learned in helping thousands of managers and executives succeed in the workplace.

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Skill 1. Be proactive, stay proactive.

This is a must have skill for all managers, executives and entrepreneurs. By proactive, we mean three crucial things:

Always consider alternatives

Make really good use of existing resources

Favor actions over passiveness

Always consider alternatives

As a manager, one’s responsibility is to make decisions. The decisions don’t have to always be the best or even correct, but they need to be made swiftly. When they are wrong, they need to be mitigated as quickly as possible. Then you move on. So then, what do we mean by seeing alternatives? It means treating every decision event as an opportunity and not a roadblock. Additionally, it also means that there’s always a decision to be made. This means that the next time when a crisis strikes, consider what are the decisions to be made. The important point is that there’s always a choice! Your job: identify what are the steps you and your team can take in response to these events. If you don’t have an answer, start asking around immediately because there’s always alternatives.

Make really good use of existing resources

Managers typically find themselves with insufficient resources to get things done. For example, our company Appfluence has 5 employees, doing the work of 25 people and competing against companies with tens of millions of dollars in the bank and 10 times more employees. What we’ve done successfully is make good use of existing resources. If you ever find yourself not having the budget to get something done, I want you to ask these questions:

What are my top 5 deliverables, and what do I need to do to reduce them to 3?

What are the top 3 expenses for my deliverables. Can I reduce this capital investment by using something that already exists?

Can I substitute economy of scale with economy of flexibility?

Favor actions over passiveness

On a daily basis, you’re inundated with activities that you could leave to “wait and see”. Instead, our suggestion is to make a response swiftly, and then follow up. Typically when you are unable to make a decision, you’re missing crucial pieces of information. The passive response is to let it simmer and wait to see. The active response is to reply immediately asking for this additional piece of information. As an example, a customer might reach out asking a question that you don’t have the answer to. A passive response would be to wait and do nothing until you have the answer. An active response would be to reply to the customer immediately and tell them you’re looking into it, but equally important, ask them why is it important. This will allow you to learn something new while you’re seeking that answer.

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