Digital literacy is a skill that is a fundamental need for most institutions, especially with the amount of technology used in the world. Unfortunately, many companies and institutions are not investing enough time or money to cultivate this skill.
One way this could be addressed is by conducting what some people call digital literacy assessments. These are tests and surveys that measure an individual’s digital literacy level.
By understanding where these individuals stand, the institutions and companies will be able to craft and plan for learning programs to heighten this skill. There are a few tips to conducting these assessments that can help them go smoother and be more efficient, and below we will look at some of these.
Get Buy-In
Whenever you institute a new program, the first important thing is to get the senior members of the staff or group to get on board. This may be challenging in some cases because these senior individuals may be worried that they won’t score well.
To get that buy-in, though, it is merely a matter of having a meeting or sit down with them and showing them all the numbers that help put your new stance in digital literacy in perspective.
Show Don’t Tell
Like with anything, it is best to show these individuals how the digital literacy assessment will benefit them and their team. This means explaining to them that the more literacy they have in the digital world, the more their lives will be impacted in a good way. This can even extend to the home.
Consistency Matters
Once the assessments begin, to keep these individuals’ buy-in and make it a part of your institution’s culture, you will need to make sure they are consistently executed. Pick a schedule and use it religiously to take away your team’s stress and discomfort taking these assessments.
Cybersecurity Is Important
There are a lot of areas to cover when it comes to digital literacy. When creating your assessment, one of the most important to include is cybersecurity. Things like how to spot suspicious emails and such are essential to keep your personal info and the institution’s computer system safe. Therefore it is a vital piece of digital literacy.
Barriers to Adoption
When rolling out your digital literacy assessment, make sure to answer any push back you may get. This means sitting down and considering the barriers that individuals will put up to avoid these assessments.
Employee Resistance
The last tip we have is to go into this process expecting there to be pushed back. By expecting it, you will be able to pivot when confronted with it or pleasantly surprised when there isn’t any.
Concluding Thoughts
Having a digital literacy assessment in place is becoming a necessity if you want to run your institution at its highest efficiency and productivity. Hopefully, these six tips have helped you in your planning process.
Learning a new skill can be one of the most satisfying things you can do to grow. Learning a new skill is not just a financially smart decision, but it is also good for your mental health. When you learn new skills, you feel more powerful. New neural connections are formed in your brain when you learn something new. The best way to change your life is to change your mind. And learning new skills is the best way to change your mind, literally.
When the normal routine of life makes your life dull, having entertainment alone is not enough to recharge yourself. Entertainment can be good for a weekend — but if you do not learn anything new for years, you will start hating your work.
The traditional system of education expects us to finish school and college and then work for the rest of our lives. That strategy might have worked 30 years back as the world was slowly moving towards the information age. It is not going to work anymore. To thrive in this day and age, learning has to become a habit and continuous up-gradation of skills is required to stay relevant and competitive.
One of the biggest challenges in learning after school and college is that the learning journey becomes lonely. If you are trying to learn from a book or an online course with a set of video tutorials, your learning can become quite stressful. Students learn best when they are energetic and happy. And the only way to feel energetic and happy during your learning journey is to be part of a community that has the same learning goals as yours.
1. Sign up for a cohort-based online course
Many online courses nowadays are cohort-based, and cohort-based online courses usually have a community around them. Being part of a community can impact your learning journey in very subtle ways that are not obvious. Remember, you are the average of the five people around you.
If you are part of a learning community where you see other students have similar goals such as yours and if you see that they are making progress with their professional journey, you are highly likely to grow along with them. You will have a positive pressure to achieve results.
After the completion of the online course, you can think about becoming part of a mastermind community where the learning journey continues beyond the course duration. A mastermind community is usually led by a mentor, and you will have the best of the best students as part of the community.
Mastermind community memberships usually come at a premium, but it is worth the premium because the ideas that you get from the community for your career and business will be well worth the price.
3. Start blogging about what you’ve learned
To make sure that you do not forget what you learn, take notes and write about what you have learned in your blog. Writing organizes your thought process and it is one of the best ways to remember.
If you write in a public blog, you can also build your brand at the same time and may even start having some subscribers who want to copy your notes. A lot of digital mentors have built their following because they started taking their notes in public.
You also have to make sure that you implement what you learn. Implementation is very important because when you implement your leaningsconcepts
perspectives
onlinecourses
and get results, you are going to have validated learning. Validating what you have learned will make sure that the concepts you are trying to learn will go from information to understanding.
Once you understand something new, you will feel powerful and your perspective will expand. Once your perspective has expanded to new horizons, you will never be able to get back to your original state of thinking.
Also, implementing what you have learned gives you a project in hand. You get hired for what you can do, not what you know. Online course certificates usually prove that the student knows something, but not that they can do something. When you do a project, the project proves that you can do something. And who knows — the project can become a side hustle and may even become a business someday.
5. Become a digital mentor and teach
And finally, start teaching what you have learned to your followers. If you are already blogging and blogging about what you know, you will have an audience. Create a smaller mastermind group where you are the mentor and help your students. This will mostly happen online. You are effectively becoming a digital mentor for your students. Teaching is one of the best ways to learn, because it forces you to simplify the concepts you already have in your mind.
Any phenomenon that becomes “fashionable” instantly acquires its own mythology. This mythology forms a system of concepts that are accepted and not questioned. At the same time, the vast majority of people do not think about whether it corresponds to reality.
This paradox has existed as long as humanity. Some such misconceptions are harmless and cute. But misconceptions about any management, especially time management, lead to real mistakes in life and work, reduce motivation, and kill faith in oneself. Time management games and activities increase motivation, engagement, and problem-solving skills. They also improve resource management, speaks creativity, and enhances teamwork abilities.
So, what is the history of time management?
History of Time Management
The history of time management goes back to the distant past. As far back as 2000 years ago in ancient Rome, the famous thinker Seneca proposed to divide all time into time spent with benefit and useless.
Seneca also began to keep a permanent record of time in writing. The thinker said that when living a certain period of time, one should evaluate it in terms of occupancy. In the later history of time management, these ideas formed the basis of such a concept as “personal efficiency.
Leon Battista Alberti, a writer and Italian scholar who lived in the 15 century, said that those who know how to manage time usefully will always be successful. To do this, he suggested using 2 rules:
Make a to-do list every day in the morning.
Arrange things in decreasing order of importance.
For centuries, all of these principles existed only in theoretical form, and only since the 1980s, this topic has begun to move from theory to practice. For teens, it will be useful to read time management tips.
Time management is necessary not only for executives and business owners: each of us must be able to manage our own assets to enjoy the process of life in its entirety. Of course, not everyone needs time management. If a person has nothing to do in his or her life, and his or her main task is “to kill time”, then time management is an irrelevant and unnecessary discipline for such a person.
In other words, you should first decide whether you really lack time and where you would like to spend your free minutes, hours, and days when they appear.
Time management consists of several components:
Strict time management.
Optimization of time resources.
Planning a day (week, month, or another period of time).
Organization of motivation.
Time Management Myths That Affect Your Workplace Productivity
Time management is important not only for work: people who have mastered the art of time management are more cheerful, healthy, and successful in professional and personal life. Effective time management allows you to think about all your actions and decisions in terms of their appropriateness for your own development and improvement.
Myth Number 1: You can’t be a Successful Person Without Time Management
The main danger of this myth is that it equates being organized with being successful. This is not the same thing. It is the substitution of the essence with a tool.
At first glance, this myth seems very plausible. How can you be successful if you can’t consciously and systematically manage your time and activities? It seems like you can’t.
However, any success is first of all decision-making. And only in the second place is their execution. If you don’t make decisions or make the wrong ones, then no time management will help you at all. You will do a lot of things that lead you nowhere.
For example, Konstantin is a successful businessman. When I first met him and his style of doing business, I fell into a stupor. He was the epitome of anti-time management. Absolute unpredictability in his thoughts, actions, and decisions. Nevertheless, he has outstanding business accomplishments. Due to what? First of all – due to enormous experience, brilliant intuition, ability to make the most accurate decisions under conditions of lack of information, not to get lost in difficult situations, to be flexible and fearless.
And this is not an isolated example. Neither Konstantin nor others like him did not need the classic system of time management or rules for improving productivity. They succeeded without their help.
Myth Number 2: There are Universal Time Management Systems That Suit all People
Most books on time management inconspicuously carry the idea that time management systems are not personal. After all, this is management! And it is a universal thing. At best, the authors divide people into rationalistic and intuitive (orderly and chaotic).
A greater stupidity is hard to imagine. A time management system is built into a person’s way of life and changes it (and the image, and the person). If it does not do this, it is ineffective. And a person’s lifestyle depends on his or her values, beliefs, cognitive filters and strategies, life situation, type of nervous system, peculiarities of character, activity, etc.
Trying to change your lifestyle by copying techniques developed by someone else is like trying to transplant someone else’s organ. Your body will accept it only under conditions of suppressed immunity, i.e. partial destruction of your identity. The same happens when you copy someone else’s way of life. It disorganizes you. Basically, there are only three possible alternatives:
It will destroy your identity if you follow it fanatically.
You abandon it or modify it beyond recognition (but this is a rare option).
By chance, it will coincide with your personality traits and you will be able to apply it permanently (this is even rarer).
Myth Number 3: Time Management Doesn’t Work
The number of people who have tried living by time management and given up on it is greater than those who have succeeded.
In order for you to manage your time really effectively and without violence to your nature, you must construct a time management system for yourself. This requires a prior analysis of the characteristics of your personality, activities, lifestyle, and situation. If you set up a time management system for yourself – it doesn’t mean that all your time will be spent on work, the development of yourself, and your skills. You should also make time in this system for primitive things like watching movies using VPN for Amazon Prime or playing video games on PS4 or PC as well as other activities that help you relax and reboot.
The same about Konstantin, or rather about his sad experience of implementing time management.
Konstantin liked to attend all kinds of training, seminars, and other developmental events. At one of them, some charismatic person managed to plant in Konstantin’s head the bacillus of time management.
Konstantin decided to give it a try and hired himself a guru of time management. This teacher was the exact opposite of Constantine in temperament and most of his personality traits. However, he possessed great persuasiveness. The experiment of introducing time management into Konstantin’s life lasted about seven months.
Konstantin began to trust his intuition less and began to base his decisions on more formal and rational methods. As a result, for the first time in the last 14 years of his business career, he incurred serious losses (several tens of millions) and found himself on the verge of bankruptcy.
Now, being with Konstantin, it is better not to talk about time management.
Myth Number 4: Time Management Guarantees Personal Development
Many time-management techniques include blocks devoted to goal-setting. This is very correct and appropriate. But here lies a dangerous trap.
It lies in the fact that having reached a certain stage of development, people find themselves in a crisis associated with the need to rethink themselves and their life. He or she must make a kind of quantum leap. Instead, within the framework of time management, he or she is presented with rather primitive technologies of goal-setting.
In the vast majority of cases, these technologies are good in themselves. However, they allow you to choose goals based on meanings and values that are already familiar to you. And they do not work at all when you are experiencing an existential crisis.
If you fall into this trap, then instead of doing inner work on yourself and making a kind of quantum leap, you will move toward goals that are no longer relevant to you. You will lose time and exacerbate your own crisis.
For example, Elena is a talented person who worked for a long time as a top manager of a large company and finally opened her own business.
At the same time, Elena was always aware that the area of her professional development was not really interesting to her either when she was working as a hired employee or when she opened her own business. She was successful and highly professional. But all these years she was plagued by the feeling that she was out of place.
A year and a half after opening her business, this feeling became very strong. And then Elena went to training on goal setting and time management. Being an emotional and enthusiastic person, Elena came out of the training elated and with a list of new goals in her hands.
For eight months, Elena worked on achieving her new goals and got her way. What was the result? Severe disappointment and depression. Loss of meaning and motivation to move forward.
When I asked Elena why she thought this was the case, she said that the goals she had set in the training were totally artificial and superficial. With the shortage of time and group work, she formed pacifier goals: superficially attractive and appealing to the approval of others, but completely unresponsive to her deepest needs.
Myth Number 5: Time Management Immediately Starts Saving Your Time
This myth has probably caused the most casualties among time management recruits. Here is what a typical story of a victim of this myth looks like.
Vasily is a mid-level manager. He is promoted and made head of a division. The volume of tasks and responsibilities increases dramatically. Vasily ceases to have time and cope. But he does not give up and buys a hyper-popular in managerial circles book on time management.
Why does Vasya do this? Stupid question. To have more time. However, with amazement and irritation, Vasya notes that in an attempt to apply the great wisdom in the book, he gets less time, his life becomes more difficult, and the free time does not increase. And, funnily enough, all these phenomena only worsen over time.
After a little floundering in this situation and having exhausted his willpower reserves, Vasya powerfully forgets about any kind of time management. And later, upon hearing this magic word, he reacts aggressively and profanely.
What Happened? A tragic conflict between myth and reality.
Mythological time management is a magic pill that quickly and forever gets rid of your time problems. Real-time management is a painful process of changing your lifestyle and developing completely new and unfamiliar skills.
As soon as you start implementing a little bit of sophisticated time management in your life, your efficiency goes down dramatically instead of going up! And it remains low until new skills and habits are developed. And developing them takes extra time, motivation, and energy.
Because human is a lazy and fairy tale-believing creature, few people make it all the way to the end. Nevertheless, everyone should know how to avoid burnout.
A Practical Task
If you have never tried to implement time management in your life, please write for yourself on the sheet of paper:
What goals would you like to achieve with it, what desires to realize?
What in your way of life now prevents you from achieving these goals?
What in you/your character prevents you from achieving these goals?
If you have tried any of the time management systems but were not successful in it, please answer the following questions:
What time management systems have you used?
How would you characterize the features of that system/s?
What goals did you want to achieve by using them?
What prevented you from achieving those goals?
What didn’t suit you about the time management system you were using?
If you have tried any of the time management systems, implemented them, and are still using them, please answer the following questions:
What are the main features of your time management system?
Is there anything in your time management system that you find inconvenient or not fully effective? If yes, describe it.
What would you like to improve in your time management?
P.S. When answering the questions, please do not limit yourself to such general and meaningless concepts as “laziness” or “procrastination”. They do not explain anything, but only close the road to possible positive change. These questions will help you to understand what you really want.
Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. It involves a juggling act of various demands upon a person relating to work, social life, family, hobbies, personal interests, and commitments with the finiteness of time. Using time effectively gives the person “choice” on spending or managing activities at their own time and expediency.
Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects, and goals complying with a due date. Initially, time management referred to just business or work activities, but eventually, the term broadened to include personal activities as well. A time management system is a designed combination of processes, tools, techniques, and methods.
Time management is usually a necessity in any project management as it determines the project completion time and scope. It is also important to understand that both technical and structural differences in time management exist due to variations in cultural concepts of time. The major themes arising from the literature on time management include the following:
Creating an environment conducive to effectiveness (in terms of cost-benefit, quality of results, and time to complete tasks or project),
Setting of priorities,
The related process of reduction of time spent on non-priorities,
A year into the pandemic, the implications of how Covid-19 has changed how people will work from now on are becoming clear. Many employees will be working in a hybrid world with more choices about where, when, and how much they work. For midsize companies specifically, Gartner analysis shows that 46% of the workforce is projected to be working hybrid in the near future.
To better understand the impact of Covid-19 on the future of work, we surveyed 3,049 knowledge workers and their managers across onsite, remote, and hybrid work contexts, as well as 75 HR leaders, including 20 leaders from midsize companies. Except where indicated, our findings come from these 2021 surveys.
Managers used to be selected and promoted largely based on their ability to manage and evaluate the performance of employees who could carry out a particular set of tasks. Within the last five years, HR executives started to hire and develop managers who were poised to be great coaches and teachers. But the assumption that coaching should be the primary function of management has been tested since the pandemic began. Three disruptive, transformative trends are challenging traditional definitions of the manager role:
Understanding Midsize Businesses
Normalization of remote work. As both employees and managers have become more distributed, their relationships to one another have also become more asynchronous. Gartner estimates that in more than 70% of manager-employee relationships, either the manager or the employee will be working remotely at least some of the time. This means that employees and their managers will be less likely to be working on the same things at the same time. Managers will have dramatically less visibility into the realities of their employees’ day-to-day and will begin to focus more on their outputs and less on the processes used to produce them.
Acceleration in use of technology to manage employees. More than one in four companies have invested in new technology to monitor their remote employees during the pandemic. Companies have been buying scheduling software, AI-enabled expense-report auditing tools, and even technologies to replace manager feedback using AI. While companies have been focused on how technology can automate employee tasks, it can just as effectively replace the tasks of managers. At the extreme, by 2024, new technologies have the potential to replace as much as 69% of the tasks historically done by managers, such as assigning work and nudging productivity.
Employees’ changing expectations. As companies have expanded the support they offer to their employees in areas like mental health and child care during the pandemic, the relationships between employees and their managers have started to shift to be more emotional and supportive. Knowledge workers now expect their managers to be part of their support system to help them improve their life experience, rather than just their employee experience.
When managerial tasks are replaced by technology, managers aren’t needed to manage workflows. When interactions become primarily virtual, managers can no longer rely on what they see to manage performance, and when relationships become more emotional, they can no longer limit the relationship to the sphere of work. These three trends have culminated in a new era of management where it’s less important to see what employees are doing and more important to understand how they feel.
Radical flexibility requires empathetic managers
To be successful in this new environment, managers must lead with empathy. In a 2021 Gartner survey of 4,787 global employees assessing the evolving role of management, only 47% of managers are prepared for this future role. The most effective managers of the future will be those who build fundamentally different relationships with their employees.
Empathy is nothing new. It’s a common term in the philosophy of good leadership, but it has yet to be a top management priority. The empathic manager is someone who can contextualize performance and behavior — who transcends simply understanding the facts of work and proactively asks questions and seeks information to place themselves in their direct reports’ contexts.
Empathy requires developing high levels of trust and care and a culture of acceptance within teams. This is a lot to ask of any individual: that they ask questions that produce vulnerable answers without compromising trust, diagnose the root cause of an employee’s behavior without making assumptions, and demonstrate the social-emotional intelligence necessary to imagine another’s feelings.
Empathy isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. In fact, in that same survey, 85% of HR leaders at midsize companies agreed that it’s more important now for managers to demonstrate empathy than it was before the pandemic. Further Gartner analysis shows that managers who display high levels of empathy have three times the impact on their employees’ performance than those who display low levels of empathy. Employees at organizations with high levels of empathy-based management are more than twice as likely to agree that their work environment is inclusive.
Creating a new workforce of empathic managers is especially difficult for midsize companies. While larger companies can earmark billions of dollars for learning and development for massive workforce transformation, smaller companies are more fiscally constrained and don’t have the same resources. Midsize companies also often don’t have the scale to create a managerial class within their workforce — they need managers to be both managers and doers.
Midsize companies need to find solutions to develop more empathic managers without massive investments and continue to have those managers work rather than just manage. This will require organizations and their HR functions to develop their managers’ skills, awaken their mindsets to manage in new ways, and create the capacity across the organization to enable this shift. Here’s how to adopt a holistic strategy that invests in all three of those strategies.
Develop empathy skills through vulnerable conversation practice
Asking managers to lead with empathy can be intimidating. Many managers understand empathy conceptually but aren’t sure how to use it as a management tool: Are these questions too personal? How do I create a trusting relationship with my direct reports? Is caring acceptable at work? How do I talk about social justice?
It goes against deeply ingrained assumptions that we should keep work and life separate. Managers need opportunities to practice — and, crucially, room to make mistakes — in order to learn to lead with empathy. Unfortunately, only 52% of 31 learning and development leaders polled in May 2020 report that they’re increasing their focus on soft skills.
To build empathy, Zillow creates cohorts of managers across the organization who engage in rotating one-on-one conversations with their peers to troubleshoot current managerial challenges. These conversations offer frequent, psychologically safe opportunities to engage in vulnerable conversations focused on how managers can commit to specific actions to care for themselves, as well as support the well-being of their team.
Managers are able to practice their empathy with their peers, asking specific questions to understand their challenges and articulating their own circumstances in response to probes. Importantly, these types of conversations offer managers the opportunity to fail — and in a safe space — which is an opportunity rarely given to figures of authority. They also help managers feel less isolated by practicing empathy with peers, who are less likely to pass judgment.
Empower a new manager mindset by creating a network of support
According to our 2021 survey of 4,787 global employees, 75% of HR leaders from midsize companies agree that managers’ roles have expanded, yet roles and teams are not structured to support well-being.
Goodway Group, a fully remote company since 2007, knows that the best business results and purpose for work happens within teams and that distributed teams face greater challenges with communication and shared visibility. Goodway created a dedicated role, the team success partner, whose responsibilities include fostering trust and psychological safety and supporting team health. Managers work with team success partners to respond to the unique challenges distributed employees are facing; this includes facilitating remote psychologically safe remote conversationsand supporting new team member assimilation.
Managers’ motivation to be empathic increases when they have a support system that makes it clear that the burden isn’t theirs alone and when organizations invest in roles designed to support them.
Create manager capacity for empathy by optimizing reporting lines
Managers are already overburdened by the demands of the evolving work environment, and actions that drive empathy are time consuming. While 70% of midsize HR leaders agree managers are overwhelmed by their responsibilities, only 16% of midsize organizations have redefined the manager role to reduce the number of responsibilities on their plate.
Recognizing the pressure on managers to maintain team connectedness in a remote environment, leaders at Urgently, a digital roadside assistance company, rebalanced their managers’ workloads. When managers have a team size they can handle, they’re able to dedicate time to fostering deeper connections and responding with empathy. Moving to a hybrid environment creates complexity; one key part of the solution is to help managers prioritize their workload to focus on fewer, higher-impact relationships with individuals and teams.
Organizations that equip managers to be empathic by holistically addressing the three common barriers — skill, mindset, and capacity — will achieve outsized returns on performance in the post-Covid-19 world.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization‘s managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization’s objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans.
Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models often include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
Michael Porter identifies three principles underlying strategy:
creating “fit” by aligning company activities with one another to support the chosen strategy
Corporate strategy involves answering a key question from a portfolio perspective: “What business should we be in?” Business strategy involves answering the question: “How shall we compete in this business?”
Management theory and practice often make a distinction between strategic management and operational management, with operational management concerned primarily with improving efficiency and controlling costs within the boundaries set by the organization’s strategy.
Interorganizational relationships allow independent organizations to get access to resources or to enter new markets. Interorganizational relationships represent a critical lever of competitive advantage.[40]
On the one hand, scholars drawing on organizational economics (e.g., transaction costs theory) have argued that firms use interorganizational relationships when they are the most efficient form comparatively to other forms of organization such as operating on its own or using the market. On the other hand, scholars drawing on organizational theory (e.g., resource dependence theory) suggest that firms tend to partner with others when such relationships allow them to improve their status, power, reputation, or legitimacy.
A branch manager is an executive who is in charge of a particular location, or branch office, of a bank or other financial services company. Branch managers are typically responsible for all of the functions of that branch office, including hiring employees, overseeing the approval of loans and lines of credit (LOC), marketing, building a rapport with the community to attract business, assisting with customer relations, and ensuring that the branch meets its goals and objectives in a timely manner.
Key Takeaways
A branch manager is an employee who oversees the operations of a branch of a bank or financial institution.
Branch manager’s responsibilities include managing resources and staff, developing and attaining sales goals, delivering exceptional customer service, and growing the location’s revenues.
In prospective branch managers, employers look for someone with experience, proven success, and leadership skills.
Academically, branch managers typically have undergraduate degrees in finance, accounting, or related fields of study.
Understanding Branch Managers
A financial institution’s executives place great confidence in the company’s branch managers, expecting them to run their locations as their own businesses. A branch manager’s job description includes assuming responsibility for virtually all functions of their branch—including growing that location’s customer base and elevating the community’s perception of the company’s brand.
Branch managers also have the responsibility of delegating tasks to skilled workers and are responsible for their successes and failures. In fact, the branch manager is responsible for the success or failure of the branch they manage. Excellent multitasking and organization skills are necessary to accomplish tasks in a timely and efficient manner, not only for the branch manager but also for the people they manage. The branch manager will also oversee the performance of subsidiaries, such as bank tellers, loan officers, and back-office workers.
Requirements for Branch Managers
Because branch managers’ responsibilities include developing and maintaining good relationships with customers and employees, they should possess strong sales, people-management, and customer-service skills. Other attributes required of a branch manager are diligence, strong analytical skills, and the ability to prioritize, multitask, and focus on detail.
Branch managers are expected to be proactive about networking to bring in new business and increase revenue. A new branch manager might join the local chamber of commerce and attend business and networking events, where one often can meet influential community members. For example, a branch manager might meet a local hospital administrator and work out a deal to provide the branch’s services to the hospital’s employees.
Branch Manager Qualifications
Branch managers usually have undergraduate degrees in finance, accounting, or related fields. Some financial institutions will look at a branch manager job candidate with a non-finance-related bachelor’s degree as long as they have a master’s degree in a finance-related field.
Financial institutions hiring for branch manager positions look for candidates with both prior financial experience and proven leadership experience. They also seek candidates with a track record of increasing the number of a bank’s accounts, and hiring banks expect branch managers to be deeply knowledgeable about banking-industry regulations. Once hired, branch managers have the freedom to choose their teams, but they also must be able to ensure their teams’ success.
Digital literacy is a skill that is a fundamental need for most institutions, especially with the amount of technology used in the world. Unfortunately, many companies and institutions are not investing enough time or money to cultivate this skill.
Cybersecurity Is Important
Concluding Thoughts
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