Some of the criteria for success are obvious, such as completing projects on time and on budget. More often than not, though, being a good manager has more to do with how you interact with your staff than with how smoothly various projects go.

In this concise TechRepublic Premium guide, learn how to become an effective IT manager.

Featured text from the download:

3: Maintain your technical knowledge

Often, IT managers (and especially CIOs) spend more time in meetings than they do configuring servers or troubleshooting problems. As a result, it’s easy to let your technical skills become outdated. But there are at least three good reasons why you should maintain your technical skills, even if you don’t use them on a regular basis.

First, you don’t want your staff to think of you as an idiot manager who knows nothing. If you don’t have a minimal level of IT knowledge, your staff may not respect you. Second, you never know when you may have to fire an employee or when someone will quit or end up in the hospital or something like that. You need to have enough knowledge to pitch in and help complete whatever projects the employee was working on. Even if you don’t have sufficient time or technical knowledge to complete the project yourself, you should know enough about it to help those who are going to be working on it, if necessary. Third, vendors will constantly try to sell you things. Unless you have a good bit of technical knowledge, you could easily get taken for a ride by a fast-talking vendor who is pitching an inferior product.

Boost your IT management skills with our five-page PDF. This is available to download for FREE. Get access to more content with a Premium annual subscription. Use the code 25off-trp to get a 25% discount.

TIME SAVED: Crafting this content required 10 hours of dedicated writing, editing, research, and design.