The fourth and final part of the series is the most important. Part 4 of A Manager's Annual Plan looks into the role of the manager as leader.
Now that you figured out what to do, how to do it and how to best utilize your resources to make it happen, you have to exercise the most important skill of a manager. You have to motivate the people in your organization to work toward that common goal. You have to lead.
All "management" is "people management". You don't ever manage a department or a project or a company - you manage people. You don't ever manage operations or sales or customer support - you manage people. That's why leadership skill is so important to a manager. The resources in Part 4 - A Manager's Annual Plan (Leadership) will help you improve as a leader.
About leadership, you state that “It is not a gift that some people have and others don’t.”. I beg to differ on this point, there are people who have attitude and will always have attitude, who can’t deal with others in a civilized manner, not to mention the loners. Not everyone in the world can be a leader, even if s/he read all the resources available on the internet about it. It is probably not a gift, but it is not something that each and everyone of us have it (or can have it) either.
Regardless of whether your employee is a loner or if they have an attitude, each person has their thing inside them that makes them tick, the art is to find out what that thing is, the best way to do that is to talk to them on their level, the same way they are talking to you, this way they may realise that you as a manager arn’t so bad and you do have another side outside of barking orders at people. Treat people as you yourself wish to be treated and you will find that some people, however difficult, will react in a positive way towards you and what you say.