Loe raamatut: «People Management»

Managing people is hard but rewarding

As you go through life, you will increasingly find that you need to manage people. A parent has to manage their family; a supervisor or team leader has to manage a small team; an entrepreneur may have to manage staff, customers and suppliers.

Early in my career I took responsibility for managing people. I managed up to 250 highly trained professionals who worked as a tightknit team. It didn’t matter that I was the youngest person in the team! For over 20 years I’ve been working with individuals and organizations to help them improve their management of people. This has ranged from military personnel to entrepreneurs, from charities to government departments. I’ve learned many secrets and tricks over these years. Some I’ve discovered for myself, but many I’ve learned from others. Humans are wonderfully inventive!

This book aims to help you improve your skills at managing people – to help you find ways in which everybody benefits. It contains 50 secrets, grouped into seven themed chapters.

• Build on a strong foundation. You must understand what type of leader or manager you want to be. Your employer may give guidelines, but you must exert control over your day-to-day behaviour.

• Create a great team. This shows how to choose the right people and quickly build a functioning team.

• Set goals and targets. By setting people effective targets and goals, you can monitor progress and offer appropriate rewards.

• Motivate yourself and your people. Implementing ways to motivate people is ultimately much easier than having to cajole and constantly monitor unmotivated people.

• Manage good performance. You need to recognize good performance – reward it, develop it, perpetuate it and spread it to others. Otherwise you will lose your good performers and be left only with the poor ones.

• Manage poor performance. Some managers find ways of managing around poor performance without tackling the poor performance itself. However, this encourages more poor performance, from both the original perpetrator and everyone else. Know how to tackle the problems head on.

• Develop your people. Though often overlooked by managers, another fundamental task is developing people. You need to improve the less able, stretch and reward the able, plan succession for the future and mentor your people’s changing needs.

Managing people is a hugely complex area in which you never stop learning. The secrets contained in this book will help you make massive strides towards succeeding in this fascinating role.

Knowing how to manage people well is one of the most important skills in life.

Build a strong foundation

A strong foundation is essential for anything you build, and this should include your management career. You need to decide from the outset if people will want to follow you or if you will be relying on the authority vested in you by your employer. How you act as manager will set a tone to be copied, loved, hated, criticized, praised or ignored. Be prepared to take the time to promote stability and longevity for your life in management.

1.1 Know what your own boss expects

You need to understand in detail what your own boss expects of you as a manager. Armed with this information, you can draw up specific targets for both yourself and your individual team members, and be confident in your day-to-day decision-making.

1 Who is your boss? If you work in a company or hierarchical structure, then there is usually a clear answer to this question – your boss is the person who appointed you or to whom you report. If you are an entrepreneur running your own business, however, your ultimate ‘boss’ may be the customer, or possibly your major shareholder or even the bank manager who allows

case study A sales manager had been set sales targets for him and his team to achieve. He was also set a target for cost reduction within the department and was required to ensure all his staff were trained to use the new software systems the organization introduced. As part of the organization’s expansion plans,

you credit! If you work for a charity you need to be clear whether the ‘boss’ is the donor of the funds or the recipient of the benefit.

2 What does your boss want? If your boss is clear and concise about his or her wants, then you are able to move straight to setting targets for your people. If not, you are going to have to ask, and if necessary keep asking, until you get clear and SMART (see Secret 3.3) objectives.

3 When does your boss want it? Your boss will inevitably want you to achieve a number of different things, and you need to know the comparative priorities – what is most important/urgent and what is less so.

4 How does your boss want it done? This may include the detail of the method, but perhaps more importantly, the framework or environment in which it is to be done. For instance, are you constrained by quality procedures? Are there internal policies on health and safety, equality laws or human rights issues?

If you don’t know your boss’s expectations, then achieving them will be purely a matter of chance.

he was also tasked to investigate new markets and recruit new sales staff to exploit these. Unsure of priorities, he tried to achieve everything as soon as possible. After nine months he collapsed with exhaustion, having reached none of his targets or objectives in full. His team were branded as failures and dispersed.

1.2 Decide if you are a manager or a leader

Are you a manager or a leader? This is not about your job title. ‘Leaders’ have their ‘followers’, whereas ‘managers’ have ‘the managed’. This may seem like a purely semantic difference, but there are different concepts behind the words.

• Followers. These people actively choose to follow you. They want to support you, they want to work for you, and they want you to succeed, because your success proves they were right to follow you.

• The managed. These people are relatively passive in working for you. They are happy to let you make all their decisions for them. They do as they are told and leave it up to you to check the quality of their work. They don’t try to use their initiative because they believe that is what you are paid for. They give you the ‘right to manage’.

one minute wonder There is a quote from a staff members’ annual report that reads: “This person is capable of producing adequate results when under constant supervision and when caught like a rat in a trap!” Does this describe any of your own people?

It is probably pretty clear that your life will be more fulfilling and more enjoyable if you are a leader than a manager, but pressure (target-driven organizations, the desire to be indispensable, the feeling of responsibility) tends to encourage micro-management.

You probably need to ‘manage’ people who have little experience and expertise, but as people grow in ability and knowledge you can slowly switch from ‘manager’ to ‘leader’. Of course, if you take over a team that is already performing, you may be able to go straight to leadership and followership from day one.

A leader attracts followers, whereas a manager has to supervise the managed.

1.3 Balance your decisions

Are you the leader of the team, or the person tasked to get things done, or the person tasked with looking after the individual team members? Actually, if you want to manage people well, you need to take on all three of these roles.

There is a concept called ‘Pyrrhic Victory’, which describes a situation in which an objective has been achieved – but at too high a cost.

• If you make all decisions with the primary objective of achieving the task at any cost, then you might end up destroying the team on the way. But…

• If you make all your decisions with the primary aim of keeping the team intact and happy, then you probably won’t achieve the task But…

• If you are determined to ensure that each and every individual is safe, happy and looked after, then you won’t fulfil the task and the team will fall apart as well.

John Adair, the world’s first Professor of Leadership Studies, developed a model called Action Centred Leadership. His contention is that as a leader or manager you need to ensure that every decision and action you take balances the needs of the task, the team and the individuals. By doing this you stand the greatest chance of achieving the task, having a cohesive and capable team still in place for the next task, and having individuals who still have a good quality of life, and feel valued and respected.

This model is usually represented by three interlocking circles, from which it gets its name, Action Centred Leadership.

Answering yes or no to any of the questions above doesn’t tell you the right thing to do. By asking the questions before you act, you will get a chance to balance your decision.

Balanced decisions every day make for good leadership – not task focused one day, team focused the next!

1.4 Don’t be consistent!

“What?” I hear you cry! “Surely I should manage everyone in the same way to be fair?” Well, think about it: imagine you have two people, one is experienced, competent and willing, and the other is new to the task, has little ability and is lazy. Would it be fair to manage each of them in the same way? Would it motivate them both?

You have to manage or lead in a way that suits the situation. This is called Situational Leadership, a title originally coined by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey. Here is a simple primer to the idea:

• Consider an individual’s ability on a scale of low to high. This is their ability to do the job you are asking of them, not just a reflection of their age or years of service.

• Next consider their willingness to do this particular job, again on a scale of low to high.

• Now imagine these two values plotted on a graph, like the one opposite.

• The notations on the graph (C, D1, D2, S) refer to the paragraphs below the graph, which tell you how you might best manage this particular person.

• S = Support. This person is very willing but lacking in skill/ability. They need support in terms of demonstrations, training and practice (see Secret 4.8).

• C = Coaching. This person is both willing and able and therefore only needs some light coaching in order to perform well.

• D1 = Directing 1. This person has both low ability and low willingness. They are going to need much more in the way of directing – orders, supervision and checking.

• D2 = Directing 2. This person has already proved their ability but their willingness is low. They don’t need training and demonstration; they need some direction from you to understand why the task is important and how they will benefit personally by doing it well.

It is vital for your success and the success of your people that you manage in a way that suits the situation.

1.5 Learn to delegate

As a manager, team leader, supervisor or foreman, you have to delegate work to others. Delegating is a fundamental skill of management, but it is also one that many managers do very badly. There is a skill to learn in order to delegate effectively.

The more you delegate, the more time you will have to manage people and improve processes. In order to delegate effectively, you need to ensure that the person to whom you delegate a task is provided with four things: Skill, Time, Authority and Responsibility. The first letters of these words spell the word STAR, which makes them easy to remember, as shown below.

• S = Skill. You need to ensure that the person has the skill and ability to do the task. This doesn’t mean that they have to be as good at the task as you. (You may be able to give them more time to do it than you would otherwise have available to do it yourself.)

• T = Time. You need to make sure that the person has adequate time to complete the task at the pace that’s likely for their ability. This means allowing for the actual time this task will take alongside any other tasks they need to do. If you are their manager, they may be reluctant to admit that they don’t have the time. Try to ask open questions (“When will you do this?”) rather than leading questions (“You have enough time to do this, don’t you?”) to ascertain their workload.

• A = Authority. Ensure that other people know that the person you’re delegating to has been given the authority to complete this task. You might just tell people that they will need to provide this person with information and support, or you might give them a written ‘licence’ or acting rank. Without confirmation of authority, their task may be much harder to perform.

• R = Responsibility. This is often the hardest one. You are delegating something that you have a responsibility to get done, so you must ensure that the person you delegate to understands that they are responsible to you for doing the task. One of the best ways to give the responsibility is to make it very clear that you are sharing the credit for the successful outcome.

For more about delegating to motivate people, see Secret 4.7.

The more you can delegate properly the more you can get done, so learn to love delegating.