Managing people is difficult. It is not as though most of us have an instinct for management. If you are a people person, someone who is a natural with charming people may be more comfortable to manage others. However, if you do not study management and the principals, you will make mistakes, and some of those mistakes can be costly. To promote someone into management without proper training is, in my opinion, unfair.
What does it take to be good at management? A good understanding of what that means is critical. First, to know how to manage an individual is to have a sense of those people and their motivations. Managing a clerical person is significantly different from managing an architect or an attorney. What makes them different?
Every person is different in their motivations, education, aspirations, and timeline thinking. I will explain each of these and how they affect your management style. It is essential to know motivations. I once worked with a brilliant man who could have earned a high salary, enough to support his family in a significantly comfortable style in Southern California. That did not interest him in the least. What was more important to him was to have time with his family. Earning a high salary was not necessary.
There are many differing opinions about education.
My assistant for one of my businesses is brilliant. She has that right brain left brain thinking that many people don’t possess and could have easily run a significant business. When pushed to attend college, she rejected the idea. Whether it was because her parents didn’t have a degree or she felt she wasn’t a good student, I am not sure. She seemed to be happy supporting me versus moving ahead.
Aspirations for everyone are different.
Some people want to move up in the world, make more money, or have the power or notoriety for running something more significant than themselves. Some people prefer simplicity and nothing more than a regular paycheck and a job with little worries once they walk out the door.
One of the biggest challenges to understand is the timeline thought process.
Some people can think about the next hour, but nothing more. Some people can think about next week, some about next year and others about ten or more years from now. The time frame thought process would have a significant impact on how successful someone will be. Someone who can only think about next week but not next year will have difficulty being the CEO of an organization. Thinking about next year or the next five years is incredibly important in successfully running a business.
What is essential to your management style no matter whom you are managing? There are five critical principles for effective management; fairness, training, consistency, positive reinforcement, and coaching.
When you are Fair, what does that look like?
Fairness is subjective. We all perceive fairness from our perspective. The only framework we have is our own, and this is where you will start. You will ask employees to complete functions as they appear on the job description. Suppose you don’t have a job description, shame on you. Create a job description for each position. You can’t criticize an employee for not performing if they do not have a guide or a job description.
Once your employees understand the job description, are they performing or not? Sometimes it isn’t easy to assess. If you are struggling with this, make sure the job description clearly defines the job or responsibilities. To clarify, be specific about the tasks. Each job function must be clear. A good manager will identify how to measure performance.
Consistency, treat all the employees with the same rules.
Whether the employees are at a senior level in the company or new to the business, a manager must treat all employees the same. I once had a Vice President who thought she could have special privileges because of her title. It is just the opposite, because if you are at a higher level in the business, I will hold you to a higher level of standards. Employees watch senior management. If senior leaders are breaking the rules, the rest will take that as a guide for their behavior.
Positive reinforcement is vital for your employees.
Positive reinforcement help employees to be fully aware of when they are performing correctly or not. This is not one of my strengths, I will admit. To facilitate this process in my business, we created a business card size card that let a person know they would “caught” doing something right. On the card, we identified which essential they were accomplishing. (We had 14 essentials for employees to follow.) We tracked how many reward cards each person received and gave them a gift for every five reward cards. When I walked around the building, I saw many cards taped to employees’ computers or cubicles.
Proper coaching is critical to employees’ success.
While working with one client, they began to rant about how all of the employees were screwing up in the middle of the office. They went on for about an hour about all of the employees’ mistakes. Because of this, no one felt they were doing anything right. How do you think the employees performed after the rant?
This business owner would have greater success with a one-to-one approach to correct the errors versus impacting the entire office.
Reward employees in public when they are doing a great job. If an employee needs to be corrected, do so in the privacy of an office.
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