Easy Management
Ever wish that managing people could be easier?
It can (and should) be easy to manage your people.
Here are some tips to making it easy to manage your teams.
Clear Responsibilities - Make sure that they have specific responsibilities and objectives. Do they know what they are supposed to do and when they are supposed to do it? When their results don’t meet your expectations, have a discussion to find out where there was misalignment. What needs to be changed in order to ensure there is alignment moving forward.
Individual Capabilities - Do they have the ability (personal skills) and training to perform their responsibilities? If not, is this something that can be trained over time? Who can train them? If their individual capabilities do not match the responsibilities, is there someone who can help them? Sometimes a visionary (great ideas and creativity) needs an integrator (someone who can get things done and also recognizes the level of effort required to implement visionary ideas). If the individual is clearly not a match for the responsibilities, is there another role in the organization where this person can provide value?
Results - What are the results that you expect from this person? There need to be quantifiable targets that can be tracked, monthly, daily or even hourly. Sometimes this is not intuitive. Sometimes you need to find incremental targets to ensure that the big goals are met. For example, if your sales person needs to generate $1M per month, what are the weekly or daily goals that help them achieve the monthly goals? Cold calls, customer visits… Most people love to have a target that they can meet or exceed.
Communication - As a leader, it is your responsibility to ensure that your team has clear responsibilities, targets and the resources to be successful. When you are a new leader, or you have a newer employee, it is wise to invest a lot of time to get to know your people, who they are, what they enjoy, what they are good at and where they need support. Maybe some training could help them perform better, maybe better resources, tools or systems could hep them improve their performance. When you and your employee are well connected and everything is running smooth, you can decrease the frequency and length of communication, but you still need to have regular check points.
Feedback - How do you respond to bad news? Do you get frustrated or angry when you hear bad news? If so, there is a chance that your team will not tell you bad news until it has turned into horrible news and it is too late to change direction. Your employee may only be the messenger of bad news that was not his/her fault. But if you respond in a way that makes them regret bringing unhappy updates, they make learn to keep their mouth shut and let you learn about issues on your own. We all have areas where we can improve. If you can receive bad news and personal feedback well, you are more likely to continue learning and becoming a better manager. If you are in middle management, your boss will be happy to provide you with constructive (or destructive) criticism, but your employees (who have a different perspective) will only provide feedback if they feel comfortable.
Responsibility - This is extra credit. I like to hold myself responsible for my team. Not just in performance metrics and goals. I want my team members to be successful in their career, even if that means they need to promote into a new department or move to a new company. I want them to enjoy coming to work. Work can be hard and I hold them accountable for their metrics, but I do not want them to dread coming to work because of how I make them feel. I want them to know that when they arrive at work they will be appreciated and respected. If you have both salary and hourly employees in your team. What kinds of restrictions do you put on the hourly employees? How are the rules different for them, like vacation, cell phone use or other flexibility?
I have certainly over-simplified the process of managing people. We are all complex individuals. Hopefully, these thoughts will help you create a framework to make managing people easier. I have many years building and transforming teams into well-oiled-machines. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes a fun and worthwhile adventure.