Management

There is nothing soft or woolly about coaching, listening or giving feedback. Another perspective might simply be that they are guidelines for listening to, understanding and getting the information you want from the people you lead. Many managers find it useful to have some support in this area, particularly those who have progressed from a more technical environment and then find themselves managing people. The main difference between machinery and people is predictability. People are hard to understand, (they rarely conform to laws of physics), and management should be all about understanding your people and getting the best from them. Indeed management is after all a people game - and a contact sport!

You remember the old story about a fisherman walking along the river bank and he comes across a snake with a frog? He feels sorry for the frog as it’s about to be eaten and so he moves it out of the way. Then he feels sorry for the hungry snake and so he takes out his hip-flask and gives it a shot of whisky.

Next day he’s walking by the river and the snake is waiting for him - with two frogs!

And so what is the moral of this tale? Easy - you get what you reward! And it’s the same in organisations - you get what you reward. How you measure the performance of your people will determine how they behave and you will get what you reward. So there’s little point in rewarding adherence to rules and blind obedience - because that’s exactly what you will get. But you can’t reward adherence to rules and blind obedience and expect initiative and creativity. Incidentally if you do reward creativity and initiative then you may also get the odd spectacular failure!

So what does your organisation reward? And what do you reward?

Imagine if your employees were customers and you were a provider of management services. Now imagine that, if they weren’t happy with the service they were getting they could switch suppliers. That would make all of us as managers sit up and think about the OUTPUTS of our management, ie what we do to and for the people we manage, how we support them and generally what sort of ‘management service’ are we providing? We are constantly told that we should listen to our customers and orientate our services around this. So let’s take a look at what our customers say, (what employees really want from a manager), and it may just change the way we work.

Many managers are technical experts promoted for practical achievements, not for their excellent interpersonal relationships. Managing people is not easy - they don’t conform to laws of physics and they can be unpredictable; so why do we do it? And at the end of the day we very rarely know what our employees want from us.