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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?

Stress has become ‘the next big thing.’ If we type the word ‘stress’ into the Google search engine there are 18,000,000 pages, each with 178,000,000 articles and websites offering advice, stress tests, statistics and potentially ‘the answer.’ There are stress counsellors, self-help books, DVDs, etc - it is almost as though ‘stress’ has become an industry in itself.

Stress is now a self-diagnosing condition

Stress has also become a self-diagnosing condition where we find individuals visiting their GPs and saying ‘I have stress,’ (rather than ‘these are my symptoms, what do you think it might be doctor?’) We have created a stress culture and so most of us can recite the usual symptoms and suddenly everyone is a stress expert.

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.

I heard a strange throw-away comment on a visit to a hi-tech company in Cambridge, UK. We were all discussing the attributes necessary to succeed in such companies and one of the managers said this:

"We only employ technical people so issues such as personality and behaviour are irrelevant in our recruitment processes."

So what is a ‘technical person’ - is it a person at all? I guess ‘technical people’ conform to the basic laws of physics and so require no motivation, leadership, stimulation or understanding?

Perhaps they are all bloodless zombies, (working only nightshift, of course), devoid of feeling, pleasure, pain or complaints and with no aspiration other than servitude and the odd drop of blood to keep them going?

And so what sort of recruitment process would we choose to recruit ‘technical people?’ A quick sift through the CVs: qualifications, (check), experience, (check), background, (check), and then, …hmm….maybe use some sort of test, perhaps hold a mirror up to their mouths to see if there is life, and if it steams up, well they must be right for the job - they are ‘technically qualified.’

And it's great that they have no families, friends, social life, no interests outside work and certainly no humour. Anyway it's only the technical bit in which we're interested!

You know how when we go into Comet and we just love buying things, but when the salesperson comes over to speak to us we go rigid and walk out? That’s because we love buying but we can’t stand being sold to. This principle is the same with change, we love it if it’s something we do but hate it when it is done to us.

I had the senior team from a Swedish-based organisation gathered to look at the future shape of the business. They weren’t too pleased. Their collective view was that they were masters of change, they lived out change every day and they needed no-one to help them ‘manage change’. So it was difficult. I couldn’t get them to even admit that they themselves might have to change, so I gave each of them an envelope with their name on it. They were really suspicious and opened them carefully and inside were their redundancy notices.

You remember the old conundrum. A frog sits on the edge of a pond, thirty feet in diameter. He jumps exactly half way, and then half that distance, and then half that distance. And so on. How long does it take him to get there? The answer, as we all know, is ‘never.’

I often find continuous improvement a bit like this. As we seek constant incremental improvement we may negate that single, creative, explosive quantum leap which freshens up the whole organisation, or function and takes us a massive step forward. As organisations seek ever-evolving improvement, so the evolutionary process slows down, a bit like our frog on the pond. Often, a creative, revolutionary leap has to be built into the system or processes to prevent stasis, the stagnant pond of miniscule improvement.