Managing People for Growth

I get a lot of questions about how to be a good manager so I thought I’d share my views here in a handy getting-started guide. First, let’s clarify that most talent pros distinguish leadership from management. Rather than pit one against the other, I think they are complementary, and here’s a great post describing how. The focus of this post is managing people for growth because the return on this investment in this skill area is considerable. One of the most engaging aspects of work is learning and growth, which is always easier if you have a great people manager for a boss. Highly engaged employees… deliver more “discretionary” effort, which means they solve more difficult problems, deliver higher standard work, and take better care of customers.

Start Here: Be available and present regularly

Managing people takes actual time and needs to be factored into your workload every week. Managing people is not an “extra” you do on top of other responsibilities. It’s the primary activity to give yourself leverage, leading to higher performance and superior results. If you are “still” an individual contributor and don’t have time for your direct reports, you need to address this first.

This is true at ALL LEVELS (I’m looking at you, CEOs). Everyone at work needs to discuss priorities, trade-offs, barriers, and conflicts; and get perspective, advice, and support. This is the primary value people managers can offer to their reports. Not telling them what to do or how to do it better (that’s micromanaging). Discussing the priority and quality of work is the purpose of 1:1’s, not slogging through a tick-by-tick update on a list of activities. While it’s useful to keep a shared list of activities for each direct report, it’s a value-destroying activity to simply run down the list every week getting the details of what did and did not happen.

For a value-adding approach, here are a few questions to get you deeper into a valuable dialogue:

What is the most important thing on your list this week?

What’s getting in the way of you accomplishing that?

What can I do to help you get it done successfully?

For more on conducting high-value 1:1’s check out this treasure trove of advice from Claire Lew at Know Your Company.

Level Up: adjust your approach based on the other person’s needs

So, if it’s not zero, how much time does it take to manage people? That depends largely on the readiness and needs of the people reporting to you. While making time is a requirement of being a good coach, the amount of time is not a predictor of impact (i.e. more time is not necessarily better). A research study by Gardner identified 4 coaching profiles comprised of 90 variables to evaluate coaching quality. Their research found that the most effective style was not the most time-consuming. The most time-consuming approach was the least effective. The most effective style was about making connections between the employees’ needs and a wide variety of resources.

“Being a Connector is more about asking the right questions, providing tailored feedback, and helping employees make a connection to a colleague who can help them.”

The classic way to guide your coaching behavior is the “tried and true” Situational Leadership model by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey (sadly they conflate the terms leadership and management). This framework helps you identify the needs of your direct reports and adjust your approach to match them in these four styles:

• Telling (specific guidance and close supervision), for lower-competence, novice, or inexperienced workers who need more direction and structure to be successful. Make decisions and communicate them; create roles and objectives and expect others to accept them. Communication is usually one way. Effective in a disaster or when repetitive results are required.
• Selling (explaining and persuading), for experienced workers who add perspective and want to expand their expertise, and who disengage if they are left out of planning. Create the roles and objectives but invite suggestions on how to refine them. Best for high-risk, high-impact situations demanding depth and expertise.
• Participating (sharing and facilitating), for moderate competence and experience with strong emotional intelligence and social skills tuned to group process. Facilitate collaboration and carry equal weight in decisions; set boundaries but leave tactics and methods to the group. Works in less urgent, more ambiguous situations where diverse input is an advantage.
• Delegating (letting others do it), for experienced workers who want to own outcomes and feel stifled by too much involvement. Keep responsibility for the team and its results but give minimal guidance and oversight; be available when unexpected barriers come up. Efficient for repetitive work with lower risk.

Management mastery: thrive on paradox

We all like simplicity and whenever possible our brains like us to respond with formulas so we can reserve deep thinking for the highest-value puzzles. Managing people may just be the highest value puzzle so shifting from task-oriented problem solving to people-oriented problem solving can pay back immensely as you move up in a career or your company increases in scale.

Accepting that managing people is a complex, dynamic, multiplistic scenario requires you to use your best emotional intelligence and constant vigilance to be present with each person in each moment. In a word, people are messy. If there’s one thing I learned in graduate school, it’s this statement written on the board by Professor Charles F. Luna: “Things that matter are messy.” I guess here I’m calling people things, but you get the point. If you want to be successful in managing people, you have to deal with messy.

Master people managers can see any interaction as an opportunity to help a person learn and grow. The problem with people is that growth is almost always uncomfortable and therefore we both crave it and resist it. It gets exponentially harder if you are operating in a business environment with deadlines, safety standards, excellence values, and demanding customers.

To be successful in helping people grow you have to embrace the paradox of being both compassionate and demanding. Simultaneously. Good luck!