My desire is to help leaders recognize the value of their employees and to develop them into the person they were created to be. Sometimes this takes a paradigm shift.
Paradigm
Your paradigm, or the filter you see the world through, is the sum total of what you have learned and observed up to this moment and now believe is truth. You would need to be convinced you were wrong for you to have a paradigm shift; a new baseline to guide your thoughts and actions.
Employees are our greatest resource
After 40+ years of management experience, I find the statement “People are our greatest resource” interesting. Some managers simply say it because it sounds like a good managing philosophy; saying it makes them feel like a good leader. Others actually believe it, but their day-to-day managing style doesn’t reflect it. They simply don’t understand how to receive the full benefit their employees can bring. Very few seem to understand how to manage their “greatest resource” and receive its greatest value. My intent is to share with you how managing your “greatest resource” looks through my “filter”.
Employees Are People
Employees are not just resources. They are more than the talent they use in your organization. They have families, other talents, plans and dreams. They want to feel valued. They are whole people.
A paradigm shift that happened to me a few years ago was recognizing people I walk past in a store or on the mall have a real life. One of my favorite sayings now is, “Everybody has a story”. They are not TV characters crossing my “screen of life”. I look at them and try to imagine what their day is like. Is there life a struggle? Are they with kids or friends or all alone? Are they happy or sad? They have real lives. They might work for you.
Another paradigm shift that has happened to me is to recognize there is a parallel between the part of an iceberg that is below sea level, about 90%, and the part of an employee that is below “see” level. A scene from the movie Avatar brings this thought to life for me. Two characters are talking.
Character 1, “Can you see me?”
Character 2, “Of course I can see you. You are right in front of me.”
Character 1, “No…can…YOU…SEE…ME?”
Do we know our people well enough to really “see” them; see the whole person, not just the surface that you see when they come to work, but the whole person?
How do we invest in our people and receive the best ROI they can bring? We need to know more about each employee. Tapping into their passions and talents, including the ones they are not currently using for us, will improve the value they can bring to the organization. Allowing their long-term goals and desires to fit into our future needs will increase the possibility of longevity with the organization. We need to know them below “see” level.
After thinking about this, I have come to these two questions. Do organizations really believe people are their greatest resource? If they do believe it, do they support that resource the way they do their other major resources?
We invest in Facilities Management. We have someone at an executive level responsible to ensure our facilities are sufficient (buildings, infrastructure, etc.) and capable of supporting the organization’s needs, today and in the future.
We invest in Financial Management. We have someone at an executive level responsible to ensure our finances are in order. They create short and long-term projections to guide management decisions in this area.
Do we invest in People Management? Is someone at an executive level responsible to ensure the right people, with the right talent, are in the right place, at the right time and all employees have a clearly defined career path that is in line with our future needs and their talents, abilities and desires?
I am convinced that People Management isn’t just another task put on the Human Resources group. In a typical organization, HR is already overloaded. People Management is a separate function, reporting directly to top management, and responsible for “getting the right people on the bus” and then “in the right seat”; responsible for the recruiting process, the interviewing process, the on-boarding process, the training process and probably the most important responsibility is ensuring every employee has a career path that fits their passions and talents.
Tom Peters coined the phrase “Management by Wandering Around” (MBWA), being visible to your people and accessible to them so they can understand your direction. That thought has been essential to my understanding of managing people. This kind of interaction will allow you to instill the management philosophy you desire one situation at a time. Being visible and available to your employees is the key.
Managing People
I have discovered managing people has a strong similarity to raising children, they both need direction and guidance in their development. A child moves from infant to adult at planned intervals; potty training, walking, talking…driving a car, through the day they move out on their own. In a similar manor, an employee moves from novice to expert at planned intervals, one step at a time under your team’s guidance.
As Stephen Covey said in his book 7 Habits for Highly Effective People we need to take our people from dependent, to independent and ultimately to interdependent if we want to have a well-functioning team. A group of independent individuals is not a team. A team blends the collective talents of each person on the team to become a great team. Covey called this synergy. The product of the whole is greater than the sum of individual efforts. To do this we must understand them all well enough to know what is below “see” level.
As Jim Collins talked about in Good to Great, we need to get the “right people on the bus” and then get them in the “right seat”. These are the two separate focuses in People Management; culture fit and ability to accomplish the needed tasks.
How do we find the “right people for the bus”? The answer is repeating what already works. What are the common culture traits your best people all have? What traits do you wish you could repeat in future staff? Once you know the answers, work questions into your interviewing process that will help you get below “see” level with the candidate. For example, if you are hiring someone at a managerial level, at the end of the interviewing process invite the candidate that is your top choice and their spouse to dinner with a few of your key leaders and their spouses. The evening interaction will tell you more about the candidate’s people skills than the formal interviewing process in the office ever will.
How do we get people in the “right seat”? What are they gifted to do? What are they passionate about? Do they enjoy leading or following? Are they comfortable teaching a group, are they more comfortable teaching in a one-on-one setting or would they rather not teach at all? Do they care about their fellow employees and help them when they can? Are they very organized and structured or are they more unstructured and random? (We need accountants to be structured, not random. However, a good sales person must be flexible to meet customer demands.) Can they speak in other languages, like Spanish or Japanese, that are valuable in communicating within your business? Define what you need and match your employees’ strengths and abilities to those needs. Guide them and teach them how to use those abilities in your organization.
Normally organizations fill open positions caused by growth or attrition by finding candidates, either internal or external, at the time the need arises. People Development works bottom up. It is a continuous process, that I call a flowing river, of allowing employees to grow in areas they are interested in throughout their career. It is discovering and then nurturing the newly discovered strengths in current employees and preparing them for potential openings in the future. When those openings come, you will have an employee trained and ready to step in. As one of Covey’s 7 Habits says, be proactive, not reactive or inactive.
The underlying point is that we hire and manage people; people with real lives. Yes, we hire them for specific talents, but we also get the rest of their skills and passions. If we see an Engineer only as an Engineer, we will miss the value of their other skill sets. For example, if you have an Engineer with great people skills, you may discover they will be happier and even more effective in your organization in Technical Sales or Project Management.
Employees learn and grow every day. Their knowledge is a “flowing river”, ever moving and ever changing. If we are not open to the “flow of the river” we can miss great opportunities. The only way I know to create an environment that is ever changing and still in control is to create guidance systems around it. Like banks of a river, they allow the flow while containing it within its boundaries. I call this a Development Road Map.
I believe every organization needs a Development Road Map. In fact, you probably have it started. Your Organizational Chart should be used to build your Development Road Map. The problem is most Organizational Charts list only positions, not the names of the people in those positions. Do you have Accountants or people working in your Accounting area? Do you have Engineers or men and women with Engineering skills and knowledge and have skills in other areas that also may be valuable to you? If we see our people as mono-talented we will never realize what the whole person can bring to our organization.
Selecting Leaders
What are the qualifications of a good leader? Too many times we witness a person promoted to lead a group because they are the best at performing the needed tasks in the group. That does not make them a good leader. Many people promoted in this manner have failed. It has been given a name; the “Peter Principle”; people promoted to their level of incompetency.
A leader has the traits needed to inspire, motivate and teach others. My favorite example is Tom Izzo from MSU basketball. The best picture to understand my point I have ever seen is 5’9” Izzo with his finger pointing up at his 7’ player explaining reality. He is greatly respected by his players. He is quick to praise and just as quick to administer corrective action. He has vast knowledge of the game. He is a leader, not a doer.
So, what are we looking for? Someone with integrity that employees respect. They are self-controlled, even in the “heat of battle”. They care about others and have the patience to teach people at the employee’s own speed of learning. They are not greedy and focused solely on money. They know employees that are well trained and cared for will increase the bottom-line. Profit is a result of what employees do in their day-to-day. A good measurement is how they manage their own family and finances. This indicates what they understand as valuable.
Do these traits for a leader matter to you? Do you have a good measurement system to understand how your leaders are doing? There are two I think are valuable.
1. The Leadership Levels in Good to Great by Jim Collins
2. The Manager’s Measuring Stick in First Break All the Rules by Buckingham and Coffman
You can find these in their respective books. If you choose to use these or any other system, you need to measure the leadership ability of your potential leaders and current leaders to ensure quality leadership.
We need to shift our paradigm in the culture of today. The days of thinking of employees as “robots” has gone. They are whole people that desire the best out of life in the workplace and in their personal lives. We need to get below “see” level to help them live their dreams.
Christian Life Coach 