First Break All The Rules
It’s no secret that the manager position in the workplace is difficult. Ultimately, the way an employee performs is the main piece that influences the success of a business. That’s why it’s the manager's job to make sure that they perform to their maximum capacity.
A lot has been written about the way managers can execute their position effectively. However, what if all of the information about management is actually false? On the contrary to taking the age-old management adages for granted, first, you should Break All The Rules, by analyzing the methods that the greats used.
This text will tell you, on a practical level, the way managers can look for the best employees for specific positions while keeping them happy with that position.
Additionally, you’ll find out how to balance giving your team independence while making sure that they do quality work with some direction and control. Lastly, you’ll learn about what to do when your staff member is not working the way you expected them to.
Employee satisfaction is the key to a successful business.
There are a lot of ways that you can raise your business's profits. However, a lot of those methods only let you grow over a small period of time. A successful company is actually one that constantly grows which can only be accomplished with a nice and regular performance. This performance deals with a lot more than just the way that things are managed inside of a company.
Namely, the center of a business is the workplace and in a successful company, the workplace is empowering and performs really well.
The success of any type of company can only depend on a revenue flow that is strong and tenable. This kind of flow won’t come from methods like cutting prices or opening up in another place. It comes from increasing your loyal customer base. Developing a big loyal customer base obliges you to make your customers feel happy with all of the great items and services that your business offers.
However, how does a business make that a powerful and a well performing type of workplace?
It lies in the happiness of your staff members. The happier they are, the more effort they’ll put into developing and keeping a powerful work environment.
How come?
For starters, a happy staff member is more committed to their position and since it’s stronger, they’ll put in more productivity.
Their commitment additionally tends to have an indirect influence on the business’s profits. A happy and committed staff member will be more likely to preserve energy by, for instance, not neglecting to turn off the lights. They’ll even negotiate prices and there’s a smaller probability that they would steal from your business.
Lastly, those kinds of committed staff members will most likely stay with the business longer. They’ll also be nicer towards customers since they care a lot about how the business is viewed.
Therefore, if you want to be successful for a longer time, businesses have to create empowering work environments where the performance is always high. Making sure that staff members are happy with their positions is a guaranteed way to create that type of work environment.
The manager determines the degree of employee satisfaction.
If the fundamental part of a successful company is the happiness of its staff members, then what is the fundamental part of that happiness?
It’s the manager.
This is due in part to the fact that the manager is accountable for describing their team’s workplace. They have to make a type of environment that will bring happiness to their team.
In fact, a staff member’s happiness is more impacted by the positioning of their manager than by any of the policies or the procedures of the entire business. That’s because managers turn the business’s work attitude into both practices and guidelines.
For example, when it comes to practices, this kind of change tends to incorporate transforming new business strategies into solid goals that the team can aim their attention at. For instance, giant technology businesses don’t have to concentrate on making revolutionary items any more. On the contrary, now they just strive to make their item the standard. When changing this new strategy into a solid ground rule, the sales manager has to, for example, ensure that their sales clerks make their customers aware of the item’s compatibility with other devices.
When it comes to directions, the advantages of a manager that understands, trusts, as well as puts in their time and help into their team are much greater for the members of any business regulations that aren’t satisfactory for their staff. For instance, suppose the manager of a media giant didn’t reward their designers with pay raises unless they were promoted up to the management level. The biggest issue in this case is that the designers who worked really hard and well weren’t rewarded for it in any way.
In order to solve this problem and praise those who perform exceptionally, the manager created a new job title. Here, designers could still design but they also had to share their thoughts with new designer. This made the position seem more like a management one.
These instances depict how managers are in command of changing the work environment into one that is not just a place where you make money to live. Although no one should even consider working somewhere that doesn’t pay well, what is more important to staff is a workspace that gives a sense of purpose as well as the potential to express themselves.
The work of the manager is centered on mediating, not leading.
In order to become an awesome manager, first of all, you have to get rid of the well-known management principles and get to know the true significance of your position.
Initially, you have to grasp the fact that a manager is not a leader.
Although awesome managers and awesome leaders have quite a few similarities, a major difference between the two is found in their focal point. Leaders look outward, into the future and are visionaries, whereas managers mainly just look inward, at what is already prevalent and can be changed into performance. They’re also understanding.
In other words, managers interact with people, and their job includes figuring out, fixating and holding onto strong staff members.
But, since managers aren’t leaders, then what are they?
They are mediators. They care of the demands of the business as well as of their staff members and they take into account the interests of both parties. They make sure that their work environment favors reaching the economic goals as well as ensuring that each employee feels productive and important.
When trying to accommodate both parts, managers attempt to locate the point of confluence. That’s the part where company demands and staff members are put together effectively.
Therefore, managers can be viewed as “catalysts”. Similar to a catalyst in chemistry, the manager aides in the effect that happens between two discrete elements. Although this only incorporates the two parts, it still needs something else to help put the matter into motion.
Clearly, the most important part of a successful business is located in a successful intervention, which gathers the demands of the staff members and the demands of the business in order. In this case, the managers have the main job since they have to locate, fixate and hold onto good staff members.
In the next paragraphs, you’ll read about how the best managers get their staff members to give it their all by recognizing and developing their unique gifts.
Each person has a unique and unchanging set of behaviors which can be considered talents.
Even though every awesome manager has their own management style, there is one main similarity that they all have in common:
Each person is unique in their own way. They think and relate to the world in their own way. They are also motivated in ways particular to themselves.
Research shows that in the initial 15 years of a person’s life, the synaptic connections of the brain are etched in a very personal way. After fifteen, people aren’t as capable of changing as much mentally.
Additionally, each person’s unique personality incorporates both talents and “non-talents”.
Talents aren’t unique aptitudes that only gifted people have. For example, you shouldn’t use the word “talent” to characterize people such as Mozart or Einstein. A talent is actually just a continuous pattern of either thought, feeling or behaviour that can be put into practice. For instance, some people were born more outgoing so they’d be the best as sales representatives.
However, people also have “non-talents”. In other words, it’s the absence of such continuous patterns. Some people are incredibly unorganized. However, having an unkempt desk doesn’t influence their being able to meet deadlines.
There are three kinds of talents. They are striving, thinking and relating.
Striving talents describe the motivation of a person like their competitiveness for instance. These kinds of people are encouraged by the desire to be better than other people.
Thinking talents describe how a person goes about any mental work. Some people are good at being focused whereas other people are better at being flexible and keeping their options open.
Lastly, relating talents describe your communication skills. There are people that are good at facing people whereas others stay far away from it. In a workplace, the first type of person may promote agitation. The second one, on the contrary, would help add to a nice work environment. For example, they may be the type of person that would bring a homemade dessert to the office.
Contradictory to what many believe, people can’t completely turn into the type of person that they would want to become. They do, though, have an unequivocal number of talents which is something every awesome manager knows about and tries to make the most out of.
To create a high-performing workplace, managers must consider each employee’s unique talents.
Since everyone has their own unique and constant demeanor, managers have to turn that into management guidelines. That’s because every staff member’s unique personality has a huge part on how they perform individually.
For instance, even though the sum of all of your experiences can affect the way you perform positively, what really counts are the talents of the staff member that are unique to them. That’s what will tell you how they carry out their work. Having them work at their maximum capacity can only be done when both their talents and job request are a good combination.
What is something that all nurses do? They all give injections. The more they give, the better they get at it. But, if the needed sensitivity doesn’t come naturally to them, then they won’t ever be able to connect with their patients the way that care workers have to. In other words, this non-talent turns into a flaw snf so they’ll never prosper as a nurse.
So, how do managers best handle the fact that each staff member has their own natural talents?
Managers need to capitalize on those unique talents.
If you want to be a successful manager, you have to fixate on what people can do naturally and then take advantage of it. They have to create methods that staff members can utilize to help them cultivate their natural and unique talents instead of disregarding that uniqueness and on the contrary, forcing them into a specific form.
However, smart managers don’t only capitalize on the unique talents of their staff members, they also don’t neglect their non-talents by helping stop them from turning into a defect.
For managers to positively take advantage of their team’s natural talents, they can utilize these four general guidelines:
- Choose based on talent
- Specify the correct outcomes
- Fixate on strength
- Look for the best fit
The fact that each person has their own set of talents is known by every smart manager. In the next paragraph, we’ll look into why some methods for strong management can be figured out with this fact and how it can even help you choose the best candidate for the position.
Great managers find people who have the right talent for the job.
As you’ve learned, a solid qualifier of a staff member’s talents combined with a company’s request is partly responsible for a nice performance.
However, how exactly can smart managers fish out those employees? Also, how do they figure out the exact qualities that they are searching for?
For starters, you need to be knowledgeable on the various types of talent a specific job title needs.
The manager oversees that every title has a minimum of one crucial talent from every talent category: striving, thinking and relating. To figure out the best talent for the position, smart managers not only examines the position and its characteristics, but also the environment and ideology within the business along with the team that the new member will be associating with.
For instance, every team has to have specific positions. A group that only has members that stay away from confrontation may find it beneficial to have a member that is good at bringing problems out into the open.
Next, smart managers administer job interviews so that the person can really show their true personality. As a result, the person feels less stressed since the manager doesn’t make a decision on their looks, or make quick assumptions.
Smart managers understand that people have to have some time to warm up to the typically uncomfortable interview environment so if they stress them out, they’ll just end up finding out how talented they are under pressure. Yes, this talent may be important for some titles, but definitely not for all of them.
Additionally, if you only fixate on this characteristic, the manager may end up hiding for themselves the persons other, possible really useful, talents.
The other type of interview method that great managers tend to utilize is asking questions that are open-ended. These kind of questions force the one being interviewed to give a personal reply. When contemplating the answer, a great manager searchers for distinct and first-thing-that-comes-to-mind replies since that ensures that the answers are more on the personal side.
To conclude, managers need to figure out a way to make sure that whatever task needs to be completed, must be accomplished by a staff member that has the most talent to succeed in that position.
Great managers establish alternative career paths for employees, thereby keeping them in the best-fitting job position.
Finding yourself a group of very talented staff members doesn’t solve the entire equation. Managers also need to ensure that the talents of those members are correctly put into use. The traditional career route is what typically gets in the way of accomplishing that. This method of progressing has a lot of defects in it.
What are the defects exactly?
For one, even though an employee is really great at one position, one cannot assume that they will be great in a higher job. One rung of a career ladder does not signify that there is a next. Additionally, the traditional route only allows for those who somehow make it to the top, which forces team members to start competing for those reserved, top positions. Lastly, this method focuses too much on the importance of experience, which forces the environment of searching for only those with both marketable skills and experiences. Therefore, if a member had made it to the next rung of the ladder, this translates into them having gotten some marketable skills.
A great manager can’t work off of the traditional career route. On the contrary, they utilize a variety of methods and they create different routes that are more suited for the staff member. As a result, a great manager makes a surrounding where both money as well as prestige are evenly distributed all over the company. As a result, the staff member has a lot more freedom to select a career that is based on what they’re good at.
One way to do that is by constructing graded ranks of achievement. This method is used in a lot of law firms. Here, being promoted makes a large difference in your level of prestige and salary, but not in the actual work.
Another method is to broadband the way payments are decided. Therefore, the pay for every position overlies the end of the position just above it. As a result, good performance in a lower position turns into one that is more advantageous than a bad performance from a higher position.
A great manager understands that the traditional career route has many wrong minded assumptions. As a result, they attempt to make it a reality for an employee to be able to go up the career ladder, even when they are in a position that is better suited for what they’re personally good at.
Great managers focus on reaching desired outcomes, not on controlling their employees.
Conclusively, the outcome from management comes from how well a staff member does. As a result, a great manager alters their mindset so that instead of telling staff members exactly what to do, they need to focus on how well they are doing.
At the rear of all of this is the manager’s understanding that they can only supervise their employees to an extent. For starters, managers aren’t the only members that work to create the outcome that they want. The only thing that they can do is encourage their staff members to do the work. Therefore, the way that a manager can enforce a bit of control is by doing so in “remote control” style.
However, even though they won’t be precisely in control of the work that concludes how well they’re performing, managers still need to be held accountable for the outcome. As a result, they need to focus on the results that they’d like to see from the work that is done.
A great manager outlines the results that they want out of staff members and let them figure out on their own, how to accomplish them.
Most of the time, there isn’t just one correct way of meeting those goals. Therefore, don’t just define a strict set of rules. For instance, don’t have the sales clerk imitate a specific way of selling. The manager only needs to establish the results that they want to have accomplished. This lets their sales staff select the selling style that they prefer the most.
There are a lot of benefits to this method. For starters, it’s effective since the manager doesn’t spend time on arranging and attempting to force a specific style of work in the office.
Another benefit is that it boosts the confidence of workers to take some responsibility which draws the attention of responsible staff members. When you establish the results that you want, great managers make a work space where staff members feel encouraged to accomplish things, and to move in the direction of a clear goal without needing to be told what to do.
Lastly, this kind of workplace truly assists staff members with realizing that they have talents and know what they are since their talents are put to use.
Great managers understand that they don’t have to define a confining and clear method in order to accomplish a goal. The most crucial part is that eventually, the goal is reached.
Great managers establish basic rules that ensure a baseline of customer satisfaction.
Although good managers let staff members be their own individuals, that doesn’t allow them to do as they please. In fact, in specific areas, there are a few rules that staff members have to follow.
First of all, if there are any rules about the precision or safety of work, they must be adhered to. For instance, banks have established regulatory levels as well as rigid guidelines to make sure that money is dealt with securely as well as accurately.
Second of all, any of the rules that are crucial to the industry or the business principles must be followed since this makes sure that the business is authentic and it’s comparable to other businesses that are on the market. For instance, accountants have to know and administer the rules of double-entry bookkeeping. Engineers have to make sure that the item will work on the standard electrical frequency.
These kinds of rules serves as the minimum standard for both interacting with as well as making the employee happy, which orbit around precision, opportunity, alliance and suggestions.
The most simple parts in this case are precision and opportunity. Together, they make up the minimum conditions for satisfied customers. For instance, it’s clear that if a buyer wants their car wheels to be changed, the workshop has to have wheels as well as a mechanic that is capable of completing the task in the right way.
Managers demand that their staff members follow all of the rules that are related to the two simple parts mentioned earlier. However, in order to make customers as happy as they can possibly be, a lot depends on the employee themselves.
For instance, a consumer that wants to get their wheels changed may become extremely happy if the mechanic goes above and beyond their expectations by giving them some suggestions on how to get their wheels to last for a longer period of time, or it could even just stem from having a great conversation with the person waiting. If the motor mechanic is very communicative, they could potentially turn the consumer’s waiting time into a delightful trip.
By adhering to these simple steps, the minimum work outcome is guaranteed to be met and it’s the solid ground for making customers happy. The rest of it solely depends on whether or not staff members are allowed to act based on their talents.
Great managers focus on excellent employees, who they try to develop and learn from.
A great manager helps found strong, personal connections with staff members and that’s done so that they can aid their team with their development.
Additionally, they allocate lots of time for their top staff members in order to not only get a feel for what their talents are, but also grasp a better understanding of their life as a whole. Only by getting to know their team will a great manager be able to properly assist with developing them.
For example, only when you know what staff members find important will the manager be able to encourage them or compensate them accordingly. There’s nothing more embarrassing than gifting a team member something that they actually don’t care for. For instance, if you want to honor a hard working, but shy member, don’t honor them in a way that is extremely public as they won’t be comfortable with the situation and may even get the wrong idea.
Whenever the task at hand is trying to figure out how to enhance the way an employee works, great managers will point to top staff instead of their old errors or just decent staff.
How come?
For one, when you learn from what you did wrong, you may be grasping onto the wrong inference. For instance, suppose you’re watching after nurses’ emotional connections that they have with their patients. However, your realize that they are beginning to get so affected that they can hardly do their job. You may come to the conclusion that developing an emotional bond is not beneficial.
However, that’s incorrect.
In all honesty, creating an emotional bond with patients is a crucial talent that great nurses have. The issue is that the nurses that had been watched weren’t great nurses. Those nurses developed a strong emotional bond incorrectly.
Second of all, defining business goals depending on the work of an ordinary staff member won’t bring you to assume what their maximum capabilities are. Only by taking note from the top staff will what is needed for greatness be found. Great nurses demonstrate that the right connection with patients is crucial for work with care, and great workers also prove that work can constantly be improved.
To conclude, it’s no secret that taking notes from top staff is highly recommended in order to learn from them and about them. As a result, they are pushed to work even better and they can potentially also aid managers in realizing how they can reach greatness.
Great managers carefully analyze poor performance and try to work around employees’ non-talents.
Since great managers target work ethic, they focus on any work right away that isn’t reaching their expectations.
Instead of coming to quick assumptions about why the work isn’t meeting what is expected, great managers initially examine the condition. For example, they’ll attempt to figure out if the lack of good performance is due to the deficiency in teachable skills or understandings. If that’s the case, then a proper training is most likely what will boost the work. However, they also need to ask themselves about their own work. They need to contemplate whether or not there was a problem within management that caused the member to work poorly.
However, suppose that instead of the problem being caused because of a small skillset or subpar management, the poor work came from an untalented member. No one is perfect nor has each of the required talents in order to perform well in a specific position, so this problem isn’t that uncommon.
What do great managers do in this situation? They attempt to “manage around” those without talent.
This is accomplished by, for instance, by creating a support system to help ease the staff member’s weakness or even make the weakness irrelevant. For instance, give a spell check software to a person that struggles with spelling. Managers can also offer to find them a fellow partner and together they are a team that supports one anothers non-talents with their own talents.
In the situation, though, where a non-talent shows to be a big weakness, a great manager won’t be afraid of or think twice about letting that member go. When a specific talent is crucial for a certain job type, a worker that doesn’t naturally have that talent is better off in another position. This, however, doesn’t mean that the staff member is an overall, hopeless worker. This just means that what they’re talented at is a whole lot more useful in another position.
A great manager doesn’t get upset over having to be the “bad guy” since they don’t actually condemn them. The only person that they could possibly blame is themselves because they were the ones who hired the wrong person.
Final Summary
Every person has their own talent set that make them fit in well into specific positions. A good management supports and assists staff members by nurturing as well as enhancing their natural talents, all courtesy of what they’re instinctively good at.