1. As a manager are you under pressure to get results and meet deadlines with diminishing resources?
2. Do each of your staff have more talents and abilities than they get to use every day?
Read the two questions again very carefully, and if you answered “yes” to both of them, could it be that the solution to the first problem could also be the solution to the second?
If your staff have more ability than they get to use every single day (and they do!) this represents a huge waste of resources. There are people in your department who have the most amazing range of talents and you probably don’t even know what they are?
Do you know for instance, what they do in their spare time? Do you know what activity really gets them going? Do you even know their personality type or their preferred processing style? This information is essential for mangers and without this knowledge you will be a mediocre manager at best. The good news is that we will be covering these topics and more later on in the program.
Now why do you need to know this stuff?
I said earlier the role of a manager is to get the job done – it is not to do it, I have also said that care for your staff is the most important area of management . So if you care about your staff surely you have to invest time in each staff member to discover their skills and talents. When you do this and when you rearrange your world to accommodate what you have discovered some amazing things will happen:
1. Your staff will be happier when they get to do things they love to do every day
2. Happy staff tend to be more productive and get more done.
3. You get to delegate the tasks that can be delegated and freeing your time up for management.
If staff feel valued and what they are doing is important they will perform at a higher level.
Just to be clear here, in case you are confused, we come to work to get a job done and performance is really important – we are not here to act as agony aunt to listen to all our staffs woes. Of course there are times when you should listen to their issues – the purpose of a business is to maintain a happy customer at a profit and the reason and we can best do that when we are all reading off the same page, where everyone is performing an important task and using their talents.
Be brave, if you are motivated by excellence, if only the best will do – then you owe it to yourself to be the best manager you can be. So many managers play power games with their staff and in my estimation that is a sign of a bad manager. So many people hate their boss, it makes even coming to work difficult, never mind performing at a level of excellence when they get there!
All the major companies enter the competition to be one of the best places to work – even if you are not in that league, even if you are a million miles away from persuading the board of directors to even enter, you can introduce your own changes and when your bosses notice the difference – please let them know that Declan told you!