Dan Marbes

Recently, I’ve had a number of discussions with my peers (both immediate colleagues as well as close friends) about the many dynamics of leadership.  The essence of these discussions seems to me worth sharing so I hope to capture the many facets I’ve discussed and thought about in upcoming posts.

While traveling with my brother today and discussing employee management and training, I found myself coming back to a central tenet.  Dealing with people is a “people business” and you will be far more successful if you can stay focused on that, rather than emphasizing the work.

People want to feel valued.  It’s central to our human nature and when we feel, honestly and truly, that the people we work for care about us, we are willing to go many extra miles to repay that feeling.  Conversely, people who come to feel that they are just another cog in a corporate machine detach themselves emotionally from their work and are likely to detach themselves physically as well when the opportunity to move to a new company is presented.

How do you accomplish this as a leader?  In many ways, it’s as simple as just telling your team this very thing.  It doesn’t have to be fake or contrived, but finding time to tell someone “Hey, thanks for your work on that project earlier this week.  I’m really glad that we were able to leverage your experience to help us come up with a solution for that problem” or if you see one of your team members looking tired, frustrated or disconnected take five minutes to pull them aside and ask them what’s going on.  If they’re feeling overwhelmed or frustrated with assigned tasks, see what you can do to help. Maybe you’ll discover a process failure that can be corrected, maybe you’ll find that tasks aren’t being assigned correctly in terms of team members’ individual skill sets. If it’s personal stuff, let them know that you’re available if they need to get something off their chest.  They may not take you up on it, but you continue to build and reinforce a culture that says “I care about you as a person and value you as an employee”.  Building that culture will go a long way to establishing better relationships and will likely be reflected in improved morale around the office.

People also want to know that their employer is vested in their individual success.  A leader who can identify that an employee is frustrated with assigned tasks but doesn’t do anything to help the employee has failed.  This doesn’t necessarily have to manifest itself in the form of external training/seminars, etc. (though that may be the most effective solution).  It could simply be finding a teammate with experience in the issue to mentor the frustrated one or the leader taking time to work with the employee to find a solution.

My brother, who manages a staff of personal trainers, has seen this first-hand.  Often, he will get a new trainer who is dynamite with clients, is very personable and knows the fitness end of the job very well.  Many of these trainers, however, have a difficult time with sales which is an important part of the job.  If he were to say simply “You’re not making your numbers.  If you’re going to continue to work here, you need to bring in $xxx per month.”  Now that trainer is panicking, thinking they’re going to lose their job.  Since their sales numbers directly influence their take-home pay, it’s safe to assume they would like to do this well.  If that’s true, they’ve probably tried to improve their skill.  If that hasn’t worked in the past, why should we think that it will work now with the added stress and pressure of losing the job?  Consider this alternative response “I noticed you’ve had some difficulty closing the appointments you’ve had in recently.  When I first started out, sales was tough for me too.  Why don’t we find some time to talk about sales techniques and I can share what I’ve learned and save you some of the mistakes I’ve made?”  Now the subject has been addressed in a non-threatening manner and a growth opportunity has been presented.

Where the rubber meets the road for me on this is that being a leader in the workplace is so much more about being a leader of people than being a taskmaster.  I find it to be a direct parallel to my former life as a high school music teacher.  Walking into a room of 50+ high school students with instruments of all shapes and sizes who were there as volunteers (band was not “required” in the district’s curriculum) knowing we had 2 months to prepare a concert program and that MY efficacy would be judged on the result was a large dose of reality.  The only way that was going to happen was if I got everyone to buy into what we were doing and do their best with the tasks I had assigned them.  Along the way, many of them stumbled but I paid attention and did my best to help them through the challenges they encountered.  By working together, the students were able to exceed what they assumed they were capable of and the band as a whole put forth a very high quality product.  This success built upon itself and allowed us to undertake more difficult music with each successive performance.

I hope that some of these observations resonate with you and allow to to foster your own culture of success.

All the best,

Dan

This entry was posted on March 5, 2011 at 3:55 am and is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.