As a manager looking at your team as your family can often help you to find achievement in your team; being the manager is like the parent, you need to learn the needs of your ‘children’. It is not said or framed in a way I am belittling your team members, instead you need to orchestrate and know how they as individuals operate and how you can help them to achieve.
You often get a choice!!
As a manager the key difference is you can choose your ‘children’, understanding interviewing techniques, looking for ways to understand them as an individual early on will help you work out if they will fit or work in your family.
More often the wrong questions are asked, or you are seeking the wrong answers which will leave you hiring someone you don’t know how to ‘connect’ with them. Hiring is often decided by people who might not even be managing or leading that individual which makes no sense.
Learning their needs
This stage should be done early on in the piece, understanding what they are seeking from a job; what their personal enjoyments are, find that element of passion where they glow when they are talking about that topic. You will now know how you can encourage and inspire that individual. I talk in more detail in the article The Pay-off and understanding what the person has ‘sacrificed’ to be in your team.
Just like children no two are alike, all your team members are different; for some it’s the money and overtime getting more dollars in the bank drives them. Not all of them, others will enjoy spending time with their family and travelling, others have aspirations to higher positions and career growth. Each of these have a different answer, if you try to give the person who wants family time overtime opportunities or taking on more responsibilities as acting manager and it isn’t what they seek, it’s not going to get good results.
Understanding the chain of command
As a manager, it is likely you report to another manager or superior; understanding that their checklist is to know you and seek the results from you. If you aren’t delivering then they aren’t interested in which team member in your team forgot something; that is your responsibility.
The whole ‘chain of command’ is there because to ‘flat line’ management would mean in many cases one person is responsible for a hundred plus staff, this would prove ineffective and would cause more issues and loss to a company. So layering management enables the reports to have 5-10 people who they have to check-in on and so on.
With great power comes great responsibility
As a manager or a leader, you are taking on more responsibilities than your members under you. You have to inspire and find ways to get results from them; you can choose the path of a dictatorship which makes people work out of fear and insecurity; or you can pick the path of a leader and encourage and make them get a level of enjoyment achieving results for you.
Management requires respect from your team, a level of admiration similar to a child admiring a parent; coming from a sincere place. In reality nobody wants to go to work; but if you make it a slight bit more bearable then people would be more productive.
It’s not manipulation but inspiration
You as a leader need to inspire your team, people know when they are being manipulated or forced into something; it’s a hardwired human sense. It makes people not feel appreciated and can often lead some into depression. As a manager if you inspire your staff to achieve greatness by speaking their language then you will find your team will work like a well oiled machine.
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