your people
7.2 Develop people on a tight budget
7.3 Help people leave their ‘comfort zones’
7.4 Set objectives that stretch people
7.5 Remember to develop yourself
7.6 Improve the working environment
7.7 Promote your people’s image
Managing people is hard but rewarding
As you go through life, you will increasingly find that you need to manage people. A parent has to manage their family; a supervisor or team leader has to manage a small team; an entrepreneur may have to manage staff, customers and suppliers.
Early in my career I took responsibility for managing people. I managed up to 250 highly trained professionals who worked as a tightknit team. It didn’t matter that I was the youngest person in the team! For over 20 years I’ve been working with individuals and organizations to help them improve their management of people. This has ranged from military personnel to entrepreneurs, from charities to government departments. I’ve learned many secrets and tricks over these years. Some I’ve discovered for myself, but many I’ve learned from others. Humans are wonderfully inventive!
This book aims to help you improve your skills at managing people – to help you find ways in which everybody benefits. It contains 50 secrets, grouped into seven themed chapters.
• Build on a strong foundation. You must understand what type of leader or manager you want to be. Your employer may give guidelines, but you must exert control over your day-to-day behaviour.
• Create a great team. This shows how to choose the right people and quickly build a functioning team.
• Set goals and targets. By setting people effective targets and goals, you can monitor progress and offer appropriate rewards.
• Motivate yourself and your people. Implementing ways to motivate people is ultimately much easier than having to cajole and constantly monitor unmotivated people.
• Manage good performance. You need to recognize good performance – reward it, develop it, perpetuate it and spread it to others. Otherwise you will lose your good performers and be left only with the poor ones.
• Manage poor performance. Some managers find ways of managing around poor performance without tackling the poor performance itself. However, this encourages more poor performance, from both the original perpetrator and everyone else. Know how to tackle the problems head on.
• Develop your people. Though often overlooked by managers, another fundamental task is developing people. You need to improve the less able, stretch and reward the able, plan succession for the future and mentor your people’s changing needs.
Managing people is a hugely complex area in which you never stop learning. The secrets contained in this book will help you make massive strides towards succeeding in this fascinating role.
Knowing how to manage people well is one of the most important skills in life.
A strong foundation is essential for anything you build, and this should include your management career. You need to decide from the outset if people will want to follow you or if you will be relying on the authority vested in you by your employer. How you act as manager will set a tone to be copied, loved, hated, criticized, praised or ignored. Be prepared to take the time to promote stability and longevity for your life in management.
1.1 Know what your own boss expects
You need to understand in detail what your own boss expects of you as a manager. Armed with this information, you can draw up specific targets for both yourself and your individual team members, and be confident in your day-to-day decision-making.
1 Who is your boss? If you work in a company or hierarchical structure, then there is usually a clear answer to this question – your boss is the person who appointed you or to whom you report. If you are an entrepreneur running your own business, however, your ultimate ‘boss’ may be the customer, or possibly your major shareholder or even the bank manager who allows
case study A sales manager had been set sales targets for him and his team to achieve. He was also set a target for cost reduction within the department and was required to ensure all his staff were trained to use the new software systems the organization introduced. As part of the organization’s expansion plans,
you credit! If you work for a charity you need to be clear whether the ‘boss’ is the donor of the funds or the recipient of the benefit.
2 What does your boss want? If your boss is clear and concise about his or her wants, then you are able to move straight to setting targets for your people. If not, you are going to have to ask, and if necessary keep asking, until you get clear and SMART (see Secret 3.3) objectives.
3 When does your boss want it? Your boss will inevitably want you to achieve a number of different things, and you need to know the comparative priorities – what is most important/urgent and what is less so.
4 How does your boss want it done? This may include the detail of the method, but perhaps more importantly, the framework or environment in which it is to be done. For instance, are you constrained by quality procedures? Are there internal policies on health and safety, equality laws or human rights issues?
If you don’t know your boss’s expectations, then achieving them will be purely a matter of chance.
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