Looking for real management advice about people?
As a manager, your goal is to create a work environment in which your people are empowered, productive, contributing, and happy. Don't hinder them by limiting their tools or information.
Trust them to do the right thing. Get out of their way and watch them catch fire!
Here are 5 of the most important principles for managing people in a way that reinforces employee empowerment, accomplishment, and contribution:
1. Demonstrate you value people
Your regard for people shines through in all of your actions and words. Your facial expression, your body language, and your words express what you are thinking about the people who report to you.
Your goal is to demonstrate your appreciation for each person's unique value. No matter how an employee is performing on his or her current task, your value for the employee as a human being should never falter and always be visible.
2. Share your vision
Help people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves and their individual job. Do this by making sure they know and have access to the organisation's overall mission, vision, and strategic plans.
Better? Include employees in the actual planning on the product and department level and ask for their input on the overall plan. They will own the direction and surprise you with their commitment and competency.
3. Share goals and direction
When possible, involve employees in goal setting and planning. They add value, knowledge, ideas, insight and experience that you won't find on your senior team. At the very least, involve them in goal setting on the department level and share the most important goals and direction for your group.
With the help of your employees, make your progress on goals both measurable and observable, or ascertain that you have shared your picture of a positive outcome with the people responsible for delivering these results.
If you share a picture and share meaning, you have agreed upon what constitutes a successful and acceptable deliverable. Empowered employees can then chart their course without close supervision.
4. Trust people
Trust the intentions of your people to do the right thing, make the right decision, and make choices that, while maybe not exactly what you would decide, still work.
When employees receive clear expectations, they relax and trust you. They can focus their energy on accomplishing, not on wondering, worrying, and second-guessing.
5. Provide information for decision making
Make certain that you have given people, or made sure that they have access to, all of the relevant information they need to make thoughtful and informed decisions.
