4 Leadership Lessons You Should Learn Early
I’ve had the fortune (or misfortune depending on how you look at it) of learning several lessons about management and leadership on the job. I learned these lessons by finding what worked and what didn’t work. Sometimes what worked created fantastic results right away and sometimes what didn’t work resulted in disaster.
Everything that we do, as people has actions and results. If we’re lucky we can take a step back after we get the results and look at whether they were good or bad. We can take a moment to analyze what behaviors drove what actions and learn how to apply those again or differently in the future.
Here are 4 leadership lessons that you should learn early.
Treat Your Team People Not Property
The people that work for you are individuals with their dreams, hopes, and desires. They have their own unique lives and experiences that have occurred and continue to occur outside of work. It’s important as a leader or a manager to look at each employee as an individual and not just as a tool to achieve a result. You may have two salespeople that both achieve great results, but have fundamentally different motivations for doing so and different personalities that demand a different sales process. If you only treat people as a business resource and not as a person, you may never fully understand what motivates the individual and put yourself at a disadvantage in getting the best performance.
When an individual works for a boss that they don’t believe cares about them, they only work enough to satisfy themselves or to keep their boss off their back. They don’t go above and beyond to achieve the best results of their life. They won’t push themselves and their peers to achieve more than they thought possible. The opposite is true as well. When you work for a boss that you feel truly cares about you as an individual, you want to work for them. You want them to be proud of the work that you’ve done. You work harder than you might otherwise would because you want to do a great job because your manager cares about and believes in you.
This doesn’t mean that you need to be best friends with your employees, but it does mean you should know who they are. What are their goals in work and out of work? What’s going on in their life that’s important to them. When they come in on a Monday morning, ask how their weekend was and be genuinely interested in hearing about it. If they mention they have a relative that is sick, ask them if they’re doing better in a few days. Show your team through your actions that they are not only a resource to the team but also a person that you care about. It will make a tremendous amount of difference and opens the door for management systems to work the most effectively.
Focus on the Right Outcomes
Many companies today focus on the behaviors, not the outcomes. This sounds like the right thing to do. if I just identify the right behaviors and set those out as what I need to see my employee doing, I will consistently get the best results. These organizations don’t focus on sales goals or targets. They believe that if the employees consistently execute the right behaviors the results will be the output of those behaviors.
This may sound like a great plan, but it ignores something fundamental about people. People are individuals and individuals think feel and react differently in different situations. The only way for a management system that is highly focused on behaviors to work is to hire people that think and act the same way consistently. That creates a tremendous challenge for the recruiting department and the manager in identifying and hiring for those specific traits.
The opposite approach, however, is much more consistent and can be applied more easily. Rather than focus on the behaviors, focus on the right outcomes. Identify what the goals of the team or organization are and communicate those clearly and effectively to your team. Ensure they know how to check their performance and know when that goal is to do. Follow-up with them regularly to discuss their progress as well.
Why does this work better than behaviors? People are, again, individuals that work, think and act in different ways and so are your customers or the other teams that you interact with. For example, If you have two salespeople in an automobile dealership that are both high performers that consistently meet or exceed their goals, as a manager you would be very happy. However, if you had a requirement that every customer test drive a vehicle before talking about payments and financing because you believed that was a necessary step to achieving good sales, you would need to coach to that. If one of your high-performing salespeople failed to do test drives, you would have to hold them accountable, even though they are achieving the sales targets. As the manager should you care if they are doing test drives if they achieve the results ethically and legally without doing the test drives? No! You should be focused on the outcome. Focusing on the outcome makes it simple and allows each individual to find the path that works for them.
Empower Your Team
Speaking of the path that works for them, you must empower your teams to find the right solutions. In the example of the outcome, we learned that if you define the right outcomes for your team you do not need to define the behaviors that lead to those outcomes. You can certainly provide training, advice, best practices, etc, but allow your teams to apply or not apply those as they see fit.
Many managers have an innate fear of letting go of their teams. They feel that they need to have a very strong grip on their business and control every aspect and action that occurs on their team. These people get involved in every decision and often set up very complex systems to ensure that nothing can occur without their input. These are called micromanagers, and if you’ve ever worked for one, you know that it’s an awful manager-employee relationship.
Micromanagers don’t allow individuals to develop or express their personality on the job. They slow down processes and drag down productivity because the team must wait for the manager to approve their actions. People may miss finding solutions that allow them to express their personality and ultimately allow them to more effectively find solutions.
Rather than have tight control of your team, define the right outcomes and then trust in them that they will find the right path to the result. Check-in with them regularly and offer advice if necessary, but don’t hold them to a specific process or path to success. You’ll be able to help encourage them toward the right solution through accountability.
Account for What You Said You Would Do
Accountability is often seen as a dirty word. People think of accountability and they think of write-ups or yelling at employees for poor performance. This is not right. Accountability isn’t necessarily a negative process, but a process of simply seeking to identify how results compared to goals and gain an understanding of why that is. Accountability is a necessary part of any management system and a team that seeks to achieve great things.
If you want to be successful, you must account for what you say you will do. That sounds simple and the good news is that it is. If you set a goal of selling 20 widgets per month you must measure your performance at the end of the month and determine if you made that goal. You must work with your team to understand if they did or did not meet that target and why they got the results they did. Use this information to help them craft their plan for the next month as well, allowing them to generate the majority of the plan.
Why does accountability work effectively for performance management? If you set clear targets, empower your team to get them, they will, of course, want to achieve those results. If they have strong performance that exceeds their goals they will be excited to talk about them and look forward to being praised for their performance. Conversely, if they failed to achieve their goals they will not be looking forward to the conversation and will feel uncomfortable while describing what happened and how they’re planning to do things differently.
Both the success and failure to achieve results will drive the motivation of your team. They will either have reinforced their successful behaviors and be looking forward to talking about their results, or the prospect of failing to meet targets and sitting through an uncomfortable conversation will drive them to change behaviors, or find another way to be successful. In either instance, you will more quickly and effectively achieve high performance or identify when an employee might be better in another role.
You don’t need to scream or yell at your employees for accountability to work. You don’t need to have them working in a state of fear. You simply need them to know that win, lose or draw, you and they are going to talk about their performance candidly. This is often enough to ensure success, however, you will encounter team members that, no matter how hard they try, simply cannot find a path to success. For these employees, it’s important to understand that while they might not be in the right role today there is a right role for them. You must either, help them transfer to a different department and role where they can succeed or let them go so they can search for and find the right position somewhere else. If you’ve treated your employees as people, clearly defined the right outcomes, allows them the freedom to find the right path to success, and regularly followed up on their performance there will be no surprise or drama if it doesn’t work out. Many times, the team member will recognize this and might even shake your hand when you part ways. I’ve seen it happen many times.
These 4 leadership lessons are an invaluable part of a successful management system. Treat people like people, not property, define the right outcomes, empower your team, and account for what you said you would do. Incorporate them consistently into your management system and you will begin to see positive results. They may be slow over time, but as a snowball grows as it rolls downhill so will your results, until you reach a point where success seems easy.
What has worked for you in the past? Do you use a similar system or do you have something else that works for you? I want to hear about it! Post below, contact me or meet me at my website LeaderLifeline.com!
Originally published at https://www.leaderlifeline.com on May 4, 2021.
