Be a Better Boss - How to Bring Out the Best in Your People

Be a Better Boss

How to Bring Out the Best in Your People

There are multiple variations of management styles, but there’re also different types of managers. The one quality that makes a great – and not just a good – manager, is the ability to look at each employee in a unique way, and capitalize on it. Great managers learn how to integrate each of his employees’ unique skills into a plan of attack. Leaders, however, discover what is universal and capitalize on that. Leaders will only succeed if they can ignore the differences of sex, age, race, nationality, and personality. Managers will only succeed if they can identify the differences and strengths in people, and implement that to challenge each employee to excel in his own way. That being said, managers can be leaders and vice versa.  

The first step in finding each employee’s strength is to identify his uniqueness. There’s no such thing as perfect, but managers need to carve out a role that best fit each individual employee based on the conducted research. If the manager capitalizes what is unique about each person, he makes each person more accountable, but he also builds a stronger sense of team, because it creates interdependence – it makes people need one another.  

Instead of trying to change the employees, it’s vital - as a manager - to identify their unique abilities. There are three tactics that will help managers in doing so 1) Continuously tweak roles to capitalize in individual strengths – for example through job rotation; 2) Pull the triggers that activate employees’ strengths – for example by offering incentives; and, 3) Tailor coaching to unique learning styles – for example by adopting your coaching efforts to each employees’ unique learning style.

It’s important to make the most of the employee’s strengths; and a manager can benefit from spending a good deal of time outside his office to walk around and watch each person’s reactions to events, listening, and taking mental notes about what each person is engaged to as well as what he struggles with. It’s a good idea for the manager to ask open-ended questions and to listen carefully to the answers, for example, “What was the best day at work you’ve had in the past three months?” This will help the manager in identifying each employee’s strengths and weaknesses. A strength isn’t necessarily something you’re good at, it could also be something you aren’t good at yet. To identify a weakness simply invert the question, and ask: “What was the worst da you’ve had at work in the past three months?” As with strength, a weakness doesn’t have to be something you’re bad at, you might be competent at it. Overall, it’s the manager’s job to identify the weaknesses and come up with a plan to overcome them. There are four approaches for overcoming weakness: 1) Offer relevant training and look for improvement; 2) Find him a partner whose talents are strong in the areas where he/she is weak; 3) Use a mental trick to shift the focus from what he cannot accomplish through discipline to what he can do through instinct; and 4) Rearrange his working world to make him believe his weakness is irrelevant.