People Are Your First Priority
Focus on supporting your team — results will follow
There are times when we are all overwhelmed by the different responsibilities we have to deal with at work. Especially once you are in a managerial role — leading a team, department or even a whole company.
Everybody wants a bit of your time. Your schedule has meetings scattered all over. Requests hit your inbox non-stop. Projects need evaluation and prioritisation, followed by a timely delivery. You need to consider priorities from your company, boss and team, and integrate them into the plan. In short, there are lots of things fighting for your attention.
This can put us in dangerous territory. We might be missing out on taking care of the most important thing of all: the people on our team.
Your primary priority is to support, develop and grow the people working for you.
More important than the roadmap meeting this afternoon? Yes. What about spending 30 minutes cleaning the inbox? Definitely! Finishing the presentation for next week? Not important.
If you do not put great focus on your people, chances are they are not performing at their best. Not because they are not capable, but because you are not providing the necessary support or guidance. You need to know your team inside and out. Ensure everybody is working on something suitable. Give them opportunities to grow and learn. Only then will your team be as productive and impactful as it could be.
Trust, Happiness and Growth
Unfortunately, there is no detailed script that will tell you exactly how to put your people first. After all, we are dealing with individuals. Each and everyone of them is unique and might need a different approach. In my experience, a big part of doing a reasonable job as a manager is providing support in three key areas:
Establish trust by building a great relationship
The first step is to build a good relationship with your report. For me, a lot of this happens in one-on-one’s. And especially important are the first few weeks after becoming someone’s manager.
You have to learn as much as possible about the other person. What they love doing. What they hate working on. Where they see themselves in 3 to 5 years. Is there anything you can do to make their life less stressful? And a thousand other things.
But learning about the other person is only half the job — and the easier half at that. Is it also very valuable to connect on a personal level. To have a fighting chance at that, I try and pay attention to three things:
- Show a real interest in the person, no matter what mood I am in;
- Share as much as you receive, especially things outside of work;
- And ultimately be open and honest. Always!
One-on-one’s are an important tool for a manager, and becoming good at them is not easy. However, there are lots of resources out there to help. Be it with building candid relationships. Get someone to open up. And examples of good questions to kick-start the conversation.
Building good relationships with your people takes time and effort. And it needs continuous investment. Nothing is worse than loosing the trust of a person and having to re-gain it.
Maintain happiness to enable high performance
Once a good level of trust is in place, it can be used to maintain happiness in the team. Why do I try to make my team happy? Because when someone enjoys what they are doing, they will do a better job. Which leads directly to a better performing team.
According to Daniel H. Pink, making meaningful progress is a key contributor for happiness at work. To achieve consistent progress, your job is to make sure the team is working on something that is matching their current skill and experience. It has to be challenging enough to keep things interesting. At the same time though, you need to provide support in case someone gets stuck and frustrated. All while injecting some form of meaning. You will not be able to find the perfect project all the time, but your team will appreciate you trying.
Happiness is also influenced by how well your team is getting along with each other. And a key task for you is to pay attention to team dynamics. You need to be able to de-escalate issues before they become problems. Resolve minor personality clashes before they turn into fights. On the other hand, recognise the quiet achievers for a job well done. And highlight someone going the extra mile to help a colleague.
Let me provide an example for a de-escalation technique I recently added to my portfolio. Imagine a report mentioning a frustrating encounter with a colleague. Instead of trying to solve the issue yourself, counter with: Ok, so when are you going to have a chat with him or her directly? This forces the involved parties to work out the problem themselves. At the same time, it also establishes a culture of openness within the team.
As with trust, a person’s happiness is not guaranteed after it has been established once. You need to put effort in week after week. I end every personal catch up with the same question: On a scale from 1 to 10, how happy are you right now? While this may not be a very accurate measure, it at least allows me to react to big outliers.
Provide growth to foster motivation and engagement
With trust and happiness sorted, you might think the almighty people puzzle is solved. You are in a situation where the team is trusting you (and each other) and everybody is working happily on an important project. Seems like everything is going smoothly. Unfortunately, there is still a big piece missing: You need to work with your people to create a plan for their future.
Keeping track of the mid- to long-term future for my reports is usually done through some form of goal setting. However, I will not decide for them. Quite the opposite. They need to come up with the goals themselves. Of course I am there to support, guide and challenge. In the end though, these are not my goals. I want everybody to take ownership of their own future and growth.
Once the goals are set, it is all about coming up with a plan. And for me the most important part of the plan is to find the right growth trajectory. Nothing is worse than looking back at a goal 6 to 12 months later, just to realise nothing has happened. And if we are not careful, we make things worse by wrongly blaming a persons laziness.
Most of the time though, it is not due to an individuals motivation, but because they were not set up for success. It is all about finding a succession of steps, so people can grow at their own speed. When working with someone through their plan, we set milestones which can be accomplished within 4 to 6 weeks. These are big enough to have impact, while giving a good sense of progress.
Recap
As a manager, you have to juggle your time between countless responsibilities. Everybody wants a slice of your time. It is easy to miss out on the most important thing of all: the people on your team.
Establish an environment of trust. Maintain a high degree of happiness. Come up with plan to grow your people. Only when everybody on your team is honest, happy and engaged, will they perform at their absolute best.
