Navigating the path to each employee’s success is not trivial and requires a commitment to be patient, dedication to push ahead despite failures and devising.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. All managers struggle with the fine balance between doing work that achieves short term goals vs investing time in activities with long term benefits. Output that’s immediately visible may give a feeling of satisfaction in the moment, but it soon fades away and demands more energy to keep up with the pace of growth and scale of the company. Focussing too much on progress in the short term eventually slows down every manager in the long run. Energy spent in growing business may help you achieve some outcomes, but the same energy invested in growing people can produce remarkable results. As Julie Zhuo says «What you quickly realize as a manager is that the single most effective way to setup a team for success in the long run is to focus on the people» Navigating the path to each employee’s success is not trivial and requires a commitment to be patient, dedication to push ahead despite failures and devising unique ways to inspire and bring out the best in every individual. It’s a slow process, but done right it can be your ultimate advantage as a manager. What you need as a manager is to utilise the power of one-on-one meetings by designing them with a clear purpose in mind. Without a purpose-driven approach, every one-on-one meeting sooner or later turns into a time-wasting mandate where neither party adds or derives any value from the discussion. It’s a mindless execution of duties as opposed to a benefits-driven exercise. One-on-one meetings designed to address the core needs of your direct report works best since they instantly connect to every individual at a personal level. Before you put together an agenda for a one-on-one meeting or scrounge for a list of questions, the really important question to ask yourself is «what do people really need from me as a manager?» While core needs may vary across individuals, here are the five things most people desire from their managers. These are not external motivators like recognition, rewards or promotion. It’s the knowledge that you as their manager genuinely care about them. Do you notice when they are feeling sad, miserable, joyful, distracted or angry. Do you care enough to recognise subtle changes in their behaviour? Observing even small things like «they did not say hi» when they entered the one-on-one meeting like they typically do and asking «Hey, it appears to me that you are upset about something. Is everything alright?» goes a long way in building a meaningful connection. It’s a small observation, but indeed a very powerful one to communicate that you care enough to take note of their feelings. Camille Fournier says in The Manager’s Path: «Great managers notice when your normal energy level changes, and will hopefully care enough to ask you about it.» Every person is unique. Work that excites one person may annoy another and what’s easy for some may require others to stretch beyond their comfort zone. Each individual also has different life goals, learning practices, productivity measures, interest levels and tolerance limits shaped by their own environment and experiences. Putting everyone together and packaging them into a single unit without taking time to understand their unique traits is the most ineffective way to utilise the strengths that every person brings to the team. As a manager, your direct reports want you to be curious about them as an individual. There’s a certain sense of security in the knowledge that you are being seen for who you are and not an imagined persona created by your manager in their minds. Human beings are designed to find joy in building new skills and strengthening existing ones. People expect their managers to be candid and speak openly not only when things are going well, but also when things are not going as expected. No one wants a manager who ignores the conflict with the hope that it will disappear on its own instead of handling it maturely. They look for support from their managers in their desire to grow by connecting how their work is aligned with the skills they need to develop, the resources they need to develop those skills and the mechanisms they need to put in place to measure progress along the way. Everyone at work craves the satisfaction that comes from finding their own solutions as opposed to being told what to do and how to do it.
