What’s the general attitude of the people in your team?
Would you say they are displaying the attributes of Ownership, Accountability and Responsibility.
If so, well done. The chances are you are MANAGING the team effectively and LEADING in the right way.
But what if you’re experiencing more Blame, Excuses and Denial. Chances are you are not MANAGING effectively enough. Forget LEADERSHIP for the moment. It’s MANAGEMENT that you need to nail first.
There are 2 key things we need to do to manage effectively:
- Clarity For Performance
- Measure for Pressure
Let me explain.
Most people come to work to do a good job. But how do they know if they’ve done a good job unless they know what’s expected of them?
No point getting frustrated with someone for not doing something if you’ve not explained how to do it. So, give Clarity to People to allow them to Perform.
So, action point 1 – Make sure everyone in the team has a clear and straightforward job description. You can get good templates simply by googling the words “job description template”.
Secondly, we need to Measure for Pressure. People perform better when they are under a certain level of pressure.
Let me show you visually the relationship between Performance and Pressure.
As pressure is applied, performance increases but if too much pressure is applied you can see that performance drops. What we’re aiming for, is finding the sweet spot where we get Optimal Performance.
So how do we do this?
Set fair but stretching KPIs or Key Performance Indicators and track performance against these.
AND
Review these regularly (at least monthly) through 121s sessions with each member of the team.
So action point 2 – make sure everyone has got KPIs
And action point 3 – make sure you review performance against the KPIs in regular 121s
Managing people doesn’t have to be difficult, It just requires us to give Clarity for Performance and to Measure for Pressure.
