Soft management
With the advent of neo management styles and thought leaderships, the old school of hard management has started losing its sheen. In earlier times, management was perceived more as an authoritative mode of handling teams and situations. With world advancing in everything from technology to thought processes, people have become more democratic in nature. The soft nature of human being is being used more than ever in a more conscious and scientific way. This blog is an attempt to unravel the importance of aligning some of the soft management concepts in a structured way there by making it more practical and sensible to all.To give you a back ground; let us look at the following examples to start with.
1. Capital punishment was a normal and brutal at one point of time in the history, but now, the same is perceived highly inhuman and is banned in many advanced countries.
2. War and invasion was a normal decorum of any country at some point of time in the past, but now world talks about preserving peace.
3. At one point of time, the mode of ruling a country was dictatorship, now more and more countries are becoming democratic.
Similarly the management styles also were of hard nature at some point of time. With changing times, changing needs and changing intelligence of man, the new thought leaders have started encouraging and advocating soft management styles.
Soft management is nothing but skilfully using the soft side of self (like emotions, weaknesses, compassion, concern etc) for the advantage of the self and the team. Very unlikely people with normal paradigm think to utilize their soft side for their advantage. Here I am giving you some TIPs on how to do it and urge you to adopt the same to mould a healthy team. As leaders, lets us start doing things differently.
The fundamental need for the soft management principal is the fact that a successful and efficient delivery is always a sum total of individual efficiencies of the team members. So as managers, if we fail to get the best out of even single team member, our overall delivery efficiency will go down. The only way to achieve this is by delegating, empowering and motivating your team members.
· How do you motivate your team member? – by boosting their self-ego by appropriately acknowledging their strength.
· How do you acknowledge their strength? – by letting them do activities which they are strong at and which they enjoy doing.
· How to boost their ego? – by willingly and happily letting their ego climb above your ego level.
· How will you do that? – By getting people involved and letting go yourself on many things which you always wanted to preserve as secret (your weaknesses).
Step 1 - Get your team involved
· How to get your team involved?
o Boost your child-ego and bring down your parent ego. In simple terms,
§ Parent ego is when you get in to the mode of speaking more and listening less
§ Child ego is when you get in to the mode of speaking less and listening more
o Be honest about your weakness, but don’t make it obvious. Skilfully acknowledge it and present it more as the need to utilize your team’s strengths.
o Map your weakness with the strength of your team and delegate the work to appropriate team member such that your weak areas will be compensated by team’s strength. Remember, this is one of the fundamental of DELEGATION and TEAM WORK.
o How would you get your team involved?
§ Take a stock of all your team members.
§ Identify and list their strong areas.
§ Identify the areas where you need to improve in your unit.
§ Map the areas to the people who are strong in that area.
§ Delegate the area to the team member and wait for the output to come.
o Why should this method work? This will work because;
§ You are delegating areas that suits team’s interest and strength.
§ You are giving opportunity for your team to perform.
§ When you acknowledge their strength and give them the opportunity to help you, the team will perceive you as a person with high integrity, approachability and modesty. Your willingness to acknowledge your weakness will be accepted in the most subtle way without impacting your personality. But if you don’t do the exercise, your weaknesses will be an obvious topic of discussion among the team. This also act as an indirect way to uplift their parent ego and encourage them to help you achieve your goal.
§ You are addressing team’s urge to be in the limelight in a very proactive way even before it becomes a need of the time.
§ The support of your team will come out more than ever when you give them the chance to empathize on delivery situations.
You will earn the respect of the team when you are humble enough to respect and honour them with opportunities to perform. The key is in how you delegate the work to the team.
· If you dictate terms to your team, less likely that you will earn respect. Your work might get done, but will be at the cost of your team’s respect.
· If you delegate it with respect to your team’s prevailing constrains, you will not only get your work done, but also earn a lot of respect.
The basic fact behind this phenomenon is the fact that people like to relate to you as a person with flesh and blood than as a proclaimed manager with bureaucratic nature.
A general human’s tendency is always to relate issues to people than the incidents and situations that caused it. Managers are often the soft and first targets and are made as one of the reason to escalate things or even to leave jobs.
This is when technique of soft management helps.
Step 2 - How I can be of help your team?
The next important and effective technique is to check with your team on what help they need in order to be able to achieve a goal. Discuss, understand, confirm, accept, acknowledge, respect and be open when you deal with the team. Of this, being open minded is of at most importance as the rest of actions gets a bosting if you are open minded. It is important for us to know the technique on how to be open minded.
What is being Open minded.
Being open minded is to be able to face a situation or person keeping aside any apprehension, pre conceived notions, prior knowledge, assumptions and expectations which you might have while facing the situation or person.
Technique to become open minded
1. You are approaching a person or a situation as it required your involvement in some way or other
2. You might or might not have some apprehensions, pre conceived notions, prior knowledge, assumptions and expectations
3. Technique - Approach the situation with a mind set to accept or project any of your above notions ONLY IF IT IS PROVED TO BE CORRECT.
This essentially means that, in spite of all apprehensions you might have, you are giving the benefit of doubt to the person or situation in front of you that he/situation is correct unless your apprehensions are proved to be correct.
The need for open mindedness arises from the fact that, approaching a situation or person with a closed mind set will surely lead to mis-understanding and mis-communications. You will neither be able to discuss issue freely nor be able to provide solution. Instead, you will start evaluating the person or situation from an incorrect or negative point of view and eventually frame a picture which might or might not be correct.
For example, suppose you are introduced to a person and prior to the introduction, if you are mis-lead by commenting that he is highly sensitive and emotional, there is all possibility that you will be cautious while talking to that person. Let’s take the situation one step more.
Suppose the person just had a bad day and he ended up venting the same to you during the conversation. That is it! The person will be labelled by you as emotional and sensitive till the time he proves it the other way.
You will be surprised to know that most of the time we end up making incorrect assumptions leading to a considerable efficiency, time and energy leakage. Moreover, every such incorrect assumption degrades your own qualities as a manager. Since you as a manager is the epicentre of all major decision making, it is important to keep your thoughts words and action as clear and clean as possible.
Let such unproductive assumption not come your way. Be open-minded and embrace the situation and people as it is to start with.
Another scientific logic to ensure an open mindedness comes from the following facts
1. If you are not open minded, you will not be able to throw right set of questions or discussion points, and hence will fail to identify the pain areas of the situation or the person. Because of this the person opposite to you will not be able to communicate effectively.
2. You will miss out a lot of vital information which otherwise would have changed the perception and outlook on the situation or person completely.
3. You will inherently fall in to negative mode of thinking and acting which in turn will pull you down before every one including yourself.
Step 3 - Mentoring and sponsorship
Going one step further, mentoring and sponsorship will immensely help you to get closer to your team. There is a growing need for trust based work environment in the current world. This wil happen only if you as a manager help your team to create the trust in you. One of the best ways to do that is by effective mentoring and sponsorship. Let us understand this in little more detail.
MENTORING
Mentoring is an exercise with a base of unconditional trust that the manager and team member extent to each other.
· Manager extents his full support to impart ethical, value based and sincere grooming of his employee
· Employee extents his full dedication and commitment to absorb the knowledge from the manager understanding the positive impact of the same in his career.
SPONSORSHIP
Sponsorship is an exercise where in you as a manager will entrust money or goodwill on an employee enabling him to take up higher goal in alignment with one of the company’s goals.
· Once you invest considerable time and effort in grooming an employee, after a period of proper mentoring, the employee comes in to a state of self-reliance and will be ready to come out of the manager’s cocoon to take up higher responsibilities.
· This is a very sensitive time and sadly most managers fail to recognize this crucial juncture and end up losing the employee to another firm where they will find their opportunity.
· This is where sponsorship comes in to play. While involved in the mentoring of your team member, you should also prepare for the next stage where in the employee will eventually become independent and will come back to you for his next level of growth.
· How will you prepare the sponsorship? Well, you can do this in two ways
o If you are a decision maker - Investing money on his ideas to help him grow business for you and the company
o If you are an influencer/supporter - By pledging your trust on the employee with higher management and there by encourage higher management to give him one of the coveted and open positions.
Though there are many such soft skills which is more of a ‘necessity’ that just ‘a good to have’. For now, I am limiting to three most important aspects that came to my mind. Hope you will benefit reading this. All the best to the HARD managers to cultivate the SOFTer ways of handling things.
