In continuation with my earlier blog on the need to delinking thoughts from words and action, in this blog, I want to stress the importance of seeing various incidents, people and situation as separate instances. This is one of the most important qualities a manager should possess.
What happens in general is, when a manager encounters a specific situation involving a person, he starts labelling that person as with specific character. When the same person is involved in a different situation, the manager starts seeing the person with the label already attached. Then the new situation becomes a different composition and any effort from you to resolve any issue will be in vein.
To make it more clear, for example, if in a specific situation, your team member didn’t turn up as required by you to handle a crisis and if you happen to label the person as irresponsible. There is a fair chance that you start avoiding him/her from your list of dependable resources. Next time when there is a crisis, you naturally tend to avoid the person and in that process he/she loses his confidence and in turn becomes a candidate for attrition. It will be even more worrying when u later realize that he/she didn’t turn up in the first instance due to some personal problem at his/her end. You will end up losing a precious resource even without an attempt to set things right.
Every team member in your team is equally valuable and there is different level of patience you need to build to mentor and bring them up on curve. You might be lucky with few resources who is productive from day one, but a team composition naturally will have mediocre and nonperformers as well. A manager is successful only when he knows how to evoke the best productivity in all cadres of the team.
Coming back to our topic, how to ensure u see different situations differently? You can try out the following technique.
When you encounter a situation, try to understand what caused the employee to not perform as required. There could be 2 major reasons
1. He had some personal problem due to which his attention on the issue resolution was less
2. He genuinely didn’t have the confidence or capability to take up the issue and resolve it.
In both case, you as a manager have a big role to play – the role of a counsellor (1st case) or a mentor (second case).
· If the team member has personal issues, first you need to address that. Because, without addressing one’s personal problem you will not get the productivity that you require. In some cases, you might not be able to help beyond a limit the problem is personal in nature. But at least you can hear him out and give the comfort that you as a manager genuinely feel about his issues and is ready to support him. And definitely, do these with all your heart.
· If the team member didn’t have the confidence or capability, then again it becomes you owners to help him build both. For that you need to realize, mentoring takes time and involves changing perception and attitude of the team member. Each team member needs uniquely designed mentoring exercise and as manager, it is your responsibility to drive it.
Thus, If you don’t take up issues separately and see people confined to that specific situation and issue, you are bound to mix up situations and mess up things at your end.
It boils down to the age old teaching that, nothing remains permanent – situation, people, their perception and their thought processes keep changing. With change being in evitable, its high time you too become dynamic and flexible. Keep changing your outlook adapting to new situation.
A non-performer today can be tomorrow’s performer and vice versa. Never underestimate your team. Have faith in them and do the best for them. Its like planting a tree and carefully nourishing it till it become a big self reliant tree.
Patience and perceverance are good virtues to posses at this stage.
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