If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a manager say to a team member, “When you come to work, you need to leave your troubles at the door.”
That sounds really good in theory, but in reality, team members are not artificial pieces of machinery that can switch on and off some magical “home life/personal” button and effectively drop off their issues at the curb on the way in! And in fact, in most cases, if we take the individuality out of the individual, we may also remove the fire and the spirit that invariably may have attracted us to them in the first place.
So how do we honor the spirit and the talents of the individual but yet keep some sort of a grasp on the professionalism necessary to run a good business?
Here are some initial thoughts:
You are what you Hire.
Start out by clearly defining who you need and what you need them to do. This may sound basic, but in today’s fast-paced environments, you may be surprised at how many employers set out to hire people and haven’t put a plan in place first! Know your business and your culture and clearly define what type of person is going to help you grow that and then don’t deviate from the plan unless you find that the plan was faulty to begin with. If it’s a good plan, stick with it even if it hurts!
Find out what makes them tick.
In our first blog, we talked about forming relationships and getting to know each other as a foundation for building trust and ultimately, building a strong relationship. Well, it’s important to know about the talents, knowledge, skills, and abilities that will make a team member successful in your work environment, but it’s also important to know who they are outside of work, at least on an introductory level. As Patrick Lencioni said in an interview about his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, we human beings are “inherently messy, fallible creatures” and just like we don’t have an “on/off” switch for our personal lives, we also don’t come with operating instructions. So it’s important to begin to build that list yourself.
- Knowing things like:
- Sue loves to be recognized for her hard work, but she loathes being recognized publicly,
- James has a very high regard for justice and if he feels something is not fair, this will fire off,
- Li enjoys creative work, but can quickly get bored with routine, or
- Jose worked for a boss who ended up getting into hot water for unethical business practices, so he’s not immediately trusting of upper management
could be essential to understanding what makes them tick.
And actually, all of these things could be looked at as “baggage” that people bring into the workplace. They make those operating instructions that much more complicated because all of a sudden we can’t go straight from Step 1 to Step 2. Now, we’ve got an if/then scenario that gets factored in… and it all begins to look a little overwhelming.
Some people embrace this as a challenge; others begin to squirm. But we all know that the days of, “If they don’t like it, they can go somewhere else” are gone. Ironically, in today’s business climate the scarier thing may be that if they don’t like it, they CAN’T go somewhere else and so they stay! …And they’re miserable. And their values are not in alignment with what they’re experiencing at work. And because the whole person shows up to work and the whole person shows up in their work, it’s not good.
How much of this could we as managers and leaders recognize early on if we simply took the time to get to know our people better and took some steps toward building a relationship with them? Look, we know this is business. And we’re not implying you have to be Dr. Phil to run a successful department or a successful business, but what we are saying is that if as leaders, you show that you care about team members as people and not just as a means to an end, they will recognize it and they will being to invest their trust in you. Now you’re on fertile ground.
More on how to grow your understanding of what makes your people tick in our next blog…
Tags: experience, individuality, relationships, team
