So what an organization will value most are managers who know how to enhance engagement and who can extract the value that employees can offer. A book published in 1999 – First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently indicates that the route to enhanced engagement lies in ignoring conventional wisdom in 4 key areas of managing people:
-selection
-expectation setting
-motivation
-development.
Select Talent
The conventional wisdom says you should select employees according to their skills for a particular role. Excellent people managers will however select people for their talent. Talent is how people think, feel and behave. So for example someone with a talent to communicate easily and with empathy is going to be much more effective at handling a customer service role rather than someone who has received the same skills training and does not have this talent.
Skills can ensure the task is done. But it takes talent to re-define the task and take it to a new level.
Expectation Setting
The average people manager using conventional techniques will provide guidance on the task as well as the steps to be taken to achieve that task or outcome. The effective people manager will however just define the outcome and then leave it to the employee to design and navigate the steps required for that outcome. This creates the opportunity for innovation and “non-linearity” that can sometime become inhibited if the work is over-defined.
Motivation
Conventional people managers try to focus on “improving” an employee, sometimes into a person the employee is not. An excellent people manager in contrast focuses on the employee’s unique strengths and talent.
Development
In the conventional approach, managers will promote an employee if they have done well in their jobs but this is not always a success. So many good sales persons become mediocre sales managers – for example – and this is a double negative: a mediocre manager born and a good salesperson lost.
In contrast, an excellent people manager seeks the right fit for a employee’s talent and ensures this is developed through progressively more challenging and rewarding assignments.