Being the manager is an essential part of ‘being’ in business regardless of whether you have employees, manage a team or as a sole trader. Managing others is what we all do on a daily basis. Be it getting the kids to school on time, directing a contractor to develop your next marketing brochure, managing suppliers to have your product delivered in a timely manner or managing ourselves to get into action. Managing others is part of our day-to-day life. So how can we be more effective at the managing process?
The most important attribute in being a more successful human lies in how we connect and engage with the world. In the managing process how we connect and engage with others has a great influence on how others will respond towards us and in turn how well they perform for us. Intrinsic success is not possible without the help and assistance of others, every part of our lives depends on it. So how you deal with the management process is going to have a lot to do with the ultimate success you have. Here are a few tips that I use with my clients to help them manage others.
A solid theory!
One of the first things I teach clients is Motion Theory. Motion Theory states that everything in the universe is constantly in motion, the planets, time, weather, our age pretty much everything. At a quantum molecular level even things that appear to be solid like rocks, walls, floors etc, are constantly in motion. In respect to people and in particular those that work for us, Motion Theory is prevalent in that people are either doing one of three things. They are either moving towards our business and engaging ‘advocates’, moving away from our business and disengaging ‘detractors’ or hovering somewhere in the middle ‘fence sitters’ and some what appearing to be undecided as to the way they will move. Now if these people are moving towards our business and engaging then we are more likely to get the most out of them. If they are moving away from our business and disengaging then we are not going to get the most out of the relationship. If they are in the middle or fence sitters then once again we are not going to get the best out of them. As employees the same is true, employees are either moving towards the business, away from the business or sitting on the fence. In reality it is only possible to be moving towards or away from as even fence sitters are moving in one direction or the other.
So if you have employees can you identify which way they are moving? If you have other people you work with, suppliers, contractors or yourself can you identify which way they are moving? In respect to yourself it maybe that there are particular parts of your business that you either move away from or towards. For example I find a lot of small business owners moving away from the finance area of their business.
When employees begin to move away from a business they begin to become disenchanted, discouraged and disappointed. The further they move away from the business the more disgruntled and disappointed they become and in some cases become destructive sharing negative thoughts, feeling and emotions. This they need to share with others to feel that they are not the only ones and will often try to recruit the fence sitters. In respect of the business owner who moves away from the finance aspect of their business we find that eventually money becomes a major issue in the business. So what is it that leads us to engage or disengage and how can we manage the engagement process and have others and ourselves move towards every aspect of our business?
Core Drivers
As humans we are intrinsically motivated to move towards things that make us feel better and away from those things that make us feel worse. In essence there are five core drivers that underpin the things that we want to feel and engage with; we want to feel safe, worthy, inspired, self fulfilled and loved. We are motivated towards moving in the direction of things that increase engagement with these core drivers and disengage with those things that have us feel less of the five core drivers. So how does your business fulfill one or more of these core drivers for you and your employees’ contractors or suppliers? Once you have connected with this you can begin the process of enhancing those core drivers. In this process you can assist your employees to connect with the business and connect with how it enhances core drivers for them.
As an example I was coaching a call center manager who had 15 line staff who manned the inbound calls of a large call centre for a major telecommunications organization. As you can imagine a majority of his staff where either fence sitters or detractors, moving away from the business. One of the tools I taught him was the ‘Leap Frog’ technique in which we help the detractors to connect a core driver being meet in the future with what they are doing now. As you can imagine most of the call centre staff are on their way to somewhere else. Most of them are working in the call centre to fund another passion, dream or desire. Therefore we needed to connect those employees with a future, passion, dream or desire to the current reality and show them how the ‘Leap Frog’ effect works. We identified how the current reality was giving them skills, money and experiences that would one day help them and assist them to actualize there passion, dreams and desires. We connected and leap frogged their journey to reaching their end goal. Now in a call center environment every possible statistic is scrutinized. Our experience and coaching lead to a near immediate 25% increase in engagement, which in turn helped this team to be one of the most successful in the whole, call centre.
What we had done is turned a group of individuals from being detractors, because they could not see core drivers being meet, to advocates in a very short period of time. Once they could see how their current reality was actually helping them to have their core driver’s meet, they began to become more engaged in what they where doing and therefore performance improved.
So how does what you are currently doing have your core drivers meet? How does it do this for your employees, contractors or suppliers? What will it take for you to move towards all those things in your business that you currently disengage from?
In our next blog on ‘Managing for Intrinsic Success’ we will provide more tips and practical solutions to the management process. If you need any help in the management process you know where I am!
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