Running a business can be stressful; whether you have a handful of staff or a cast of thousands the key to success is through your people. Now, assuming your recruitment processes are good (therein lies another entirely different blog!) and that you have a capable team then the rest is simple – it’s just managing them, right?!
There is an equation that I often use when running workshops to help managers drive high performing teams: Ability + Willingness + Opportunity = Performance. I’ll talk about ability and willingness in a future blog; today I want to focus on the ‘Opportunity’ element of the equation. The manager or leader creates this because it is a mix of elements such as processes, structures and strategies and deeper factors such as culture and climate. In fact, research from many sources has shown that it is climate more than any other factor that influences individual and organisational performance.
I was recently barricaded into my office developing two brand new programmes, one of which is a leadership programme aimed specifically at managers of field sales teams. Managing sales people can be a delicate exercise; balancing both performance and behaviour can be challenging with some individuals, particularly if they are working remotely.
Whilst I was researching this programme I revisited Steven Covey’s Leadership Model. If you’re not familiar with his work I can highly recommend ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’; its available either in print or an audio book and is hugely enlightening. Covey’s Leadership Model is interesting because it challenges leaders to look at their words and behaviour and consider the possible effects that these could have on their teams (the ‘Opportunity' element of the equation). In essence the model considers for topics:
1: Inspiring Trust - You build relationships of trust through both your character and competence and you also extend trust to others. You show others that you believe in their capacity to live up to certain expectations, to deliver on promises, and to achieve clarity on key goals. You don’t inspire trust by micromanaging and second guessing every step people make.
2: Clarify Purpose - The second is to clarify purpose. Great leaders involve their people in the communication process to create the goals to be achieved. If people are involved in the process, they psychologically own it and you create a situation where people are on the same page about what is really important — mission, vision, values, and goals.
3: Align Systems - This means that you don’t allow there to be conflict between what you say is important and what you measure. For instance, many times organisations claim that people are important but in fact the structures and systems, including accounting, make them an expense or cost centre rather than an asset and the most significant resource.
4: Unleash Talent - When you inspire trust and share a common purpose with aligned systems, you empower people. Their talent is unleashed so that their capacity, their intelligence, their creativity, and their resourcefulness is utilised.
Looking at these topics it’s not difficult to see how the use of words (either written or verbal) can impact on your effectiveness as a manager – choose them carefully.