People Management and Improving Your Workplace
Picture a situation where you are the manger of a certain department of a certain company. You have a team of workers who are very talented individuals with different skills, aspirations, commitments, and ambitions. In order for you to be able to manage and more importantly improve your workplace, you need people management skills.
What is People Management?
People management is a part of human resource management that encapsulates all the processes of acquisition, optimization, and retention of talent in the organization. It involves training, directing, and motivating team members to maximize the productivity of the workplace and enhance overall professional growth. — talenx.io
Management positions in workplaces oversee the flow of task and growth of the workplace in order to increase employee performance every day. The process involves addressing the dynamics of the workplace; how people work, interact, behave, and improve the business of the workplace. Managers need essential people management skills to ensure constant support and leadership to lead employees toward success.
Key Components in People Management
There 4 components of people management that managers need to understand in order to be an effective in their role.
Creating the workforce for the future
All work in a workplace starts with acquiring the right talent for the job. It starts with understanding the team and the members of it to create an effective. Next comes knowing the best recruitment platforms, creating the brand image that talent candidates trust, work with, and is engaging. Once the right talents are onboard, comes the task of training and helping them improve which in turn builds more commitment.
Understanding the people
The people are the workplace. Managers need to understand the people that make up team; their personal goals, commitments, and interests. Knowing an individual’s behavior in the team helps to judge where they fit on the team and ways to get the best out of them.
Effective communication
To achieve synergy there needs to be proper channels of communication and feedback. Communication is an important tool to know how people in the team are feeling and performing. Having open communication and feedback channels help managers address their employees’ sentiments and grievances.
Creating better collaboration
Creating an effective collaboration system brings everyone on the team together. Managers needs to understand not only an individual’s goal and also the team’s as a whole. Everyone needs to working be working together because success comes from teamwork.
Mediating differences
It is natural for conflicts to arise because different individuals have different opinions and perspectives. Conflicts need to be confronted and resolved in a manner that compromises difference and not antagonizing people in order to not create resentment in team. This also brings back the importance of effective communication.
Essential People Management Skills
Communication
Managers need to be proficient communicators; they need to get along with everyone and can get along their messages effectively.
Active Listening
It’s also equally important to be good listener. Show that you are engaged with what someone’s saying, show support and understanding how to respond to their problems.
Empathy
Being able to understand how others feel and relating to them makes for a good manager.
Trust
To be a good manager everyone in the team should trust the manager and at the same time trust all team members to realize their potential to achieve the team’s goal.
Flexibility
To be a good a manager it’s important to be flexible with your management style. Able to accommodate everyone to create maximum comfort and boosting the team’s productivity.
Conflict-resolution
A conflict is bound to arise in a team. A manager needs to have good conflict-resolution skill, understanding where people are coming from, create a good compromise to maintain peace, and ensure it does not happen again in the future.
Patience
Patience is an important people management skill — utilizing kindness and respect in helping team members overcome work challenges and training recruits.
Organization
In a team there are several tasks running simultaneously, a good people manager ensures the task are properly done in time and in the right order. A good organization skill determines how effective and efficient the team’s work will be.
Personal Experience
To be honest, I have never been a part a of team or a manager/leader in a professional setting. But for a software engineering course I had to work in a team developing a software for the better part of a semester, everyone in the team applied principles of people management. While we did not have a single leader we became everyone else’s leader and our own. Applying people management in ourselves allows us to work together more cohesively and prepares us for leader positions in the future.
