Learning to be a People Person and Improving People Management Skills

Azzahra Abraara
Portelier
Published in
5 min readDec 3, 2020

While doing a project with teammates, communication is the key to keep the relations between the teammates. And you already know that every individual has different personalities. That is why we need someone who can easily break the barrier between your teammates or easy to start a conversation with someone to make the team really close to each other. Little do you know, that person is known as a ‘people person’ How can we be that person? Let’s learn together, my introvert, extrovert, and ambivert friends!

source: https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/flat-youth-people-hugging-together_4741430.htm#page=1&query=group&position=3

Being a People Person

Based on this article there are several ways to be a people person. Let’s start!

Start with “You”

Sometimes people still cannot differentiate between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is when you feel concerned to someone’s feeling while empathy means to understand the perspective in different person and not judging it. To be a people person, you have to start to be an ‘empathic’ person. For example in a real-life conversation, being sympathetic be like “My biggest condolence for you”, or “Oh my god, I am sorry to hear about that” and so on. While empathy, we talk something like “You must feel so proud!”

Avoid the Robot Response

While people ask you a “How are you?” question, instead of answering with a dull response such as “Good. Thanks”, start to answer what is in your mind or how you feel and make it personal. Try to answer “Yeah, I have a great day. Today, I got my first salary and tonight I am going to treat my parents with my own money for the first time!”

Ask, Don’t Tell

When you have a conversation with a bunch of people, what is the topic that is interesting to talk about? Themselves, isn’t it? Show that you interest to hear a story about them so that they find you interesting. Also, it helps the conversation to keep ongoing.

Be Quiet and Just Listen

If someone is talking or telling stories about themselves, do not ever to cut the conversation. Let them finish their stories. It prevents someone to think that you are not listening, and you just think of how to respond. In conclusion, try to let someone finish their story first.

Beware Your Tone

Start to think about your tone when you speak. For example,

when you respond to someone, “I can’t believe you did that!” and “I can’t believe ~you~ did that!”, they have a different meaning. Yes, they express surprise response, however, the last one feels like you appreciate and praise that person.

So that’s pretty much it on how to become a people person. However, have you wondered, how to implement those while working on a team project? Let’s get into it!

People Management

”People management is the process of training, motivating and directing employees to optimize workplace productivity and promote professional growth. Workplace leaders, such as team leads, managers and department heads use people management to oversee workflow and boost employee performance every day.” -indeed.com

People management is important in a team so that it can

maintain and manage the members of the team well.

If we have good people management in a team, it solves so many problems that might be happened in a team, such as:

Handling Interpersonal Conflicts

good people management can prevent you from starting a conflicts between employees and managers. It also can help you to handle conflicts that is happening. It reflects your team has respect to each other.

Leading Employee Training

Because your team has good people management, you can also teach your new employees and lead a training for them to teach how can we have a good people management in a team and teaching some feedbacks that has already happened in a team so that your new employees can succeed in their works too.

Managing Deadlines

Good people management can make the team easy to manage their deadlines. It also can help the team to evaluate their resources and set realistic deadlines for the next work by learning from the evaluation.

People Management Skills

people management requires some soft skills so that people can easily interact with their co-workers, improve organizational tasks, and also can help to make an open and honest communication towards their co-workers.

There are several people management skills to improve yourself:

Empowering Employees

by empowering your employees, it helps them to enhance

their new skills and they will convince, they can improve more. There are actions to empowering employees such as support them, and open for questions, and gives feedback for them.

Active Listening

start to listen to your employee about their perspective, concern, and others before you answer them so that it reflects positive interactions between the employees.

Conflict-resolution

If there is a conflict between employees, make sure you can mediate them. Also, if you have conflict-resolution, you can predict conflicts that might happen in a team and prevent them to make it happen.

Flexibility

to implement flexibility in you, you can start to help your co-workers and understanding their workflow so that we can work with their workflow.

Patience

Patience is a very important skill in people management. With patience, you can easily handle your new employee, respect someone’s opinion, handling and solving problems. By implementing patience, your quality of work will increase.

Clear Communication

with clear communication, it helps the team to solve problems easier, easy to adapt to new changes and do brainstorming new ideas easier.

Trust

building trust in a team can help the team to work together more productively and efficiently. It helps the team to support each other too.

Organization

Organization helps you to keep your team’s productivity on track and to maintain it easily.

That is all for me. Hope those tips will help you to enhance your people management skills and to be a people person! Thank you for reading until the end. Good luck!🥳

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