THE MESSY BUSINESS OF MANAGING PEOPLE

James Weekley, Head of Internal Communications, RELX

I thought long and hard about the title of this article and decided that after all is said and done, managing other people often is a messy business. In the most glorious and positive ways people are driven by emotion, which makes them unpredictable. And with all the systems and processes in the world to control how things are supposed to happen at work, they rarely go the way we think they will because we fail to factor in the human impulse.

It’s this capriciousness which makes the whole process of managing people exciting and fascinating for those with curiosity about the human condition. But a complete nightmare for those without. And don’t forget, it’s not just your people who are unpredictable, emotional, impulsive and capricious. You are too.

The unfortunate reality is that most aren’t put in charge of managing people because they are good at it. It’s because they are good at precisely something else, so they are woefully ill-equipped and then must learn on the job. I once witnessed a superstar salesperson take over a large team only to fail miserably within six months. He struggled to adjust from being a lone-wolf hunter of new business to someone who needed instincts more akin to farming to build a cohesive team more effective than the sum of its parts. We’ve all seen this happen one way or another.

Based on my nearly 60,000 hours of working life and experiences of directly managing over a hundred people in a whole host of different environments, I have condensed into a few thousand words the priorities that matter most when managing others. This is one man’s view of course, but I share these insights in the hope that they bring you grounded, practical insight that you can either use right away, or at least give you something meaty upon which to ponder.

YOUR NUMBER ONE PRIORITY

The best managers of people I have seen have one single thing in common. They are all highly self-aware. They know and are comfortable with themselves, so are fundamentally better placed to know others, which, in turn, means they know how to get the best out of them. They understand their own emotions so are better able to work with the emotions of others. Displays of emotions in the workplace for these people are okay.

By contrast, the worst managers of people I have seen are people who think their technical knowledge and perceived hierarchical power are all they need to make others do what they want them to do. And we all know how well it works out for people like that.

So, if you are struggling to get the best out of your team, the chances are that you will first need to attend to the development of your own self-awareness. Now, some people are naturally self-aware, like some people are natural jugglers. But few are, many don’t bother to learn and those who do, often give up before they have mastered it.

One of the defining moments early in my career was when the company I worked for reorganized and I had a new boss. I had never come across anyone like him before. He treated me as an equal from the get-go and spent time really getting to know me and the others in his new team. It was a big group scattered all over the country. It took quite some time.

I asked him why he invested so much effort in us. ‘It’s not what you do at work that’s hard, it’s how you do it’, came the response. And this was from someone who cut their teeth in the space industry, which sounded pretty hard to me.

And hasn’t his insight been right every single day of my working life? It’s how you do things, not what you do, that’s hard. And the how specifically refers to how you relate to others and work with them.

Depending on what you do for a career, you may think your number one priority is to grow revenue, develop innovative products for customers, better equip the organization with technology, hire the best people or ensure your organization complies with the law. If you do any of these things or thousands of other things besides, but you also manage people, then your number one priority is to ensure their welfare before anything else.

Managing people is a bigger responsibility than you probably think it is. Without, of course, denying the individual responsibilities everyone has while at work, as a line manager you are entrusted with your people’s safety, health and wellbeing at work. It’s your job to make sure that they can be themselves without fear of judgement, that they can have a life outside and never have to apologize for it, that they can feel supported, trusted and valued, and, most importantly, that they can become successful in ways that are meaningful for them. If you don’t do these things, then you are firstly failing in a basic societal precept and then you will find that you fail in everything else you are trying to achieve.

This means investing time in getting to know your people at a human level. Where have they come from? Where do they want to go, if anywhere? How do they want to get there? What do they care about? Who and what matters in their life? Why do they work here? What makes them tick? And then being prepared to share these things about yourself. Such rapport builds your ability to influence.

I’ve never met anyone in my entire working career who came to work to make a mess of it. It’s just that as line managers we sometimes fail to take account of beautiful individuality and the tensions it can cause, then work with those tensions to generate new ideas and new ways of working.

People join organizations but leave their line manager. So, managing people well is the first line of defense in employee retention and it’s the single most important responsibility you have at work. It is my own experience and my observations of what successful managers do that if you look after your people, the rest will come. It is one of my universal truths in the workplace.

MAKE YOUR PEOPLE FAMOUS

But taking a distinctly human approach to managing your team is not enough. Your work is not yet done. There’s more to do and that means letting go of your own insecurities and creating the right environment for your people to overtake you. If you don’t feel that upward pressure, then what on earth will keep you on your toes and drive you to perform better?

This starts with hiring people who have the potential to be better than you. Then unlocking that potential so they are at your heels pushing you onwards. It takes no small amount of humility and a healthy slice of courage to think this way.

You might think you can control your team. But it’s an illusion. If you rely on control, then you are playing on people’s fears. Fear of failure, fear of losing their job, fear of losing their status. And fear is the fire blanket for success. It snuffs it out.

If your people flounder, then so do you. Every time. It’s the ultimate weakness of any team leader to fail to help their people develop to become more successful than they are.

By contrast, of course, if you create the right environment for your people to shine then not only can you feel good about what you have helped make happen, but that brilliance will reflect on you. Even as I write this, I cannot quite believe so many people still do not understand this simple truth.

Your job is to help open doors for your people. Let them become successful in their own right and let them make a name for themselves inside your organization and beyond. To help them work out their own solutions so they take ownership rather than simply doing what they are told to do.

Few of us in the corporate world really have any chance to leave a lasting legacy. But something we can all do, when managing others, is to help them fulfil their potential, so they in turn model your behavior and help others in their own way. That, to me, sounds like a worthy legacy for anyone at work and one that a great many of us can achieve. If you can’t get your head around this, then maybe you shouldn’t be managing people at all.

THE THREE WAYS THINGS GO AWRY

This is all well and good. But how do we react when things go wrong? Which they invariably will. This is the real test and one that, as a manager of people, you must pass with flying colors. In my experience there are three main areas where things go wrong in the dynamic between team leader and team member. The first, and by far the most common, is when we simply see things differently. The second is when something isn’t working the way you expected, and the third is when, despite best endeavor, sometimes people’s behavior lets them down. Let’s take these in turn.

One: Simply seeing things differently

One thing we can all be sure of in this life is the way we see things is not shared by anyone else. So, despite your best efforts to gain agreement or clarity there will always be different views. And this is simply because our map of the world is different from everyone else’s.

But the map is not, as they say, the terrain. Which means as a manager of people you need to walk in their shoes, see what they see, feel what they feel and hear what they hear. Explorers don’t learn how to explore by looking at maps. They put on their boots. As Bilbo Baggins says in Lord of the Rings: ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.’

And so it is when managing people. You have to get out there. You must invest time to better understand their world, so you have some chance of being able to influence it and for them to see that you care enough to try. This now brings us to the second case.

Two: When something isn’t working the way you expected

I am a firm believer that to acknowledge a behavior is to reinforce it. Focusing on the positives and largely ignoring the negatives has huge power if you are prepared to be a little patient. You may need to adjust your resources to manage areas where your team member may not perform as you would perhaps like or you may need to provide learning opportunities to help them. But in practice, just acknowledging and rewarding the behavior you want and ignoring the one you don’t can create sustainable and long-term changes.

I tend almost entirely to focus on the positives of my team members’ performance and let the negatives, as I see them, work themselves out. In any case, who am I to actively pick people’s behaviors apart and try to reconstruct them in some utopian generalization of what constitutes good?

Three: When bad behavior gets the better of someone

And, finally, to the third case. People don’t mean to mess up, it’s just sometimes they do. How does the team leader who has come this far deal with the real messiness that can result from bad team member behavior? The kind of behavior that puts the organization’s reputation at risk and needs to be urgently addressed.

The simple answer is it must be dealt with in real time, there and then, but not in front of others. It must be specific in terms of their behavior so they can clearly understand what they did and what impact it had on other people or on the organization. This is most important, as without it the recipient may well have no idea what it was they did or why it even caused an issue. Because, don’t forget, their map is simply different; they aren’t trying to make a mess of things.

Your feedback to the recipient must also be delivered calmly and decisively with a crystal-clear end message of what specific behavior needs to change, why and what the consequences will be if it doesn’t.

These are not the kind of conversations that can wait for an end-of-year performance review. In fact, once dealt with effectively as described above, they should not be mentioned in any annual assessment. Raking up missteps is not the way to move forward.

These are difficult conversations for sure, but as the Peter Parker Principle from Spiderman tells us: ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’.

WHO DOESN’T WANT TO BE RECOGNISED?

Ihave been involved with a great many employee opinion surveys in my time across a range of organisations in different sectors. In almost all, a significant proportion of employees tell their employer that they could do better in rewarding them for the effort they put in: fair reward for work done.

Maybe this is another one of these universal truths at work. No matter how much someone is paid, they always feel like it should be more? There is some logic to this thinking. After all, if you ask people the question, then what else would you expect them to say, really?

Good people will always take on more responsibility as they build their career, so they may well feel a little behind in what they are paid as they add more to the organization. Which is why benchmarking reward is so important.

Many of us will have taken on new team members who have already been with the organization for many years. If we look, we may well find that their reward has drifted out of kilter with their evolved role and with the market. I don’t want us to get caught in a long discussion here about reward processes, but the one thing I would say is to ensure that your people’s roles are regularly benchmarked with the market. Otherwise they will fall behind, which means your organization will be inadvertently exploiting them and so will you. They will find out, sooner or later, that they are off market value which will either disengage them or make them leave. Both of which are passive outcomes for the people manager aspiring to do better.

But what I really want to focus on in this section is the power of recognition. You have read why we need to make our people famous earlier in this article but here I want to expand on this idea with some simple approaches.

You need to be there for your people and available for them. Making time to listen to them. How else will you be able to see their achievements and recognize them for their efforts?

And you need to take positive steps to recognize them. Firstly, by saying thank you and often. Even when they are just doing what they are supposed to be doing. It reinforces the value in tasks that can seem repetitive or mundane, especially when you reinforce why what they do matters. It never ceases to amaze me how many people say they never receive any thanks for doing their work.

Secondly, by praising good work in front of others, they gain peer recognition. Who doesn’t like that?

And thirdly, if no other formal mechanisms exist, seeing what you can do within the rules to recognize and thank them by giving them some time back. It is my experience that people value time above all else.

If you manage people in real time like this, it means that reviewing performance becomes more organic and just part of doing work each day. If your organization has a formal review of annual performance, then even this should become a more useful and positive process for all parties involved. There are no surprises or unhelpful regurgitation of any mistakes from which people have moved on. It becomes a more positive discussion where successes can be reflected upon, recorded and celebrated.

A PILE OF CALCULATORS

We come to the end of this article with a story. Back in the mists of time I worked for a relatively small company. The performance of the business was under pressure and before looking to make any roles redundant the managing director personally drove a cost reduction program. She saw wastage across the business and asked around a hundred or so colleagues in the head office each to do their part. Small gestures, she said, would add up and we should do our bit.

Despite huge efforts out in the operations of the business to save money, the head office lagged behind. So, one Monday morning we all came into the office to find a pile of over a thousand office calculators on the floor in reception. The managing director had asked the office manager to collect them from all the desks and drawers.

She left a handwritten message on top of the pile. It said something like: ‘I asked you to do your part. You didn’t. There are over a thousand calculators here for a hundred people. This wastage is not helping. You need to do better. If you don’t, I will do it for you.’ She was right. And we all knew it. She could do all our jobs.

Here was a leader who lived and breathed her company. She was known by everyone and had worked her way through the business. She never asked anyone to do anything that she wasn’t prepared or capable of doing herself.

And here’s the lesson I have taken forward in my career of managing people: you should never ask team members to do things you are not only prepared to do yourself, but also capable of doing yourself. It’s all too easy to take the elevated and expansive position of someone who shapes the agenda and have no idea how your team actually does what it does. But that detachment hinders understanding and does nothing to show your interest in their work.

If you have someone in your team who does something you have no idea how to do, ask them to show you. And just watch how their respect and loyalty grows.

James Weekley is Head of Internal Communications at RELX. In this capacity, he oversees and promotes effective communications among people at RELX.