Leading and Managing with Usability in Mind
What’s the best way to Manage and Lead in the First Place?
It seems to be that the rule of the game when it comes to leading is to keep a tight leash. It’s especially evident in a corporate setting, in how there are strict dress codes and behaviors, and it also manifests in how we handle people and resources. It’s one of the reasons why we have rules, protocols, processes, and more. It’s why we focus on objectives, and attempt to balance scope, time, and budget efficiently.
But there’s more to leadership and management than just that, and at some point we have to ask, “Is there really a best way to lead and manage?”
Not exactly an easy question to answer, but if you ask me, leadership and management is actually pretty comparable to user experience (UX) by the sheer fact that choice matters, and that the ease of use of protocols and management tools used and set, impacts a team’s performance when it comes to achieving tasks and growing skill-sets, not just on an individual platform but on a communal level.
Parallels between UX, Management and Leadership
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, user experience, in its simplest terms, is all about making anything (usually tech) easier to use. It’s all about grounding any design you’re working with on easy-to-understand structures. It’s all about determining, researching, and designing the easiest way for a user to achieve a task. It’s all about usability, or the effectiveness and efficiency that a product creates.
“User experience and usability is all about making the right way, the easy way”
Grounding management and leadership with usability and user experience makes sense because these four things deal with one essential, the psychology of the human element. Knowing that managers and leaders deal with people, it’s not a surprise that the best of them can maneuver large crowds and teams with just a great handle of how people think. Thus, integrating the idea of user experience makes sense in management and leadership.
Making the Right Way the Easy Way
Applying the core concept of usability into Management and Leadership just really means identifying the patterns of people so that they can work better towards the common goal set by a manager or a leader. It could be as simple as picking the most commonly used communication method as the official means of telling people what their tasks are, or as radical as removing an existing process to enforce a new one on the basis that it resonates more with the behaviors of the people involved.
Instead of wasting precious time forcing people to deal with something that doesn’t feel natural and intuitive to them, managers or leaders can pick up more efficient and effective outputs over time by just applying that one simple phrase, “make the right way, the easy way.”
What do we mean when we say “making the right way, the easy way” though?
It could be as simple as streamlining how you deal with your morning routine, ordering whether taking a bath or eating your breakfast comes first and so on, in order to waste less time. Or it could be as complicated as managing how you want to batch baking cookies en masse with only one oven through the use of staggered delays.
It also goes without saying that by implementing a people-centered strategy, managers and leaders have to listen. Sometimes, that can manifest in policies that allow employees and coworkers the opportunity to have input in team, organizational, or group decisions. In that process, managers and leaders don’t just gain a more insightful perspective about key business decisions from the people they have to work with, but they also empower their people to take initiative, have higher self-esteem, and learn from whatever they’re doing.
What People Say isn’t Always Intuitive
Implementing the concept of making “the right way, the easy way” in management and leadership then has clear benefits especially when done under people-centric strategies, but the thing is, these strategies aren’t always the best option at times.
Since management explicitly deals with reaching set goals by controlling people and other resources, being people-centric will not always be best when crafting processes and plans. There will be times when what seems to be intuitive to the people you’ve listened to wouldn’t be the sort of change that a team or an organization will need. And by that, I mean that it wouldn’t be the sort of intuitive change that will fulfill business or organizational needs.
For example, there’s a reason why strict policies exist in the food service industry. When you go into McDonalds, and when you see people wear hair nets, the first thought in your head isn’t “Oh hey, those hairnets are so intuitive for working the cash register! ” The first thought that comes is about how those hairnets keep falling hair from getting into food. It’s not natural to wear a hairnet as you go into a kitchen unless you’re trained to do so. It really just ensures quality by control, and that in itself is making the right way, the easy way, but only through the point of view of a business.
Sometimes making the right way, the easy way means implementing strict policies exist. Sometimes it’s about limiting and controlling our resources so it’s not as complicated to deal with later on.
From a UX perspective, that’s also the reason why we can only pick from a list of options at times, or why we’re forced to create a password of 8 alphanumeric characters. And this just serves to reinforce why sometimes managers and leaders still have to force their way through at times even if people prefer a certain way of doing things.
Practicality and Empathy over Everything
As such when discerning what leadership style to use, whether it be between an autocratic or a participative style, or something completely different, one has to see what is practical to balance the intuition needed by the business and that of the people being dealt with.
In the end, it all comes down on how a manager or leader listens and checks the signs. Because if they don’t listen, if they don’t check the signs, more often than not, they’ll be subjecting themselves and their team to heavy risk later on.
So when we ask “What’s the best leadership style to use?”, there’s no proper answer.
Because, really, it depends.
Depends on the external situation, depends on the resources, depends on the leader.
At the heart of leadership and management is practicality and empathy.
Empathy and practicality, both elements essential to UX, take center stage as the main skills that should be honed, possessed, embodied by a great a manager and leader.
By making the right way, the easy way, you set yourself up for profound success, and make yourself a great asset no matter who you work for, who you are, and what you hope to be.
So listen.
Feel for your people.
But keep it practical.
