I don’t know how many times I have hear a manager say they wanted to fire someone and when asked you will hear a wide variety of responses, most of which don’t make any sense in reality.
First off you just can’t fire someone based on the laws of the land. Your real job is not to fire people but to help develop them, if a person has an addiction problem of any sort, then it is your and the organizations first responsibility to try and support a recovery program. Secondly if a person steals or sells a corporation’s trade secrets or say formulas that is considered a criminal offence and handled by human resources and legal departments.
Now with that out of the way lets talk management and leadership by starting to say they are your staff and you must learn to manage and lead by performance not personality. Of course you don’t like everyone after all you are human, however you don’t always have a choice of staff, meaning you may have inherited them when taking over a department or a project.
So how do you survive, get the jobs done, and be a strong manager / leader in the process be it your department or project? Well, the answer is some what simple but not necessarily easy to accomplish. Let’s start from the beginning and understand there are only two things in this big wide world you are going to deal with, work (or call it tasks) and communication.
Step number one you start by communicating with persons and asking them, “I need your help, we have a tough assignment ahead (or task be it departmental or project) and I would like you to work on it. I know you have a busy schedule but with my help can you fit it in to your work load?”
Making the assumption a person says yes, you have just obtained two critical points for performance, 1) Involvement gets commitment, and 2) you now have an ego commitment. When a person commits to something it is generally not a comfort zone for them to back down, their ego won’t like it.
Step number two before a person starts any task or work assignment, they ;must (with your help if needed) gather preliminary information necessary for them to start down the right path of work, this is what is often called, understanding or knowing the predecessor tasks or work. With that information a person can develop a potential plan, with measurable and verifiable points along the path ensuring the task or assignment is in fact going in the right direction. Don’t be surprised if the plan has to change, it is not unusual that new information is discovered along the path requiring modification and new agreed upon direction and results.
Step number 3 is to ensure prior to start that the task when completed will be usable by who or whatever receives it. Therefor, communication with the “successor” that all parties involved “agree on the results.”
This is as I said an easy process to understand since there are only several key points that make the process successful, what is hard is learning to use the process to help develop persons into productive staff member contributing to the mission, vision and value of the department or project goals. I go into more detail in my book, “The BUM Book” chapiter two page 13.
One last point if you follow this process, you now have staff members telling you what they will be doing, agreeing on how they will do it and providing you with measurement and verification they are doing it. If for any reason with your help a staff person does not continually follow the program you are now in a position to show non-performance and this now becomes a human resource issue.
This is our blog for the day and hope it helps, don’t forget we look for your comments, input and questions. We are here for you.
Cheers Gene and the Blog Team – info@abumbook.com