ODL-Managing People

Staff are the backbone of an organisation. If you have hired the right people, half the job is done. The rest is knowing how to develop their competence through motivation, training and directing. Setting the tasks and performance standards to be achieved, directing individuals, forming teams and directing those teams. This directly impacts the productivity of the workforce (human capital) and therefore, the overall success of the company. 

Effective people management is a function of various factors, which can be categorised as follows (Nandini Chatarkar's post helped me with this):

1. Clarity of roles, structure and communication channels, 

2. Culture of performance with fair and transparent performance evaluation systems, 

3. Providing opportunities for professional growth and development, 

4. Recognizing and rewarding employee contributions, and 

5. Promoting work-life balance 

So, people management is an art, it is a multi-faceted symphony of parts. A culture of collaborating and integrating these elements for success. This starts from the top i.e. with coaching and investing in senior managers. Then, I wonder. Are senior managers patient (or trained) enough to invest their time and experience in developing their employees? 

In my experience, I think most senior managers, are not trained in people management skills and they end up hyper-focusing only on the technical aspects of their staff members' job. Task management becomes their key focus. They forget the other elements such as team dynamics, motivation, needs and expectations. When you have hired right, you are managing experts who are already technically fit (so they need less technical supervision of their hard skills); but might need more softer skills or intrinsic rewards to improve their performance. Nowadays, with advances in tech, the performance standards and evaluation matrices of senior managers need to have more weighting (higher score) on people management skills (individuals and teams) than on hard knowledge.