Effort Reducing Factors Overview
Management duties vary in organisations. For example, some organisations keep financial responsibilities to senior management whereas others distribute them through to all management levels. Some general management duties to consider are:
How these responsibilities are met vary with each manager's and supervisor's circumstancies. They are important for leadership as it is an irresponsible leader that claims to lead people but lets them get undermined by poor systems and decisions.
- Governance responsibilities, including monitoring attendance, validating expenses and maintaining information and site security.
- The effective use of resources, including efficiency, reliability, maintenance and relevance.
- Setting priorities, which includes ensuring that the work they supervise is relevant to the operational plans and targets of the organisation.
- Health and Safety, which is the responsibility of everyone, so the manager has to make sure people are skilled in safety and prioritising it.
- Effective, multi-directional communication, so the work of their area is well coordinated internally and with other work areas and stakeholders.
- Customer service, which is especially relevant for business areas that deal directly with customers but also for other work areas that support customer service roles.
- Continuous improvement and development, which is the responsibility to find ways to improve the way products and services are delivered.
- Quality assurance, to ensure that work done is reliable and meets expectations.
- Moving the team beyond self-reliant to high performing, building the wellbeing and productivity of the team so it can be its best.
How these responsibilities are met vary with each manager's and supervisor's circumstancies. They are important for leadership as it is an irresponsible leader that claims to lead people but lets them get undermined by poor systems and decisions.
People skills are very important for leaders. Dealing with people is often the most acutely felt challenge for leaders.
The pathway to leadership is usually through a technical skills set that suddenly changes into a people centric. Even people who come to leadership via a interpersonal services role face new challenges. Their roles were different to the types of role a leader is in, with its corporate responsibilities and the very real power and influence it exercises over other people's work lives. The people that leaders lead are there everyday, unlike customers who may come and go for short periods of time. It is one thing to deal with someone for the duration of a transaction, quite another to have responsibility for them and work beside them for years.
One of the most important things for leaders to remember is that people are more than their work role. People are complex, more complex than any one person can be aware of, including their self-awareness. Life is a constant unfolding of self-discovery or avoidance of it. As a leader, you will always be dealing with levels of people you don't know or understand. And it's none of your business either. We are leaders, not therapists, when exercising corporate responsibility.
So leaders have to develop sensitivity to people and the ability to respond to how they act and behave. A simple principle is that workplaces are for adults. People have to manage themselves. The role of the leader is to help them do that by setting expectations, coaching, resourcing, supporting and providing feedback. If a leader does this well most adults will respond well. If they don't then, as adults, they can be held accountable for their choices.
This presents us with a critical principle: A leader cannot hold another person accountable for their performance unless that leader has first provided them with the necessary direction and support so they can succeed. This is a variation on the principle used in the Leading Performance module, that the role of the supervisor is to help every person succeed.
So what people skills or interpersonal skills are important?
Here are some key ones:
Some frameworks that help people develop awareness and skills in these areas are:
The pathway to leadership is usually through a technical skills set that suddenly changes into a people centric. Even people who come to leadership via a interpersonal services role face new challenges. Their roles were different to the types of role a leader is in, with its corporate responsibilities and the very real power and influence it exercises over other people's work lives. The people that leaders lead are there everyday, unlike customers who may come and go for short periods of time. It is one thing to deal with someone for the duration of a transaction, quite another to have responsibility for them and work beside them for years.
One of the most important things for leaders to remember is that people are more than their work role. People are complex, more complex than any one person can be aware of, including their self-awareness. Life is a constant unfolding of self-discovery or avoidance of it. As a leader, you will always be dealing with levels of people you don't know or understand. And it's none of your business either. We are leaders, not therapists, when exercising corporate responsibility.
So leaders have to develop sensitivity to people and the ability to respond to how they act and behave. A simple principle is that workplaces are for adults. People have to manage themselves. The role of the leader is to help them do that by setting expectations, coaching, resourcing, supporting and providing feedback. If a leader does this well most adults will respond well. If they don't then, as adults, they can be held accountable for their choices.
This presents us with a critical principle: A leader cannot hold another person accountable for their performance unless that leader has first provided them with the necessary direction and support so they can succeed. This is a variation on the principle used in the Leading Performance module, that the role of the supervisor is to help every person succeed.
So what people skills or interpersonal skills are important?
Here are some key ones:
- Empathy - recognise others' feelings, pressures, priorities, efforts and sense of self.
- Self-awareness - sensitivity to your own bias, assumptions, styles, feelings and stressors.
- Active listening - demonstrate that you hear and clarify that you have heard correctly.
- Diversity - facilitate diversity of age, gender, culture and styles.
- Trustworthy - follow up, reliability, confidentiality and consistency.
- Adaptability - vary relationship style to include different types of personalities and situations.
- Negotiation - bring people to agreement based on facts and values.
- Humour - use humour to lift people up and help them engage, ensuring people don't feel embarrassed or stupid.
- Solutions focus - work with people to create better outcomes rather than focus on blame or pessimism.
- Effective verbal expression - express yourself clearly in language, expressions and gestures that help people to understand.
Some frameworks that help people develop awareness and skills in these areas are:
- Emotional intelligence - There are a couple of well researched, evidenced based frameworks for emotional intelligence, such as Bar-On's EQ-i. These can help you to review your skills and find areas to develop.
- Situational Leadership - Contingency leadership theory highlights the importance of adapting styles to match the situation people are in. A classic model is the Situational Leadership model of Ken Blanchard.
- Effectiveness Training - Thomas Gordon's classic works on teacher and parent effectiveness training provide many useful tips for working effectively with others.
It is important to implement effective processes and systems for teams. These reduce unpredictability, miscommunication and opportunities for mistakes or waste. Productive structures and routines help people to focus on what is important. They also facilitate decisions, information flow, support and safety.
Each team will have its own flavour when it comes to systems and processes. This flavour will be a product of the type of work they do, how much they do together rather than individually, whether they are co-located and their personality styles. Some common factors to include in processes and systems are:
Each team will have its own flavour when it comes to systems and processes. This flavour will be a product of the type of work they do, how much they do together rather than individually, whether they are co-located and their personality styles. Some common factors to include in processes and systems are:
- Communication processes - Communication in teams happens in face to face, written, electronic and group contexts. It varies from two people to the whole group. The types of systems the team needs to keep it communication well are:
- Meetings - clarify whether meetings are for information sharing, problem solving or task work. Schedule them to maximise inclusion and relevance. Ensure there are processes for updating people who are absent. Use processes ti maximise participation. If participation is repeatedly low it may indicate a lack of relevance or inclusion. Some types of meetings or teams will need minutes for their meetings and decisions.
- E-mail - ensure people agree when and how to use email. It is primarily a document sharing system for written communication. Clarify when people check email. It is seldom a reliable sole method for communicating urgent information. The team may agree on time management processes, such as only checking email a few times a day. It can even let stakeholders know this.
- Important information - Agree on processes for distributing important information. This may include multiple channels, such as reminders at meetings, email links, document sharing and minutes.
- Meetings - clarify whether meetings are for information sharing, problem solving or task work. Schedule them to maximise inclusion and relevance. Ensure there are processes for updating people who are absent. Use processes ti maximise participation. If participation is repeatedly low it may indicate a lack of relevance or inclusion. Some types of meetings or teams will need minutes for their meetings and decisions.
- Responsibilities and roles - It is important to clarify roles and expectations between people. While each person's position will specify a lot of the role, there are still other expectations, such as how to work together, shared responsibilities and shared team support for other people's roles. When these are not clarified you can move from a supportive, dynamic team to one where people just do their own thing and don't help each other.
- Goal setting - A common set of goals for a team, embedded in a sense of purpose and the value it creates, goes a long way to uniting people. Share the goals and unite to celebrate the achievements.
- Decision making and problem solving - Teams make decisions all the time but decisions vary greatly. There are simple decisions that people can make themselves, relevant to their role or with little consequence for others. If they try to get others involved in these basic decisions people may feel harrassed and wonder why they don't just make the decision without bothering them. At the other end of the spectrum there are complex decisions that require a combined effort to make a good decisions. Key elements here are the technical knowledge, overlapping areas of responsibilities, the impact on people and whether people will buy into and support the decision. These decisions need consultation and group decision processes. Finding the balance between solo decisions, consultative decisions and group decisions is an important process for a group.
- Performance management - Performance management is a mix of formal and informal processes to align effort and work around the business priorities. It is covered in depth in the Supervising Performance module. The key elements to consider here is that a bi-annual, formal performane planning and review session will not get results. Teams need processes for meeting with supervisors for more frequent formal and informal sessions, clarifying objectives, tracking progress, providing coaching and maintaining a supportive, collaborative approach to work.
- Managing culture - Culture is the set of often unspoken assumptions about how things are done around the place. The cultural norms may have been established prior to people moving into the team. A healthy culture builds practices that facilitate people's work and the team's ability to achieve its goals. Out of date cultural norms, that matched a previous situation, or an unhealthy culture, will undermine performance and make life hard for people, even if it promises a familiar, comfortable workplace. The culture must make the team relevant to the organisation and enable it to create real value. Teams need processes to explore assumptions, renew their practices and reinforce and encourage constructive, supportive ways of working together.
- Wellbeing and motivation - Wellbeing is important for productivity and achievement boosts wellbeing. This is explored in detail in the Positive Teams module. There are practices and skills a team can adopt to increase its wellbeing. A key area of importance is how the workplace is designed so people can immerse themselves in their work with a sense of purpose and meaning. Another key area is how people engage with others, focusing on the good things they do for each other and the support, safety and professional growth the enable. Another area is how the group learns, finding solutions to make things better, building the energy of the group and exploring ways to develop and improve what they do. Finally, the group has to be grounded in reality, building its resilience to stress and focusing on how each person can achieve their potential in the team.
The previous section finished by focusing on the importance of processes for building wellbeing and motivation. It was also mentioned that the Positive Teams module explores this in detail.
This section is included here to reinforce the importance of wellbeing and productivity as partners for a prosperous organisation.
At times, poor leaders make the mistake of thinking that they can keep pushing their team until they break. Some work places are exploitative, even engaging in practices that would be illegal in most developed and emerging economies. The belief that people can be exploited for profit has been shown wrong, not just on ethical grounds but also on profit grounds. If you want your organisation to prosper, even if you are a cruel and unethical operative, you still have to look after people. It is the best way to create value. Luckily, many leaders don't need convincing about this. Like most people, they understand the importance of people and the value of respect.
There are, however, some nuances to creating a productive culture of wellbeing. Trying to make people happy or attempting to avoid stress completely are approaches to wellbeing that simply won't work. In fact, it may make things worse for people. All roles involve elements people don't enjoy - the paperwork, the cranky customer, the stress of deadlines, just to name some common ones. Wellbeing is not about building a comfortable place but a place where people can prosper. This means that a culture of wellbeing has to always be grounded in reality, able to incorporate the tough parts of life as well as the easy and pleasant.
If a team just focuses on its comfort it may become irrelevant, exposing it to the risk of redundancy or restructure. A healthy team always remembers that it is there to create value for the organisation. The wellbeing challenge is how to do that in a way that is professionally, socially and personally nourishing for the people involved.
As mentioned above, the Positive Teams module addresses this in detail, helping people implement processes and priorities that build their wellbeing and productivity.
This section is included here to reinforce the importance of wellbeing and productivity as partners for a prosperous organisation.
At times, poor leaders make the mistake of thinking that they can keep pushing their team until they break. Some work places are exploitative, even engaging in practices that would be illegal in most developed and emerging economies. The belief that people can be exploited for profit has been shown wrong, not just on ethical grounds but also on profit grounds. If you want your organisation to prosper, even if you are a cruel and unethical operative, you still have to look after people. It is the best way to create value. Luckily, many leaders don't need convincing about this. Like most people, they understand the importance of people and the value of respect.
There are, however, some nuances to creating a productive culture of wellbeing. Trying to make people happy or attempting to avoid stress completely are approaches to wellbeing that simply won't work. In fact, it may make things worse for people. All roles involve elements people don't enjoy - the paperwork, the cranky customer, the stress of deadlines, just to name some common ones. Wellbeing is not about building a comfortable place but a place where people can prosper. This means that a culture of wellbeing has to always be grounded in reality, able to incorporate the tough parts of life as well as the easy and pleasant.
If a team just focuses on its comfort it may become irrelevant, exposing it to the risk of redundancy or restructure. A healthy team always remembers that it is there to create value for the organisation. The wellbeing challenge is how to do that in a way that is professionally, socially and personally nourishing for the people involved.
As mentioned above, the Positive Teams module addresses this in detail, helping people implement processes and priorities that build their wellbeing and productivity.