Manage Your People Well
Let’s say you have a team consisting of highly-skilled people. But, your team’s performance is disappointing to your liking. Maybe, your team’s leader lacks people management skills. Every managers, leaders, business owners need to understand how to manage people well to lead their business/teams to the best potential and gain success.
What is People Management?
People management is the skills needed to motivate, handle, direct your teammates so they can be the best teammates you can have. Some people have this skill naturally, but most people don’t. Managing a group of people is not a skill anyone has. Most leaders use the numbers of the productivity to think of improving the profits, but one of the most important factor many bosses tend to forgot is to make the people happy and satisfied in the workplace.
People Management vs Team Orchestration
You may have heard the quote:
“Being a boss is different from being a leader”
That’s why Shelisa Bainbridge, a leadership coach opposed the word “people management” and prefers to call it “Team Orchestration”. This perception may cause many leaders to think about how they can orchestrate the team to perform better, than thinking on how to manage each individuals in the team and can lead to more successful outcomes.
When we start thinking about people management in terms of team orchestration, an immediate shift in attitude, value, and impact surfaces in the managers who are responsible for the output of that team — Bainbridge
How to improve it?
So, in this software engineering project, I’m trying my best to improve my people management skills. So, I can give you some tips on it.
- Communicate clearly. When I work at this project, we always communicate everyday about the problem we have, asking solutions whenever someone occurs to a unsolvable problem. Soou need to know how to communicate, give you opinion, and learning to accept other’s opinion.
- Actively listening. This allows my group to know what happens in everyone in the group, whenever a blocker appeared. This also creates a flowing communication in our group, so it run well and nothing is overlooked to be understood. We apply the principle that everyone has equal share in the group, and we contribute evenly to make our project better.
- Flexibility. Not everyone has the same environment as you. Your team need to have the ability to adapt for every sudden change happens. This needs fast thinking and critical solving on how to adapt to any unexpected change.
Understanding Others
Imagine you are walking into class and see your friend sitting alone in the corner. You notice the sadness in his/her friend. Your first thought maybe that your friend is sad. But how did your brain know that? Your brain achieves that by simulating what your friend is doing to your mind. This helps you understand how other are feeling by just seeing your friend’s face.
In order to have a good people management skills, first you need to able to understand other people. By having this skills, you should find friends easily because people will see you as a caring people, but don’t forget to choose your actions wisely when you see someone is demotivated/sad, because your action may hurt them more.
By applying people management skills, we get many benefits. One of the most significant benefit for me is we understand every member better and able to help each other. An actively listening team members allows any individuals who happens to struggle with something to get help from other team members so he/she does not struggle alone. Because that’s why team are made.
Also a framework my team uses, Scrum makes us able to know if someone is not motivated/currently struggling on their work. A daily standup, a meeting which held in the work time, is a 15-minute event to discuss what the team has done, going to work on, and any problem happening (if any). By holding a daily standup, we know which team members are still behind/already finished their work, so we can plan on tomorrow’s work.
Conclusion
Every team member need to have people management skills, so they can strengthen their relationship. Each member will become productive if everyone has a right mindset and work environment, so make sure you are a actively listening to your team and communicate clearly with everyone and create the best product your team can build.
