Any empathetic person who is trying to build their own brand often wishes to manage their people as well as possible. They understand that productivity is the name of the game and that carrying ‘dead wood’, as it were, is totally unhelpful for their business goals. That said, many of us have had bad bosses or management in the past, and seek to avoid falling into that trap when we have our own creative and financial control.
However, we also all know that just like the over-strict and ineffective manager, the overly friendly boss is one we tend to lose respect for, as well. This is why trying to find our own balance can be difficult. Of course, we’re not here to tell you how you should apply your personality, or what values you should keep as a manager. What we can do is offer four important tidbits of advice to help you in your goals, making sure that whatever strategy you curate you can apply both consistently and effectively.
Let’s consider the following advice together:
Attend The Job Interviews
Taking the time to attend the job interviews of would-be applications of your firm can help you take a ready interest in who might be working for you. You may have someone sourcing and interviewing candidates for your firm already, but it can be nice to swing on in and see if anybody strikes you as being a unique and worthwhile venture. This way, you can also make your face known from the first moment, ensuring that your team know who you are and readily see you as a necessary part of their daily career management. This helps you ensure you feel and are regarded as part of the team, rather than an isolated entity.
Take A Healthy Interest In Career & Personality
Just as being present in the milestones of your staff’s presence at your firm can be important, taking a healthy interest in their personality, and career at large, can be very helpful. After all, you’re not only the manager and boss of your staff, but also their mentor in a sense, and their reliable node of income.
For this reason, it’s important to understand how they’d like to develop and what potential they have for doing so. It might be that an assistant at your firm, for instance, could be aided by enrolling in a management program, or in engaging with public speaking courses too. This not only helps them but when you attend a trade show in the future, these skills can help your firm. As you see, investing in your staff isn’t charity at all – it can really help both parties and enables you to strengthen your social bond without the usual socializing between colleagues.
Curate An Open Door Policy
It’s very healthy to curate an open door policy to the degree that you can. This sounds quite obvious, but many managers or business owners neglect to do this, instead of palming off those responsibilities on their HR department. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with getting the best of your excellent HR team, but it can sometimes be that staff wish to speak with you directly. Allowing them to do so, even if that means by appointment due to your busy schedule, can help you invest your time in your staff as appropriate.
This way, they see you as reachable, because you are. They may be more inclined to speak to you then rather than going through a formal process, which sometimes can be very important, particularly if they feel frightened talking about harassment they are suffering – to use quite a sad example. Being present, or at least available, can only ever be healthy.
Use Software To Aid You
Managing people is tough because people are complex. We often forget that staff members aren’t tools or cogs in a machine, but living, breathing, thinking people with a range of personality quirks, hopes, fears, strengths and weaknesses. Everyone is vastly different despite being similar in how they approach the workday and how they commit to social norms. For this reason, it can be good to have the best HR software on hand, in order for us to make notes, manage our efforts, keep track of confidential cases, and more. This way, you can make sure that despite the complexity of your staff and their personalities, you can focus on providing the best cared-for approach necessary.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily use your people skills to manage employees – an effort they will surely appreciate.
