How to help people succeed at work ?

This is a tricky question to me. I am an Engineering Director with mixed responsibilities. The primary focus is to make sure I meet the demands of the business unit(s) and also to make sure that the folks who work for me are in a happy place.

The main question for any leader is

“Are you going to mark people’ papers or help them get an A ? “

People who feel good at themselves produce better results. This may sound like a trap but I think there is value in analyzing this. I wanted to rephrase it to suit the corporate world – ” People who produce good results feel better about themselves”. This essentially means that both people and results are important. Overemphasizing any one of these will cause problems. A good leader should be able to balance this out.If people are not performing well then they will not be be happy.

There are three Key things to to making people perform

1) Performance Planning
2) Execution
3) Performance Review.

This has to happen iteratively till we achieve success. An employee’s performance should not be measured by just one cycle but constant reminders on performance objectives and reviews will help people focus.Evaluation is the tricky part of these key initiatives.

Setting goals is also not an easy task. If you can’t measure a goal you won’t be able to manage it . So , Any goal which is not measurable should not be set.Subjective evaluation may be required sometime but it is not recommended.

There is a 80/20 rule. 80% of the performance is going to come from the 20% of the activities. It does not mean that the other activities are not relevant but they may not contribute directly to the performance objectives.

The most important fact to understand is that there is no best leadership style. There are so different issues in the market place that a variety of skills are required to solve issues based on the situation. Another important aspect is nobody wants to fail even if they cannot succeed.

I would classify people into different categories

a) Low Competence / Experience , High Commitment.
b) Low Competence , Low Commitment
c) Moderate to High Competence , Variable Commitment
d) High Competence , High Commitment

It is possible to derive value from every category except (b). The Skill level is different for each individual but if there is no commitment they don’t deserve a place in the organization and they can have harmful effects on the team in general. It is the job of the leader to prioritize and assign the right tasks to the right people so there is maximum performance. For example a very good programmer may keep thinking only about improving the product and lose focus and derail the project. It is not that it is bad idea to try and improve the product but if the programmer is distracted from his core performance objective then it is a real problem. It is again the art of balancing if 90% of the focus is on programming and 10% is contributing to the product then there is a good chance of delivering on the performance objectives. It is the reverse for a product engineer . He has to focus 90% on improving the product and 10% of his time on other tasks.

Every single employee has a purpose in the team and a good sense of core responsibilities is a key factor for the overall success. An average programmer can focus that much more harder on his/her core area of expertise and over achieve. Employees will keep switching between (a) , (b) ,(c) and (d) depending on what they are assigned to do. If they are able to stay at (d) for a long period there is a good chance that they are moving up in the organization. If they are stuck at (b) then they can only pack their bags and go home.A good leader should help people stay at (d) most of the time if not all .

A leader should be able to direct , Coach , Support and delegate. A leader has to constantly switch between directive behavior and supportive behavior.

Inspired by : Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A”
by Ken Blanchard; Garry Ridge