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How We Manage Others

It seems to me we've known how to manage others well for some time.  It also seems most companies are in a general environment when money is less available to motivate employees, promotions are hard to justify, and we're asking people to solve problems with limited resources. 

I've watched career coaching, mentorship and team building make significant differences in engagement and team effectiveness.  I believe the Gen Y population especially just wants human (vs. e-learning) guidance from their (competent to mentor) leaders (supplemented by the efforts of Human Resources).  It's the stuff that many Gen X employees got from their managers naturally when they first entered the workforce, which in this new era managers have felt they have little time to do.

CEO's & HR departments then need to embed excellent skillsets in leaders around mentoring & career coaching, and add these to performance measurement processes.  It makes sense that what will drive engagement, competitiveness and agile organizations that adapt to dynamic environments, are an employee population which is managed, coached and mentored well.  We need to have guidelines measured and rewarded around these.  Wall Street results alone are "hollow."  It's especially important to emphasize this when we promote individual contributors to managerial roles.  What gets rewarded, gets done; skimping on leadership in our companies at this point in US corporation history is folly.  An organization could set up performance reviews to have a section that requests data on 5 employees the leader has mentored outside her direct report group as well as data on mentoring that happened with direct reports.  There need to be rewards in place for demonstrating the behavior.  If the workload precludes leaders doing the work of mentorship and coaching, we need to rethink the "results" the company needs to demonstrate.  This will require a shift from short-term to more long-term results (a challenge in of itself.)

I was just reading an article about all this, and had to share my bigger picture thoughts about company environments.  The environment we work in, makes a difference.  People join companies for their great brand name, and leave their managers (often shaped by the culture of the organization and what it values).  So when you interview, check for employee engagement in the organization and most importantly in the group that reports directly to your potential supervisor.  Find out if coaching and mentoring in the DNA of the company (beyond the website proclamations.)  Those companies that have a good corporate environment are more likely to make it long term.

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