Management Starts With You

If you want somebody to change how they are towards you, you've got to change how you are towards them.

It's that simple.

Stinks, doesn't it?

I mean, time it was that if an employee was a problem, we could just chew them out or write them up or fire them and move on.

But as time's gone on, it's started to dawn on people--even bosses--that being bossy isn't the best way to get your way.

In fact, being bossy is a pretty good way not to get your way.

It seems counter intuitive. I mean, it makes sense that we should be able to get better and better results if we push harder and harder, right? Isn't that how we've been told goals work? The harder you push, the faster you get results.

Except it doesn't seem to work like that with people. For some reason, when we push hard with people, they tend to resist. In fact, the harder we push, the harder they seem to push back. Even when we're the boss, and what we say should go.

It's a natural inclination, if you think about it, and it's born out of this fear: If that guy wants that thing so bad, he's not going to think about me while he fights to get it.

The Fable of the Sun And The Wind

This idea is illustrated in Aesop's famous fable of The North Wind and the Sun:

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.

They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.

Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt.

Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

The Meaning of the Fable

Many would argue that the moral of this fable is that it's better to treat people kindly than cruelly. That's definitely part of it. But there's a bigger lesson here that can be learned here--after all, chances are that few of us are actually mean.

Aesop himself gave moral of the fable this way: Persuasion is better than force.

In other words, Aesop was saying that it's better to try to convince a person that something is a good idea than to simply require him to do something.

I'd even like to go a step further and say the moral is this: People will always do things faster when they have personal reasons to do them than when they're required to do them.

Changing Our Attitudes

So the fastest way to get results from an employee is by connecting the project with that employee's wants and desires.

This means that for us to get better results from our employees, their wants and needs have to start to matter to us as much as our own do.

If the employee were a customer, we would be quick to that. We would want to know exactly what needs the customer had, so we could fill them as quickly and accurately as possible. We might even develop specific products just to meet that customer's needs. We would see there were dollars there, so we would try to learn that customer's business as accurately as we could, so that we could tailor products that would keep him happy and loyal. We would want to know that customer's business as well as the customer did.

We can see our employees in exactly this way. They are people with wants and needs. And the quicker we are to tap into their wants and needs, the more intricately we understand their reasons for coming to work each day, the more we can not only help them see the importance of their currently projects, but the more we can custom design assignments for employees based on what will fit their wants and needs.

This means seeing employees as partners rather than as resources.

This would cause us to look at "problem" employees in a whole new light.

Orchard growers sometimes spend some of their longest, hardest nights in the middle of winter when not a tree is producing any fruit. They stay up late with torches, keeping fires going, trying to keep trees alive during unusual cold snaps so that they'll be productive again come spring.

Similarly, it is often when employees are feeling and acting the most disloyal that they need us to provide them with reassurance that we are loyal to them.

And The Rest

Will every single assignment be one that can be custom tailored to fit a certain employee? No.

However, because of the careful way you try to match assignments and motivations to specific employees, two things will happen.

1. Your employees will be more willing to accept assignments from you. Because they feel you're acting with their interests in mind most of the time, they won't feel as inclined to resist you as they were when they were given assignments with reasons as simplistic as, "That's just the job," or, "Because that's what we have to do."

2. Your employees will be more likely to see the benefits without you having to point them out. Once you've started tying the success of projects to the individual desires of the employees, they will start to see how all aspects of the business affect them more clearly. They'll be more disposed to work for the overall success of the organization, because they'll be more likely to see organizational success as personal success.

The Change

I'm not trying to teach a technique or a practice here. There are plenty of managers who try to use some form of what I've described as a means to manipulate production from employees.

What I'm talking about is a fundamental change in the way employees are perceived.

A manager who sees employees as a resource, might still talk to them about their interests, or drop references to things they've heard the employee say into discussions, but as long as the employee was simply viewed as a resource, he would still be more interested in taking from the employee than in giving back. The employee will still feel this, and still resist.

He could even "do them favors" or "give them their way," in the interest of making them like him better, but in the end, since this technique is still motivated mostly by a desire to make himself look good rather than get more accomplished, it will still come up short of producing real results.

It is not until a manager truly changes his viewpoint to see his employees as partners that he will open up enough to them to allow them to trust him. It is not until they sense his resistance to their wants and needs coming down that they will begin to feel free to accept his assignments as being in their best interests as much as his.

And that's when they'll work for you as hard as they would work for themselves.