Legend has it that Theodore Roosevelt and one of his cowhands found an unbranded steer on land controlled by Gregor Lang, a neighboring rancher.

In accord with the usual custom, they prepared to brand it, but as the cowboy applied the brand, Roosevelt said, “Wait, it should be Lang’s brand.”

“That’s all right, boss,” said the cowboy.

“But you’re putting on my brand,” Roosevelt said.

“That’s right,” the cowboy said, “I always put on the boss’s brand.”

“Drop that iron,” Roosevelt commanded, “and get back to the ranch and get out. I don’t need you anymore. A man who will steal for me will steal from me.”

Roosevelt understood that a person’s moral conviction must rest on something firmer than the presence or absence of particular people. Do what is right, no matter who might benefit or who might be watching.

— H. Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt Nature & History Association (August, 2000), cited on CharacterFirst.

Why do we hire for skills, but fire for character1? Why do some people succeed and others fail?

The difference that makes a lasting difference is character. It is not heredity, not circumstances, not ability or disability, not favoritism or discrimination, not environment, not luck or chance. It’s none of these. Rather, those who overcome obstacles are the people who succeed.

Are people born with the drive to overcome? Or can it be taught? Yes. And yes. Anyone who has children knows that babies are born with certain tendencies or character traits. Yet, it is also true that people learn to be who they become. Most of this learning takes place in the family.

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When you became a manager, there’s a good chance that you didn’t realize that providing employee training would become a major portion of your job. However, it’s a fact that teaching is an essential function of every managerial job. When you’re in charge of managing and motivating other workers – no matter how small or large your team may be – training is something that you’re going to have to do on a regular basis.

Providing training to employees is a very specific skill, and it’s one that many managers don’t realize they need to have. Sharing information and teaching people how to perform tasks are two very different things. When you are providing training to team members, you have to focus on conveying information to them in a manner that is motivating and that will enable them to truly understand what you are saying so they will be able to transfer that knowledge to on-the-job performance.

3 Keys to Effective Employee Training

1. Recognize Your Training Responsibilities
Too many mangers think that employee training is “someone else’s job”. Even if your company has someone in charge of training, those who hold supervisory roles bear responsibility when it comes to employee training and development. If you want to lead a peak performing team, you must be prepared to coach and train your team members to excel.

Managers at every organizational level are responsible for making sure that the employees on their teams have the skills needed to perform the work required. Accomplishing this managerial duty involves providing effective training to team members about company polices and procedures and industry standards, as well as recognizing the need for skill-based training and making sure that it is available to employees who need it.

2.

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Many managers and supervisors struggle to get the best out of their employees. Do you have difficulty understanding why your workers behave the way they do? Sometimes this is because managers mistakenly assume that everyone is like them: “I like a lot of detail, so everyone else must as well”. And when an employee turns in a report that looks like an executive summary, this type of manager stresses to find out what went “wrong” with the employee.

In other cases, the manager works on the assumption that their employees’ preferences are the opposite of their own. This type of manager, for example, believes that employees are motivated primarily by their paycheck whilst they themselves are motivated by a stiff challenge.

What both these types of managers share is that they are both one-dimensional; seeking to explain all or most of their employees’ behaviors by a single cause. People are much more complex than this. Being able to appreciate some of this complexity will help make otherwise unintelligible behaviors understandable. Using this knowledge to then shape employee behavior will not only take some of the stress out of managing people, it will lead to greater rewards as employees begin to work with you and not against you.

Without wading through a lot of theory, let me illustrate the power of psychology with a real-life example. In one computer production facility, the production manager wanted to lift production levels. To do this, she implemented a new incentive scheme in which production workers would receive a 5% increase in their take home wage if they increased the number of units produced by 30%. This did require some effort on the part of the employees as the productivity gains could only eventuate if each of them learned how to use the new microprocessor-controlled cutting machine.

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In today’s tough business climate, managers and executives are becoming obsolete and are being replaced by leaders. The new manager/executive must be an expeditor and leader rather than an order giver and manager of people.

In this article, I have documented what I have found to be the leadership skills and abilities that are valued in leaders today. If you are looking to build a high performance team or company, these are the leadership traits that you and your managers should be focused on to improve personal and business performance.

1. Vision

Leaders have the ability to see things as they should become. Defining the organization’s direction, the leader defines the organization’s future.

2. Communication

Leaders are able to get others to share in their vision. They communicate in a clear and powerful way. Whether in large meetings or personal discussions, they never miss an opportunity to pass along their message.

3. Flexibility

Leaders are willing to learn. Leaders will be committed to furthering their own knowledge as well as making sure others keep up with the demand for a better educated workforce.

4. Action Oriented

Leaders know that it is not enough just to gather up the good ideas of others. When new ways of doing things can be implemented, putting them into action will fall on the shoulders of the entire team.

5. Bottom Line Thinker

Leaders know the financial conditions and limitations of the organization. Once they have the same information as senior executives, it is expected that they will reach the same decisions.

6. Builds Rapport

Leaders let the person or group know they understand their viewpoint, whether they agree or not.

7.

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Do you find yourself struggling with how to deal with people problems at work? If so, Manager’s Desktop Consultant: Just-in-Time Solutions to the Top People Problems that Keep You Up at Night is a worthy addition to your library of business books. Written by organizational development experts Louellen N. Essex, Ph.D. and Mitchell E. Kusy, Ph.D., this book provides practical advice for helping managers effectively deal with people problems at work.

This book is designed to provide leaders at all levels within modern organizations with practical tips and suggestions for effectively handle people related issues. It touches on techniques for managing all types of people problems that arise in the business world, including tips for improving one’s ability to communicate effectively with peers and subordinates alike.

One of the biggest challenges faced by managers relates to effectively managing change within their organizations. Coping with employees who are resistant to change can be particularly challenging and difficult. This book provides guidance for creating a systematic process and plan for leading organizations through change in a manner that will include and engage employees in the process. Encouraging employee teamwork and collaboration is another important people issue of concern to managers. The authors do an excellent job of providing substantive tips for cultivating a culture of teamwork that go beyond the often “touchy-feely” suggestions. Their emphasis is on how to improve productivity and efficiency via team work.

In any environment where people have to work together, conflict is inevitable. Managing conflict in a constructive manner isn’t always easy, but it is something that today’s managers have to face.

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People often mistake by relating the term ‘Management’ with HR. Which I feel is not absolutely true. Management means managing, like how a HR Manager manages its employees, a Sales Manager manages its Sales, a finance manager manages flow of funds and an account manager manages its firm’s accounts. Management teaches the ways to manage things well, sometimes one thing at one time and sometimes requires multi-tasking, take an example. An employee is very disturbed due to some reasons and misbehaved with many of his seniors, its HR manager’s job to handle him. The better he handles the man, the better he has learnt the term ‘management’.

The other terms, management means the most senior staff of an organization i.e. Chairman, Director, C.E.O. or Board of Directors etc. In such a case, the managerial staff is treated as representative of the senior management.

In terms of HR, management study teaches how to know different human beings, how to recognize their needs, how to persuade them to perform better and also to understand what make them feel good and happy. Almost every company is turning its side to HR department, and expecting their HR professionals to prepare its employees to perform best and give the positive results. But, this is not possible unless the problems and issues of an employee are resolved. To understand what’s going in the employee’s mind, what he wants, and what is troubling him, HR Department should try its best skills. I feel if an employee has had a bad start of the day, his whole day will be ruined and in the same manner, if he is having a bad evening, his rest of the day will be not good. Thus, HR Department should help the employee to make balance in his personal and professional lives.

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You may have been selected by your executive to initiate and see through some change program in your organization. Or you may have decided that the time has come to make your mark by dusting off the cobwebs in your workplace. However your change role came about, you have a challenging task ahead of you.

Consider this sobering thought. In spite of the importance of successfully implementing workplace change for maintaining your business’s competitiveness, most change initiatives fail to deliver the expected organizational benefits. This failure occurs for a number of reasons:

• absence of a change champion or one who is too junior in the organization
• poor executive sponsorship or senior management support
• poor project management skills
• hope rested on a one-dimensional solution
• political infighting and turf wars
• poorly defined organizational objectives
• change team diverted to other projects

Do you recognize one or more of these in your organization from previous initiatives? You have probably experienced already one major cost of such failure. The cynical and burned out employees left behind only make the next change objective even more difficult to accomplish. It should come as no surprise that the fear of managing change and its impacts is a leading cause of anxiety in managers.

Your first step in becoming a successful change leader is fully understanding your organization and matching the initiative to your organization’s real needs. This means not just adopting the latest management fad. Recognize that bringing about useful and meaningful change is fundamentally about changing people’s behavior in certain desired ways. It is not primarily about installing a new system or rearranging the organizational structure. If people in the end do not behave and work differently, then the money and time spent in “doing stuff” is wasted.

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Values are the parents of your chosen or unconscious behaviour. If someone at a meeting or a party rubs you the wrong way, chances are that you have picked up something about them that doesn’t fit your set of core values.

On my website, you’ve had an opportunity to glimpse my core values: Love& Compassion, Authenticity, Honesty & Integrity, Health & Vitality, Passion & Creativity. Without even realizing it, the way I interact at work and at home reflect these values. It is the beginning of any self-development work to take a closer look at your own driving values and even at those of your colleagues or direct reports.

In the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming, the study of how language affects behaviour, there’s an exercise called ‘The Parts Integration’. Its main premise is that all humans operate from their values. I found it fascinating that you can identify a feeling or an action as coming from a ‘part’ of your body. Amazingly, when you ask people to identify anger at a co-worker or sadness at a lost job opportunity and ask them to point to it, they can visualize it coming from somewhere in their body. The rest of the exercise takes a leap of faith and involves isolating and speaking to the part about what “it” wants for the person to whom it belongs. And the question that’s repeatedly asked is “even more than that, what does it want?” until the “part” reveals a deep core value. This value can be anything such as ‘happiness’, ‘love’, ‘truth’ or ‘peace’.

I remember one American woman in class standing up angrily and fighting with the instructor when she gave Osama Bin Laden as an example of a man whose core value was ‘security’ which explained his acts of heinous crime against his fellow man. But I understood the instructor’s point.

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