Leadership When the Heat's On: 24 lessons in high-performance management

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 Lesson Six

Practice Humanagement

Humanagement is simply the ability to use the job to develop the person while having fun in the process.  My entire emphasis changed as I stopped managing my people like a bunch of livestock and began leading them as people.  It occurred to me I could help each individual unlock the talent he or she had inside, as well as to:

• Set more meaningful goals (personal and professional)
• Better understand and plan their time
• Use more of their creativity
• Better handle their stress
• Feel safe pushing their envelope

If I had an office full of happy, growing people, I thought, there’s no telling what we could accomplish.  Sure enough, when they began taking a new and enriched mind home at night, instead of a sore, tired, and aggravated one, our entire universe expanded beyond anything we would have previously thought possible.

Don’t forget the “...while having fun in the process” part.  I don’t mean you open the office with a joke every morning.  My experience has proven time and again that people who grow and develop to the point they can handle problems they would not have been big enough to handle in the past are happier people.  They are happier because they are more fulfilled and actualized.  When an office full of people becomes more fulfilled and actualized, morale goes up.  With higher morale comes higher productivity.  I’ve never seen it fail.

           

Staff turnover also drops.  With low staff turnover comes more bonding and team spirit.  High turnover results in suspicion and a lack of personal investment in the job.  It’s difficult to feel a part of an organization if the probability of losing your job is high.  There are the managers who swear their organization has a terrific atmosphere, but people leave because the money is not competitive.  There are also bureaucracies where people stay forever, even though they are miserable.  A good logo for them would be: Repeating Yesterday, Inc; Home of the Living Dead.

Nobody is having fun in either case.  People leave the first organization because they’re not happy, not because there's more money elsewhere.  The value of having fun on the job ranks above money.  The ability to enjoy the work and the working environment is a stronger hold on people than higher wages in an unpleasant job and environment.  Ask yourself the following three questions to help get positioned and mentally prepared to practice Humanagement: 

• What can I do to set a better example for my team of the five bulleted points above?
• If my team members were asked to rate how much fun they have working for me what would my grade be?
• What's the gist of the conversations that are being carried on about me at night in the homes of the people that work for me?

“Help a team member grow, and you will receive respect in return.”

No More Repeated Yesterdays

"Choose the road that demands the most from you."

Danny Cox

Charlie’s story from my last blog brings me back to one of the most important lessons I learned during that time of my life. Here it is. Everyday we stand at what some people call the "crossroads of life" but its not really a square cross in the road but a Y in the road. One of the roads leads to sameness and boredom and the other to growth, development and enthusiasm.

So each day ask yourself this question, “Am I doing the best at my job, or am I doing it the way I’ve always done it?” When you know the answer to that question, then you know where that road leads. More often than not, it leads right back to where you were the day before. Instead of taking that tricky right turn, the one that leads to new growth, you find yourself going around in a very familiar circle.

I call that “repeating yesterday.” (We’ll be examining that idea in more depth in a later blog.) This “repeating yesterday” formula is a phenomenon that’s true of companies as well as people—in fact, it would make a pretty good logo for some organizations. These are the companies that I refer to as “Plunging into the future with their eyes affixed to the rear view mirror—they are tradition-centered and unhampered by progress.” They don’t get worked up about new goals; a fair number of them have no goals whatsoever.

Immediate Action: Make photocopies of this “repeating yesterday” diagram, and place them in strategic locations in your home, your office, and on the dashboard of your car to remind yourself of which way you want to go.

Point to Ponder Before You Go On: A love of tradition for its own sake is what I call “nostalgic paralysis”—and it’s a sure-fire recipe for stagnation, inefficiency and burnout.".

A Commitment to Personal Development

“Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle!”

Anonymous

“The trouble with ignorance is that it picks up

confidence as it goes along.”

Anonymous

To be competitive in the foreseeable future I must learn from others successes as well as their mistakes and what was learned from those disappointments. If they can do it, I can do it. The biggest mistake I can make is that of underestimating my own potential.

Ambition, achievement and high morale are inseparable. To that end, I now focus intensely on the following five-point commitment.

I. If I’m not as good as I can be in my chosen profession, then what’s my plan for improving – short of making the same mistakes others have made in order to learn?

II. I have been feeding my mind on a daily basis but the piercing question is of what has that diet consisted? From this point forward I refuse to cheat my mind by the quantity or quality of nourishment I feed it. Whatever adds to my personal effectiveness, regardless of cost, is worth the price.

III. I will develop a keen awareness for stagnated personal development. My one stinging motion through this life changing process will be that if I’m not growing, I am planting the seeds for some future failure. I will build a personal environment that fosters rising ambition. My life will slant upward.

IV. As my time on earth decreases in twenty-four hour segments, my commitment to the development of personal potential must increase on a daily basis. Therefore each succeeding day becomes more exciting than the previous day. I now make it a life principle to never delay the remedy for anything that is holding me back.

V. I must now develop the skills to make the best use of my God-given talents.
That process takes courage. I am now ready.

Danny Cox