Managing people that work with you in your business is a skill worth learning for the success of your business. Notice I used the term “work with you” versus “work for you.” People working with you is an important distinction that recognizes that people bring to your business a set of skills that contribute to your success. Knowing they can contribute is how we need to feel when we first hire someone. You feel they have something to contribute to the success of your company, and you are going to give them the opportunity to do that. Motivation begins here.
Now how do you teach them the ways in which they can contribute their skills to support both their success and the success of your company? Telling people what to do and orienting them to the business is not enough. It takes thought to determine how to help them feel connected to the brand, the values and the goals of the company then to see clearly how their work contributes in a collaborative way.
Mentoring the people that work with you is a good use of your time and your focus because it produces the results you want for your business. As a business owner, we learn a great deal about ourselves working with our staff. What is our natural style and does it work? How do we have to communicate differently to produce the results we want from each position in our company and the person filling that position?
Some business owners find they are not very patient. They simply want the work done, done correctly and expect their staff to know how to do that. Wouldn’t that be great but it is rarely the case. There is simply too much going on in a business every day for everyone to stay on top of it all. That is why mentoring staff is so important. It is a way to remain in communication, adjust priorities and solve problems together.
Some business owners find an uncontrollable urge to react to situations with their staff being the effect of their anger or frustration. Reacting is rarely an effective form of interacting with employees and most often makes matters worse. The sense of working together gets eroded. Others avoid communicating their concerns with equally poor results. Staff can feel your frustration, don’t know the nature of it so are unable to adjust.
To manage people may mean that we begin with managing ourselves. Taking time to decide how we want to be when we communicate and mentor staff creates the opportunity to produce the desired results. The mentoring of our team takes thought, being clear in our mind about the results we are looking for and the best way to produce those results given the resources at our disposal. Once we are clear, then we can have a conversation with our staff and work with them to find a solution.
Mentoring is leadership, communication, listening and finding solutions. It is not the old model of command and control that was a preferred model decades ago but is no longer relevant in the workplace. It may be humbling to step back and take a hard look at how we mentor or if we mentor our staff, but it is a journey in self-awareness that can produce tremendous results.