How to Incorporate People Management into Your Leadership Strategy
Part of owning and running a business is to grow, problem-solve for, and organize employees. This falls under the heading of people management in the list of skills you need to run a company of any size. There are six main things you can develop into habits and make you a better leader.
Practice Active Listening
Active listening involves making eye contact, repeating key points of a conversation or taking notes, and waiting for the other person to finish before you start responding. It also involves not jumping to conclusions and keeping an open mind both before and during the conversation. This helps your employees know that you are interested in finding new ways of looking at both problems and solutions.
Separate Personal and Organizational Issues
Some of the issues you will help employees with can be solved on the level of the person and some will need to be solved on the level of the organization. For instance, an individual workload is an issue to be solved on the personal level where as work-flow problems between teams need to be solved on a company level.
Understand the Purpose of Each Employee
A key part of effective people management is to understand the individual purpose of each employee. What draws him or her to this job and what joy he or she gets from the work. This can help you understand how the problems within teams are impacting each employee as well as the work overall and determine better solutions moving forward.
Balance Praise and Criticism
A good rule to follow is to give more praise than criticism, but to be sure to give both. When you give only praise, you are not helping your employees grow and do better in their jobs. When you give only criticism, your employees will always be on edge. By giving a balance of both, you can keep morale up while still improving the performance of your teams and individual teams.
Ask Open-Ended Questions in Meetings
Ending meetings with open-ended questions such as “is there something more” can encourage your employees to speak about what is on their minds in relation to issues they run into. This can help you show leadership in that you are ready and prepared to take feedback, listen to issues and address problems.
Check in During Good Times
You do not want to just check in when something goes wrong. Instead, make it a habit to check up on one or two people every day just to check in.
Incorporating people management into your leadership strategy can help make you a better leader. It can also help your teams and individual employees working together to solve problems.
