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Managing People With Passion

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My working life has been spent working with a wide variety of organisations. But they all have one thing in common. Each is trying to make the world a better place. Whether operating in the private, public or third sector they have all been about making things better.

People join these organisations because they:

  1. Want to make a positive difference in the world
  2. Develop their own potential and capacity in making this difference
  3. Want to provide food, warmth and shelter for themselves and their loved ones.

They want to belong in an organisation where they can grow, make a difference and earn a living.

They need respectful and nurturing management. The salary to them is important – but in the long run it is personal growth and making a difference that they really value. They need management that focuses on helping them to make their contribution.

Many of the organisations I have worked with have struggled in this area. People lose their sense of purpose and identity as they become consumed by delivering ‘the service’ or ‘the contract’. They become more technically proficient at what they do – but their optimism and belief slowly fades away and performance slowly degrades.

This process is driven by an orthodox approach to management that focuses on tasks and fails to engage with dreams and aspirations. The noble goals are transformed into routine. There is a famous story about the floor sweeper at NASA who proudly told visitors that he was working to help put men on the moon. Well, in many organisations this process of ennobling a job is completely reversed. People doing great work, contributing to great goals, become reduced to ‘marketing co-ordinators’, ‘database administrators’ or ‘account managers’. They get absorbed into management systems, balanced scorecards, customer service standards and the other paraphernalia of modern management and they lose sight of what they are all about.

Managing people with passion has to be done differently. It has to keep the sense of purpose ‘up front’.

It has to keep the passion burning.

Hungry for It!

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This is a great post that I think says a lot about manager/employee relations in much of UK management.

Personal Assistants and secretaries marching in the streets to demand the opportunity to

  • unleash their potential at work;
  • make progress not coffee;
  • be recognised as ‘career girls not cover girls’ and as ‘office heroes’.

It captures what the Progressive Managers Network is all about – developing managers that provide these iopportunites all of the time toevery one on the team.

All power to their elbow!

Leaders-Teachers Do Not ‘Transform’ or ‘Motivate’ People!

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Instead leaders-mentors-teachers:

  1. Provide a context which is marked by;
  2. Access to a luxuriant portfolio of meaningful opportunities (projects) which;
  3. Allow people to fully (and safely, mostly – caveat: “they” don’t engage unless they’re “mad about something”) express their innate curiosity and;
  4. Engage in a vigorous discovery voyage (alone and in small teams, assisted by an extensive self-constructed network) by which those people;
  5. Go to create places they (and their mentors-leaders-teachers)had never dreamed existed – and then the leaders-mentors-teachers;
  6. Applaud like hell, stage “photo ops” and ring the church bells a 100 times to commemorate the bravery of their ‘followers’ explorations!

This according to Tom Peters.

Wow!

Just imagine if your leadership were able to provide this kind of context for people to do great work in.

What might it mean for the impact of your team?

What opportunities do you have to DELEGATE!

Who is ‘mad enough’ about the opportunity to really engage?

How can you support them on their journey to create something new?

How well do you celebrate success – and heroic failure?

Some More Great Questions for Managers

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First posting for over 2 weeks – courtesy of a family holiday – with no laptop!

I have been reading Drucker, again, and found another really useful set of questions for managers to ask of themselves. They are also the kind of questions that you should be able to answer for each of your team members. You might consider exploring them in your 121s.

  • What is your task?
  • What should it be?
  • What should you be expected to contribute?
  • What hampers you in doing your task and could it be avoided?
  • What are your strengths?
  • How do you work most effectively? (Think about the personal style you bring to the work you’re doing. Are you best with a team or by yourself? Do you like structure or are you better at playing it by ear? Do you work well with the predictable or the chaotic?)
  • What are your values? Are you in the right place to express your values through your work?
  • Where do you belong? – What kind of work environment suits you best?

This is all about clarifying roles, contributions and opportunities for development and improvement.

All meat and drink to the Progressive Manager.

Mintzberg Knows a Thing or Two – Respect and Trust

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“Corporations are social institutions, which function best when committed human beings (not human “resources”) collaborate in relationships based on trust and respect. Destroy this and the whole institution of business collapses.”

Henry Mintzberg

So what will you do this week to build trusting and respectful relationships with a bunch of committed human beings to make the world a better place?