Great managers can create great employees

 

Great managers can create great employees

 

MOST OF us have seen the movie, ‘Taare Zameen Par’ and love talking about it. The punch line of the movie is that “every child is special”. It inspires parents, teachers, individuals, children and the public to take a relook at what the concept of perfection is all about.
The movie forces us to realise that forcing children to adapt to a situation where we would want to see them is not a smart way of raising them up.
This is primarily because no child is the same and hence should be accepted for who he/she is. They need to be groomed sensibly and sensitively. The special qualities in each child must be honed without highlighting much of their weaknesses.
But what has this to do with the corporate world? The answer is very simple — everything.
In a company where there are thousands of employees working, imagine how they would feel if they were labelled as being “low performers” or “average” or “slow” or “non-performers”. Most of us have hated being compared to other children when we were young. To match the skillsets of your peer group has always been annoying to say the least.
This takes us back to some interesting research in the realm of people management done by Marcus Buckingham, an authority in the area of strength-based management. In his research which began with a survey of 90,000 managers, conducted by the organisation Gallup, he found that there are as many styles of management as there are managers. However, there is one quality that truly sets apart great managers from the rest of the flock. This is the fact that they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalise on it. Great managers understand the many strengths of their employees and learn how best to tap their capabilities. They would harness the employees’ talents in such a way that it would be useful both to the organisation as well as to the individual employee’s career growth.
In the movie ‘Taare Zameen Par’, this is exactly what Aamir Khan does. In the movie, he nurtured and honed the genius in the little Ishaan Awasthi (the dyslexic child who till then thinks that he was a loser in life and a burden on his parents).
There have been many times when we felt that we could work harder or better because we feel that our manager understands us and has created a bridge of trust with us. Creating such a rapport does not involve any complicated procedure.
The secret is that managers should stop imposing their views and opinions. Instead, they should make a proactive effort of getting to know their employees, what makes them tick, what is their drive force, their motivators, what are they really good at, what is it that they need help for.
Great managers focus on the strengths of the individuals and not on their weaknesses. When a person succeeds, the great manager acknowledges this. He/she will make it a point to tell her that she succeeded because she has deployed her strengths in the right way. This, the manager knows, will boost the confidence levels of the employees and make them more optimistic and resilient in the face of challenges.
So like the movie, if you want your employees to become star performers, the magic is for you to harness their talents and bring out the best in them.