contractor success There Is No Good Way To Manage People But we have to try anyway. By: Tron Jordheim P “People are people,” the old saying goes, and everyone brings their own personal baggage with them to work. People make poor choices, act rashly and defend their own comfort zones. People have agendas all their own that often have nothing to do with the work agenda that you, as the owner or manager, are promoting. Sometimes the selfish and petty things people do are no surprise; some employees repeat a behavior that has been seen many times before, if you let them. Infighting, jealousy, jockeying for posi-tion and defending turf are pretty normal behaviors. Sometimes the selfish and petty behavior is quite a surprise. In contrast, every workplace has people who perform well, take care of themselves, are supportive of others on the team when needed and keep below the radar. Guidance And Goals The best managers try hard to motivate and guide their people to meet agreed-upon goals. Procedures, protocols and guidelines are put in place to help keep things fair and or-ganized. Feedback, motivation and direction are given. At the end of the day, good managers realize that there is no good way to man-age people. But since managing people is the key to any business success, you have to try anyway. There are many books on people man-agement, and you may have practiced all the different styles. If you boil down all the great people man-agement advice as much as you can, there are really only two things to do. One is to make sure your staff is get-ting ongoing training, feedback, correction and motivation for all their work-related be-haviors. The other thing you can do is to leave your people alone and let them work. The trick is to know when to do which with each person. Here are some suggestions you can try. Best Practices Try to create models of best performance and best practices for employees to learn, If you try too hard to manage people, or if you go too far in attempting to manage behavior, you’ll end up throwing your hands up in the air and declaring there is no good way to manage people. 38 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • January 2014 Image courtesy of moodboard/Thinkstock
CMM – Archives January 2014: 38
