to copy and to aspire to. You can create goals, requirements and performance thresholds to use as measure-ment tools. Be fair and consistent in enforcing per-formance requirements and work rules and be honest with them in your assessment of business conditions, in your communication of company policies and your feelings about their performance. personal conversations with the people in your group. Allow your people to be honest with you. Spend at least a little personal time with each person every month if you can. Learn to be a good listener. Your will learn a lot about how to deal with your people if you hear what they say. Leave Well Enough Alone Sometimes managers feel that people can perform better and can produce more, but if employees have found a comfortable and satisfactory balance it is best not to disturb. Resist the temptation to over mange them. There are times when your people just need to be left alone to do their jobs. Some days you will work hard to mold people’s behavior and performance when what they really needed was to be left alone to do their jobs. Some days you will leave people alone when what they really needed was to be working with someone. Know Your People Try to get to know each of your people so you can find the right way to approach, mo-tivate and correct each of them. Spend a little time with each of your direct reports and encourage them to spend time with each of their direct reports. Spending time together helps solidify teamwork, helps clarify any issues and helps to make sure you and your people are being accountable to each other. Try to ask yourself each day, who needs time from me today? Ask yourself who needs to be left alone? If you allow yourself to admit that there is no good way to manage people, you can do your company a lot of good by trying to be a better manager every day. Work on best practices, get to know your people, communicate personally, and above all, leave well enough alone. If you try too hard to manage people, or if you go too far in attempting to manage be-havior, you’ll end up throwing your hands up in the air and declaring there is no good way to manage people. CM Tron Jordheim is the CMO of StorageMart, one of the world’s largest privately held self-storage com-panies with locations across the U.S. and Canada. Jordheim has consulted for companies and spoken at trade events in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Spain and Mexico. With over 40 years of experi-ence in sales, marketing and training, he continues to be sought after as a public speaker, sales trainer and consultant. For more information, please visit www.TronJordheim.com. Communicate Stop relying on email and memos and have FREE INFO: Reader Service 202 or CMMOnline.com/freeinfo www.cmmonline.com 39
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