This interview with Valario Pascotto by Stephen Goldberg covers the approach to leadership best used to engage and empower employees. Valario explains the coaching style of leadership and what stops leaders and managers from adapting this style. He provides insight as to how to change and lift the barrier to becoming a coach leader rather than a more autocratic type of leader. Here is the link to the article mentioned in the video “Redefining Accountability: Creating A Workplace Consonant With Human Values” by Valario Pascotto, Jules Goddard and Tim Gallwey.
Link to Valerio’s websites: http://www.igeos.net/, http://illustra.tv/
The importance of planning for a manager goes without saying. Managers need to strike a balance between job skills and people skills. Planning is a job skill that is essential for managers to both master and devote adequate time.
Planning includes staying abreast of trends, analyzing market conditions, reviewing statistics and various key performance indicators amongst other things.
Personally, when I became a manager I didn’t really know how to plan. I had been a salesman and although planning is an important part of a sales role, I tended to be more action oriented and thus spent my time chasing business. I could’ve been more effective as a salesperson if I would’ve planned better. As a manager, I continued the same way until I realized that it wasn’t okay working and I needed to learn better planning skills.
Approach to Planning
There are different ways a manager can approach planning. He can do most of it himself and communicate his plans to his team members so they can be aware of what is expected of them relative to the plan. This is a top-down approach where the manager makes most of the decisions and the employees act according.
Another way is to seek the input of team members and then combine that with the information the manager may have collected to formulate his plans. He then would communicate his plan to the employees.
Employee Participation
For managers who want to stimulate teamwork, engage and empower employees, a participative approach is best. This style of leadership has employees highly involved in the planning process including researching, analyzing, problem solving and discussions.
The challenge of this approach for managers is time, training and resources. Employees would need the time away from their basic tasks to do whatever research is required and attend meetings for discussion. Essentially this approach means delegating some of the management responsibilities to team members. Training people on some of these responsibilities is required and does take time. But in the long run this approach would be highly effective in terms of building autonomous teams, employee engagement and performance.
Take Stock
It’s important to assess your situation to determine how you can improve your planning skills. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses of planning for a manager is essential. Do you find yourself lacking time to plan because you are addressing day-to-day problems? This is a common situation and often hard to resolve because the cause stems back to planning itself and not having taken the time to prevent the day-to-day problems that keep arising.
How aware are you of different styles of leadership and how they affect teamwork, employee engagement and performance? What is your current style of leadership? What can you do to have employees participate more in the planning process?
These are just some questions that you can answer and develop a plan to improve your planning skills and involve employees in the process. Thus, you will improve your planning skills and engagement and performance of employees at the same time. It’s worth the effort!
The responsibilities of a team-oriented manager/supervisor requires balancing two different sets of skills with a goal of building teamwork in the department.
At times, this is like a balancing act. On one side of the scale is job skills and on the other side is people skills.
Job Skills
The manager or supervisor needs to plan the direction for the department, set goals and establish standards for quality and productivity. Planning includes allocation of resources and materials for the department. Job responsibilities include control of time, information and costs.
People Skills
On the other side of the scale is people skills. The manager or supervisor needs to understand the responsibilities and develop the skills required to manage and direct people. Teamwork in organizations today is crucial for staying competitive and for continuous improvement. The leader must be able to develop people skills that will foster teamwork.
The Job Skills Balancing Act
Understanding the balancing act required to lead and manage a department is the first step to good management performance. Some people are naturally more skilled at planning and others are better with people.
Before promoting someone to a leadership position it is important to assess their skills and make sure they understand the inherent responsibilities of the job. They must also be motivated to learn all the skills and continuously apply them to improve.
Often and more so in smaller companies, people are promoted to a management or supervisory role with little clarification of the responsibilities and inadequate training. This is a recipe for disaster.
Strengths & Weaknesses
It is important to assess your job and people skills and have a plan for development. Perhaps your need to spend more time planning and analyzing to better communicate with the team. Or do you need to be better at training and coaching people so they are more engaged and productive.
Self-Development Goals
Once you have a better grasp of your development needs you can set goals for personal development as a leader and become better balanced. I suggest working on one skill at a time. By improving one key skill you will experience the benefits and you can then move to another skill.
If you are a leader who has several managers or supervisors reporting to you, take the same approach by assessing the skills of each person. Ask each one to do the same and then compare notes. Set a plan and coach them to success.
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