LEADERSHIP: WHOSE JOB IS IT ANYWAY?

Bar an annual review (or if you are lucky a bi-annual review) do you get input from your boss on how you are doing? And if you are someone’s boss do you spend time providing patient and empathetic input to the people who work directly for you? If you are truly honest, do you prioritise this type of ‘people’ work as much as you could?

Over years of working with clients across a range of industries I noticed a striking thing. Many very senior leaders I have had the privilege or working with and who are brilliant and empathetic people seemed to devote very little time to people-management. They consider the underperformance of their people to be everybody’s fault but their own.

I came to the conclusion that rather than being ‘bad’ at people management, many brilliant business people actually don’t consider managing people to be an important part of their job. They’ve never learned how to give productive feedback, read any books on people-management or quite frankly given it much thought.

I believe that with a simple shift of focus to seeing people management as a more integral part of leadership positions responsibilities we could see a big improvement in both productivity and job satisfaction.

But what is ‘people management’ and why is it actually the most critical thing a leader needs to do?

That is not a facetious question. I ask it because most of us are carrying around out dated notions of what people management actually is. And worse than that - the old fashioned command and control model that we all carry around in our heads as a default management style is actually damaging and disempowering.

Leadership might mean leading the big meeting or making difficult decisions, but it also means creating the circumstances for the people who work for you to thrive. This is time consuming and often falls by the wayside.

If you are a leader who wants to get better at people management, coaching can be a great way to create the space to work through what this means for you and add a few tools to your leadership toolbox.

If you are a leader who doesn’t get any meaningful direction from your line-manager then coaching can be a way to carve out the time to work on your own professional development and work out how to manage-up and replace the void where your boss should be.