Management Secrets by Mary Elston

As a manager, are you satisfied with how you’ve been communicating with your employees lately? Looking at it from another direction; how has your boss been interacting with you – has it been effective or falling short from what you’d prefer? With this second installment on our current topic, we’re well on our way to uncovering more answers to these types of questions as we continue exploring this latest blog series on managing interactions for maximizing performance.

Let’s take a quick look at what I covered in my last blog entry. I shared with you how interacting the right way with your team involves three elements: communicate, enable and support. We already discussed the first factor – communication – and what that means in terms of communicating openly, honestly, regularly and in various formats. Check out my blog archive below for all the juicy and “do-it-now” details.

We’re ready to move to the second element for managing interactions the right way – enable. When managing your group to bring out their best performance do you concern yourself with making sure they are enabled for success? Wait – don’t answer that. Let’s keep going and you can answer this question in a minute. Great managers who interact the right way with their team deliberately enable group success all the time. It’s not something that is randomly sandwiched into your management actions on a casual basis. Enabling is well planned, well constructed (like a great sandwich) and can take place with a variety of management behavior. Most essentially, enabling means providing resources, budget and basic tools needed for your employees to get the job done efficiently and effectively. It also means you are further enabling your subordinates with decision making power and delegating authority where appropriate.

What other ways can you interact the right way with your group to better enable their accomplishments? You need to be the manager who is ready to help your team with challenges and enable their ability to overcome them with input and guidance as well. You need to do this as part of your regular management process not as an afterthought.  You could also think of enabling your employees as something you “do” and they “feel.” When you enable your group you’re demonstrating you have one of the essential pieces needed for great management style and you’re in it to win it – for both yourself and your team.

What’s an example of managing interactions that include enabling? It could be a tough project you assign to an employee and, as the manager, you gave your subordinate a host of resources to make the work go faster – that’s enabling. Or you may be the manager who noticed the chair an employee was sitting in was starting to fall apart and offered to order them a new one – that’s smart from an ergonomic and good health perspective and it’s enabling too.  A few side benefits that emerge from enabling? It’s motivating and builds rapport and mutual respect between you and your team not bad!

Based on what I’ve shared above, now you can answer the question posed earlier: As a manager, do you concern yourself with making sure your employees are enabled for success? Dig into this thought and revisit how well you’re interacting with your team in a way that includes enabling their accomplishments as a normal course of action as opposed to something that’s sandwiched in as an afterthought. Write to me and tell me how you’re enabling your group with specific examples – you know there are loads of great ways to do this! My next blog will cover the third element of interacting the right way with your team – support. See you then …