After capturing the talent, the question that should be on every Manager's, Supervisor's and Executive's mind should be "How do I manage these talents to bring out the best in them?" And "keep them engaged and connected to the business and company?"
This is perhaps the most difficult part of any executive's role. Providing tasks and assignments and ensuring that your employees turn up for work, meetings and company activities is perhaps the easy part. How do I manage them to understand their intentions, motives and drives? Sure they can do the job assigned but are they really committed and engaged in the tasks assigned? Do they really discuss with you as their immediate supervisor what drives them? Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that employees work and stay in an organisation because of their immediate supervisor or leader. How do effective leaders achieve this?
As a leader we need to take time to understand what drives our employees and this requires a great deal of emotional intelligence to understand them. What is this emotional intelligence? In summary, it requires the leader to understand the employee as a full individual and not just as a cog in the wheel of the organisation's machinery.
The leader is a coach, guide, mentor and above all a person who can help the employee grow, learn, develop and mature in everything he or she does. Employees make mistakes and need to be told what they are not doing "right". The question is how do we "tell" them. The advice to all leaders and prospective leaders is that "telling" is not a way to learn. It is to shut people up and make them feel like they do not matter. If we remember our childhood, "telling" reminds us of how our parents (perhaps not the new world parents) used to discipline us and make us not do the "wrong" things. I am sure that more we are "told" not to do something as a child we are prompted to do it and see the consequences. It is a kind of learning. Telling is a very autocratic means of leading. Sure in an emergency like the current COVID 19, we would have to tell employees what to do and what to avoid for the sake of general safety and health.
The concept of discovery learning is perhaps a better description of how people, particularly the current crop of young millennials who are the the majority of our work force, learn and grow. Similarly, when you do performance evaluations and coaching, the process that we adopt will dictate if you have won the confidence and trust of your employees. Coaching, guiding and leading is a definite way to manage and develop talent.
After capturing the talent, the question that should be on every Manager's, Supervisor's and Executive's mind should be "How do I manage these talents to bring out the best in them?" And "keep them engaged and connected to the business and company?"
