How not to over- or under-manage and therefore demoralize your staff.
An individual (vertical axis) becomes increasingly INDEPENDENT of management as they develop. This development involves skills and also new ways of learning and thinking at the higher levels – we call this ‘self’ development (horizontal axis).
Unless a task is urgent, a manager is best to work from the RIGHT of the graph; in other words, to assume that the individual is more competent than you think. This leads managers to answer questions posed to us, with questions of our own – this is order to help them find their own solutions and learn to think and solve on their own. Managers still have to be responsible for organizational requirements (safety, jurisprudence etc) but the acceleration in the learning of our people is greater if managers ask questions that make others think for themselves.
When an individual is truly lost, provide increasingly, stories, examples, context until they can again be challenged by good questions to think for themselves again.
Managers must understand the limits of their ability and job-specification – managers should not ‘counsel” where the individual is failing, distressed, self-harming etc. but rather get help from the appropriate corporate service.
See why this works from an independent source, listen to Sam in this video:
Buy the book from which the Model comes!
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