Be a better manager by coaching your staff

You can’t be a great manager if you’re not a good coach. Start having regular coaching conversations with your team members. Learn what drives each person and provide timely feedback. Open-ended questions are a good way to start. Ask: “How would you like to grow this month?” If you listen deeply and restrain your impulse to provide the answers, you’ll invite people to open up and think creatively. Help your team members articulate their goals and challenges and find their own answers. If someone is frustrated or stuck, acknowledge her struggles and encourage her to think about how to move past them. Hold people accountable.

(Adapted from You Can’t Be a Great Manager If You’re Not a Good Coach, by Monique Valcour)

Don’t leave recruiting up to HR

Many marketers don’t think of recruiting as a marketing challenge — they leave it up to human resources. But acquiring and retaining talent is no different from acquiring and retaining customers, which makes marketers uniquely qualified to help bring in new employees. If you want to attract the best candidates in a competitive marketplace, don’t forget your marketing basics. These are the questions you need to answer:

Value proposition: What is the source of your differentiation? Do you have a good elevator pitch and consistent messaging in your communications?

Market research: Where can you find the talent you want? What is important to them in a job, career, team and employer?

Pricing: What are the key elements of compensation (salary, bonus, benefits, equity), and how do you compare with competitors?

Sales: When you’ve found the right candidate, do you move quickly to close?

(Adapted from Strategies to Attract Superpower Marketing Talent, by Cara France and Mark Bonchek)

Present a business case

Even with a thoroughly prepared business case, you’ll only earn support for your project with a memorable, winning delivery. Don’t be tempted to let facts and figures do the persuading for you — craft an emotional story. It can be as simple as outlining the need, impact and solution; you just need to present what’s at stake through a clear arc. Grab your audience’s attention by immediately identifying the business need you are trying to address. Next, weave an emotional appeal or human connection into your narrative — maybe by showing the effects of a proposed customer management system with testimonials from real customers, or by describing how the data-sharing project you want to expand helped employees stay connected during a major outage. Avoid relying on slides too much. And always have an elevator pitch ready.

(Adapted from The Right Way to Present Your Business Case, by Carolyn O’Hara)

Take time to define roles on next project

You’ve pulled together a winning team, and you’ve set goals. Now you need to establish the roles that each member will play. Not having this conversation can lead to confusion, turf battles and multiple people trying to jump on the same task. Avoid this headache by explicitly laying out who will do what - and define what it means to succeed in each role. You need:

A project manager to set a timeline and hold members accountable.

Task specialists to organise and lead larger portions of the project, like doing research or analysis.

A note taker to record all key decisions and document team progress.

A liaison to inform stakeholders (clients, boss, customers) about team activities - and share their thoughts with the team.

(Adapted from the HBR Guide to Leading Teams, by Mary Shapiro)

Not overlook non-obvious candidates

While many are bemoaning a talent shortage, one thing smart companies do is think about talent in a broader way. If you’re only grooming the obvious candidates for promotion, you’re missing out on an entire group of talented people. These non-obvious candidates may not have the relevant experience for the job, but if they have strong leadership skills and a different set of experiences, that could actually be more useful. You want leaders who can improvise and look at things differently. Maybe this means promoting someone from finance to head and re-energise information technology. Or maybe moving someone from legal into a business leader position for her negotiation skills. To identify the right non-obvious candidates, have HR focus on strong leadership competencies like decisiveness, vision and the ability to mobilise change and build teams. This can build a more vibrant, resourceful talent pool .

(Adapted from Promoting the Non-Obvious Candidate, by Raghu Krishnamoorthy)

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, October 20th, 2014