There are two components of people management.
1. People. This means EQ, inspiring, motivating, encouraging, and leading.
2. Management. This means hiring, firing, training, disciplining, evaluating, and directing.
These two components may seem at odds. But the effective manager expertly balances both as they move their team towards their goal. That may be as a representative of a corporation attempting to meet some strategic goal. Or as an individual entrepreneur leading those around them towards some desired end state.
The main job to be done by the people manager is drawing out the best of the people around them. Top to bottom organizational leaders enable success.
Effective people managers balance cooperation, respect, self-motivation, and trust. Inherent to leading others is leading oneself. Thus the effective people manager knows their internal rhythms, they’ve aligned their actions with their goals, and have harnessed the discipline required to weather the ups and downs of any Big, Hairy, Audacious, Goal.
To sum up: Imagine you’re sitting in your office. A star employee walks in. They’ve been offered a better position at a rival firm. They’re thinking of taking it, but they wanted to check in with you first. You need to lead this situation to create the best outcome for yourself, your company, and the star employee. How do you respond?
Scenario 2. Your CFO walks in. They say you’re not going to meet some financial target for this period. You’ve got to roll up your sleeves and manage this situation.
In both cases action is required of you. Yet the situations are drastically different. One requires leadership, the other management. Yet both can occur for an entrepreneur in a given day. You must be an expert at both
People management inherently has power imbalances. Manager and employee. Team leader and team member. The most powerful entrepreneurs know how to operate when they’re on either side of the equation, and when they’re balanced with their peer.
This peer could be a fellow manager, or entrepreneur. It could be an investor, partner, or stakeholder in your field. The point here isn’t looking out at the world and seeing a hierarchy.
It’s about recognizing when their are mutual dependencies, or when those dependencies are one sided or situation specific. For example employees rely on employers for income, while employers rely on employees for output. Whereas fellow entrepreneurs may rely on each other for mutual benefits to their business model.
That’s what coordinating with others is all about — understanding other people, and having the tools to manage mutually dependent relationships.
Emotional intelligence is being able to understand and manage the emotions of yourself and others. It includes three skills:
1. Emotional awareness — knowing when and what feelings are present in ourselves and others. It includes emotional literacy, which is being able to label these emotions and thus act upon them. At its highest level one can anticipate emotions from external and internal stimulis and thus regulate them over time.
2. Harnessing emotions — after awareness and literacy, or recognizing and understanding, comes acting on emotions to enable healthy relationships with others, and with ourself. Once we control our emotions we can lead interactions with others, diffuse tense situations, and generally lead those around us in a mutually beneficial way.
3. Managing emotions — The culmination of the previous two skills is being able to anticipate, understand, harness and then manage emotions proactively. Instead of reacting, we respond with the appropriate emotion. You need calm to focus on some task? The emotionally intelligent manager can regulate their internal state to create that emotional presence. The same applies for creating enthusiasm for a task in our team.
Imagine a customer calls you. They’re upset. An order they were relying on was late, and they lost a client as a result. They’ve been a loyal customer for years and you’ve let them down.
It may or may not have been your fault, or the fault of someone in your company. But they’re an ally, a friend, and a customer. An entrepreneur with high emotional intelligence can handle the situation.
Watch for your internal reactions to the thorny situations that crop up today. How do you act? Do you ride the wave? Or do you analyze, understand and respond with the emotion you desire to feel?