Transcript Approaches to People (Using Human Resources)

Approaches to People
(Using Human Resources)
Lecture 3
Dr. Craig Kasper
Introduction
• Main point: People are THE key to productivity.
• Productivity reflects on you, the manager!
• And we all want to look good, right??
Highlights
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Contingency Theory
Importance of people orientation
Maslow’s Hierarchy
Active Listening
Writing a Performance Standard
Efficiency and effectiveness
Self Assessment
Five steps to improve productivity
Contingency Theory
• We’ll discuss contingencies for physical emergencies
later, but what if your “disaster” is an employee??
• Human behavior is very complex.
• Ultimately, you manage through understanding and
feeling for the people.
• A good manager must know the people who work for
him.
Good Management
• Select the right people.
• Develop talent
• Treat justly (may be different than what people’s sense of “fair” or
“unfair” is…)
• Set high standards (people will either meet or exceed them, or wash
out.)
• Insist on achieving your set goals (people may surprise you with
their ingenuity.)
• Reward superior performance!! (Penalize suboptimal performance.)
Leadership Revisited
• We already mentioned that good leaders do so
by setting good examples.
• However, good leaders also have the ability to
influence people (not the power to require).
• REM: If all your employees leave due to your
bad daily bad attitude, then you do a lot of work
yourself!
Leadership Defined
• Struggle
• Strive to achieve clairity of purpose.
• Competant, assurred, confident (not arrogance), courageous
• This attitude can be contageous and often attracts followers! (A selffullfilling prophecy of sorts, since this is what make a leader great
anyway!)
• Mentor, doesn’t panic.
• Explains difficult decisions (especially when they must be reversed.)
Malsow (1954)
• Yes, this stuff still applies…
• Everone has basic needs and your employees
certainly qualify.
• They all revolve around self-fulfillment.
Maslow
1.
Basic: air, water, food, rest, shelter.
2.
Safety (security): Protection.
3.
Social: sense of belonging, sharing, friends, love
4.
Esteem: respect, achievement, competence, confidence.
5.
Independence: working toward personal goals, authority, freedom
6.
Self-fulfillment: Be all you can be!!, learning, growth, selfactualization (ambition).
• When these core
needs aren’t met, it
often shows up in an
employee’s attitude!
• Unsatisfied needs
become motivators
for other behaviors.
• You’ll see it coming in
some folks long before
you actually have a
confrontation.
James Greenwood
“Whoa! Too much coffee, Bob??”
Communication and Active Listening
• We choose to communicate verbally.
• Non-verbal communication (NVC) is automatic. (Even
when you say nothin’, you’re sayin’ something.)
• Personal perception is a powerful influencing factor in
NVC.
• Also, recall that you can’t please everyone, all the time.
Active Listening
• “You can let your walk, talk…or you can let your talk,
talk; but never let your talk, talk, more than your walk,
talks!”
• Learn to speak less and listen more (insight)! Reduce
your listen/talk ratio.
• This gives you a powerful upper hand in determining the
best course of action when dealing with conflict.
• What you hear from people in the most innocent
situation may provide valuable insight into what their true
nature is (tarot).
Setting the Bar
• Evaluation of performance of workers is critical
to any operation.
• Each job should have a set of standards to “live
up to.” If it doesn’t, then employees don’t know
what is expected.
• Employees are often involved in defining their
job standards. This is good for both employee
and manager.
Standard “standards”
1. Resemble a contract between the employee and
the firm.
2. Address the most important aspects of the
empolyee’s duties and responsbilities.
3. Guide the employee to accomplish important
tasks. (As defined by the supervisor.)
4. Be directed at specific tasks or requirments.
5. Act as units of meaure (goes back to employee
comparision/evaluation.)
Standard “standards”
6. Be brief, clear, concise, believable and easily
understood!!
7. Enhance communication between employee and
supervisor.
8. Encourage productivity and efficiency.
9. Enable employeeand evaluator to agree on
whether the accomplishements failed to meet,
met, or exceeded the standards.
10. Be taken seroiusly.
“Unstandard” standards
Nebulous, challenge your team, but don’t “give ‘em enough rope to
hang themselves!”
2. Overemphasis on doing the “boss’” job. If your’re doing his job,
why is he there? It works the other way, too!
3. Include unimportant tasks—those not necessary for the possition.
4. Unclear.
5. Difficult to measure.
6. Discourage productivity.
7. Cause mistrust.
8. Mislead employee.
9. Waste/abuse of time.
10. Unused/unenforced.
1.
Standard Development
• This can be a daunting task, especially if you
don’t have prior experience.
• Communication (language) must be clear.
• Often units of time, quality, and quantity are
inserted within a document.
• Don’t use directives, but require an outcome
(and communicate it.)
Productivity
• Usually a good manager also is rewarded by a
highly productive group (TAL).
• Periodically the manager needs to assess the
work or workers and make refinements as
needed.
• There is no rule of thumb here, but several basic
steps will be discussed.
What is productivity?
• Efficiency = output/input
• Productivity = doing the right things right.
• Increasing productivity can be achieved by
increasing efficiency, usefulness and efficiency,
responsiveness to demand (speed),
decreaseing costs, decreasing production and
delivery time.
The Manager’s Mandate
• Make goals clear from the start (syllabus).
• Rate yourself as a manager (performance eval’s.)
• Involve people in looking for opportunities.
• Analyze and measure before and after a change.
• Choose opportunities.