Are You Just Managing Your Staff, or Are You Developing Them?

Are You Just Managing Your Staff, or Are You Developing Them?

Dec 14, 2017

Motivating staff to develop and achieve more should be key to any management position, but for various reasons, some managers are quite content to restrict their activities to monitoring and controlling their workers’ activities without giving a second thought to coaching them on to better things.

While in some cases this approach might work fine for achieving great team results, it can leave the team vulnerable when things change or when workers’ skills become outdated and the organization is unprepared in terms of succession planning. Plus, this lack of forward movement can cause employees to become dissatisfied with their jobs and, ultimately, disengaged from their employers.

Another major problem for managers who fail to develop their staff is that when these managers decide to move on to new pastures, recruiters can be suspicious regarding their management capabilities.

If managers can’t demonstrate the skills to identify and cultivate talent, then recruiters can be left to imagine that there are gaps in their abilities or that something else – their own insecurity, for example – has held them back.

Developing talent and getting the very best out of every individual within an organization benefits everyone, including the manager who makes the time and effort to coach and mentor his or her employees. Make sure, for your own sake if for no one else’s, that you encourage and motivate your staff to achieve better things.