The managers should ask the most from the team for many reasons. The biggest reason is that the company and the organization expects you to deliver work as a group. Your value is measured by how much value your team can deliver. The more effective your team is, the more value they could deliver and the more successful you are. This is largely why as a manager your success is determined by the success of your team.
However, some of the first time manager including feel frustrated about asking the best from their team. Some of the first time managers get promoted to the manager position because they are the most effective people on the team. And they inevitably set a high expectation on his team: the team should deliver as good as he could and he get frustrated because apparently people won’t be as effective as him.
In other times, we feel frustrated because we carry an unrealistic expectation for motivating people. We thought managers are like the inspirational speakers that he could give great speeches and inspires his fellow, or religious leaders that his fellow follows, respects, and admires him. To some extend, a great manager should be like the great speakers or religious leaders, that he could motivate his team by inspiring them to be a better themselves. However, an incorrect goal can be very misleading. As a first step, let’s try to distinguish the different skill set of a manager and a leader.
First all of, we have to realize that it is impossible to motivate people. Mislead by the wrong examples, I had once believe people could be motivated because they don’t know what they want and your job it to tell them what they should pursue. However, I gradually realized that people are only motivated by themselves. The manager’s job is not to find out a way to incept the goal to the team member’s mind, but to find out what the people truly want and put him in the position that he could achieve it.
Finding out what people truly want takes skills, and most importantly, it takes lot’s time. Many of the first time managers, including me, spent more time thinking about the strategy and execution roadmap: what the team should do, rather than thinking about what people want to do. These managers are good at providing feedbacks for people’s execution and coaching their skills. But they would find it hard to ask even more from people besides the feedback you’ve given.
In the next part of this article, I am going to discuss some of the fundamental skills I learned about asking the most from the team.