How The Golden Rule is making it hard to manage your people.
The Golden Rule says treat others the way you want to be treated.
This is a good start, yet is missing an important perspective:
The other person’s.
And it is causing many well intentioned leaders to struggle.
Leaders struggle by assuming their people want to be treated like they would if the roles were reversed.
This is not the case because each individual has their own personality and behavior.
To be effective you must be aware of the various traits and manage accordingly.
To add this layer, apply The Golden Rule by treating other people how they want to be treated.
Here are two examples of how to put this into practice:
– To motivate them, you first need to know what motivates them:
Do they like challenges or are they motivated by helping people?
-To put them in the right position on a team, you need to know their style of interaction:
Do they need a lot of feedback and instruction before starting a project, or do they thrive on clear one-time directions and then let loose to get to work?
Knowing these details about how they want to be treated is crucial.
Because this one shift is what takes great teams and managers and makes them unstoppable.
