Ithuta JV

Source - Article by Bob Andrew

In many of companies, especially ‘high-profile’ ones, which often have no difficulty in attracting superior staff, you will generally find very few poor performers, but you often find good people who are in the wrong job. The challenge for managers is to put the good person in the right job.

Good people want jobs that will allow them to feel challenged, stretched and inspired. As Antoine de Saint-Exupèry stated in an article in the Harvard Business Review: ‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up men to go to the forest to gather wood, saw it, and nail the planks together. Instead, teach them the desire for the sea.’

Good people also want to be able to exercise their right and obligation to express a dissenting view and be allowed to argue that view, while not havng to undergo the ‘shoot the messenger’ syndrome or unexplained rebuttal. They also need to know that if they are honest enough to come forward when they make a mistake, their manager will view appreciate their honesty. There is an old story about Werner von Braun who had one of his engineers confess to him that he didn’t connect some wires as he should have. Von Braun bought him a bottle of whisky as a reward for being honest and even helped him drink it too! A project manager depends on people with integrity to report honestly. Good people appreciate a manager, who when something does not go quite right in a project or in something that he should have done says: “Well, maybe I didn’t explain as clearly as I should have what it was I needed you to do”.

Good people are generally passionate about what they do and need to be in a job that is highly energising to them and feeds their passion. Such people are not easily discouraged and learn from difficult and challenging events in order to maintain their commitment. They can cope with adversity quite easily.

People with excellence seek, and often achieve, habitual winning and see challenges as merely obstacles in their pursuit of excellence. In the right project team environment, these types of people aspire to win, not just for their sake, but also collectively for the team. For them to win means that the project team has performed at a level that no other project team can reach.

Good people want to be in jobs in which they can exercise their personal core values and for this reason need a manager and team colleagues that share these values. These values become what the person and the team are. When done right, they lead the team in everything they do: they are the moral compass of the project team.