Leading People in Business

Master essential leadership and people management skills to build motivated, high-performing teams in your organization. Also read: Leading Team in Business and Leading Change in Business for strategies on building cohesive, high-performing teams.

Understanding People in the Workplace

To run any organization efficiently different departments work together like marketing, personnel, production and finance. In today's business environment, the effective manager and a well-organized administrator has to understand people's basic needs and behavior in the workplace to motivate and achieve the demands of the organization. There should be an open communication and trust between managers and staff for better commitment, nurture talent and motivate people.

Meeting People's Needs

Lower-Level People's Needs

People's needs have various kinds. Examples of lower-level needs are salary, job security and working conditions. Failures with the minimum needs nearly explain dissatisfaction among staff.

Higher-Level People's Needs

People's higher level needs can be satisfaction of the actual job and its execution. The commitment of the higher level needs should give pleasure through belonging to the organization and identifying with it.

Building Confidence and Trust

Everybody needs to be praised for their performance and should be respected, both for what they are and for what they have done. Praise is a very effective way of improving confidence, but be sure that it is deserved.

Communicating Clearly

Improve the quality of communicating by being honest, open and accessible to everybody. If the objective is to pass on information as quickly as possible to learn speedily about reactions to your messages, then one type of communication is not enough.

Staying Positive

To build a positive atmosphere in your business, it is important to create a 'can-do' atmosphere. This should be built on common conviction, in which people, whatever their self-doubts are sure that the business can accomplish whatever it is asked to do.

Developing People Through Training

Try to assign a percentage of income to training (1.5 percent at least), or to put down bare minimum training hours – five days per year is a rational target.

Inspiring People

Employees expect positiveness from the organizational members. According to research, there are ten personal qualities that mostly admired qualities to stand in the society as organizational leaders: competence, supportiveness, charisma, fair-mindedness, honesty, vision, intelligence, courage, broad-mindedness, patience and directness.

Motivating Factors

• Self-fulfillment, Recognition, Peer Respect, Expertise, Competence, Achievement, Autonomy, Self-Confidence, Self-Respect, Membership.

Managing Conflicts and Difficult Situations

Conflicts between employees are an inevitable part of management life. Once you are aware of argument, take an instant action and invite the disagreeing parties to voice their points of view in a meeting.

Improving Performance

Very often an employee does not complete the given task successfully. If the failure is due to misunderstanding, another chance can be given to the employee. The failure factors can be demotivation, lack of skills, procrastination, absenteeism, habitual lateness, personal problems.

For further reading, explore Harvard Business Review – Managing People, Mind Tools – Leadership Skills, and Psychology Today – Leadership.

Also read: Learn to Lead Others to further develop your leadership skills.

Recommended Read: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell -- Buy on AmazonBuy on Amazon