This past week my daughter graduated from high school. While I know there are other milestones that will probably be more important it is the first big one for most parents. Watching her walk up to the stage with the biggest smile I've seen in a while and accept her diploma pushed me back to the day we brought her home from the hospital and put her in the front window for the sunlight (she was a bit jaundiced and that was the cure.) I wasn't sure at that point if we had a daughter or some marigold/human hybrid.
It seems like just yesterday and yet it also seems like eons ago. Some sort of weird temporal rift occurs as your child begins their journey in the wild and woolly world of adult-hood. You can't help look at them with the same eyes that saw their first steps and their first car accident. It's as if you have one foot on the "child" side of a chasm, and the other on the "adult" side. I'm convinced now that I will always straddle that gulf and never commit to one or the other. But I think that is a good thing.
Treat Employees Like Children
I started to put this post together as a discussion of treating employees like parents treat children. I was going to discuss how I saw a lot of similarities between how we motivate and influence behavior in children and why we should do the same in the working world. My point was going to be that a parent approaches child-rearing on an individual basis. What works for one child may not necessarily work for another. One child might need more supervision, others less. Some have more intelligence, others might need more support. The parent-child relationship (when normal) is pretty pure. It is driven by a love with only one goal - happy and productive members of society. To me that was a pretty good analogy to the manager-employee relationship.
But that was wrong.
It is Only Half the Answer
While I was formulating that train of thought I hit on some posts/tweets from Frank Roche and Chris Ferdinandi (subscribe to their blogs and twitter streams for consistently awesome info.) Their discussion was about treating employees like adults.
These discussions made me rethink my position. Now, just like I'm astride the child/adult chasm with my own children - I'm going to straddle the manager-employee chasm as well.
My position is this: Treat employees like ADULT children
Sorry Frank. Sorry Chris. I'm going to not take a position on either side of this debate but keep my feet firmly planted on both sides. Employees are adults. And they should be treated like adults. On the other hand they are also children in the sense that they have a lot to learn and experience within an organization. Performance isn't as simple as knowing what to do - it is also about the "how." The how is a function of the environment - the culture of the company. That is something that takes some time to learn and understand.
As employees work within the organization our role as managers is to assume they have the skills for the job and treat them like adults. At the same time we need to watch for signals that they are in unfamiliar waters and help them apply their skills more adroitly. Our job as managers is to help them, guide them, reinforce and reward their actions. Help them pull themselves up and take their first steps.
At some point we won't have to constantly watch out for them as they learn the best way to apply their skills within the company - but we still have to assume they are constantly growing and maturing.
Just like our own children - we will treat them like adults, yet we will always keep an eye out for those times when approaching them like children makes sense.
We will never move that foot from the child side to the adult side - we will always be a bit off balance with feet in both worlds.
