It is striking to see how many people in charge of managing other people are trying to use techniques that work for managing machines and merchandises. It is all about checklists, forms, processes, metrics and tools. As if people were engines or pieces of machineries. These "people managers" are spending enormous amount of time and energy devising PowerPoint presentations, Excell sheets and other documents, lists, tables and flow charts, starting with strategic plans and ending up in detailed action plans.

All of this is treating people as if they were inert, passive, unable to engage in a relationship. Too many people live on the illusion that "managing people" is a one-way exercise where the manager is in control while the other person is being controlled. Too many people think that "managing people" is something you can do in isolation. But there is no such thing as "managing people". Reality is that we engage in relationships with other people, or we don't. Some of these relationships deliver productive outcomes, other don't. It is not so much a question of checklists, metrics and tools as a question of ability to engage in a person-to-person relationship. Conversation is at the very core of a relationship.

Many managers shy away from just having a conversation with their colleagues about difficult issues. Instead, they hide behind a wall of slides, strategic plans, appraisal forms and action plans. But that is not the sort of things that make a relationship work. Just try to "manage your wife" or "manage your husband" with a strategic plan, metrics, appraisal forms and action plans. In business, those tools may be useful when they come in support of a conversation, not when they replace it. Some managers tend to completely by-pass conversation and believe that professionalism is about removing everything that is typically human, replacing the uncertain outcome of a real-life, real-time conversation between real people by an anonymous, predictable, de-incarnated array of forms, slides, metrics and plans.

Of course she should still use, from time to time, strategic plans, actions plans, metrics and other tools in management. But that will never replace a good conversation. Being a good people manager is, before everything else, daring to take the risk and being able to engage in a conversation.

Voir aussi : Frahan Blondé ( Mr. Antoine Henry de Frahan )

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