Page 49 - Becoming a Successful Manager

40 KNOWING THE TERRITORY

What do managers communicate when they take the time to
know and understand their employees? Speaking from our own
experiences with managers and from interviews with others, these
are some felt but unspoken messages:

• I care about you as a person.
• You are important to me.
• I want to know how to talk to or message you and not
offend you.
• I want to know how to motivate you to be the best you
can be.
• I want to know your vocational aspirations.
• I want to know what excites you, independent of vocational
success.
• I want to know what’s important to you and what isn’t.
• I want to know what specifi cally you expect from me as
your manager.

Because those messages made the recipients feel valued, the
workers responded in kind by doing everything in their power to
extend themselves for their managers. Wouldn’t you, if you felt
valued? With the increasing diversity of our workforce, we need
to extend the practice of making employees feel valuable to those
who work from a distance and across generations. Watch how your
employees will respond to you if you convey to them these positive
messages.
A friend recently forwarded an e-mail that supports this theme
of human reactions and feelings. It related how an employee
resolved a customer’s problem with a thoughtful goodwill gesture
that made the customer feel special. At the end of the story, my