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Managers don’t manage “performance.” They manage team energy.
This post will probably be fairly short — I haven’t blogged in a few days due to a couple of different reasons, and mostly I wanted to dip my toe back in the water — and it’s probably somewhat similar to “management isn’t intuitive,” but here’s the essential idea.
If you lined up 100 people who are managers of others in their companies — and let’s say you do it across different organizations, different industries, etc. — and you asked them this question below, what do you think they’d say?
What exactly do you manage?
I would assume most would blurt out something this:
- Deliverables!
- Process!
- Targets!
- Performance!
- Goals!
- Priorities!
- Revenue streams!
- P&L!
All of those answers are right, and they’re also all horribly wrong.
When you manage other people — which means, at some base level, you are responsible for how they feel/perceive about their workday, which might be 1/3 of their life — you want to make sure they hit targets, yes, but you’re really managing the energy of your team and people.