The tribal wisdom of the Plains Indians passed on from generation to generation, says: “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” Picture by Kevin Nicoll
When applied to the management of people, it is more often than not a sad truth that managers and leader alike still like to use the carrot and the stick approach, and where the stick does not work we will just use a larger one, or just use performance management to “whip” our people into shape or just threaten them with dismissal.
There are a lot of strategies that companies are employing in the workplace currently in order to improve on delivery and to get more for less as it is in business, but what if we made a paradigm shift in the way we engage with our employees?
The shift would not be to make the carrot bigger or to train them to be better but to rather apply situational leadership and management. We are in an age where you cannot manage each staff member the same way, people are different and they come from different backgrounds and have different expectations and require different management approaches dependent on each specific situation.
So, if we look at the drawing from Kevin Nicoll, he hits the nail on the head satirically when he says that the plains Indian already knew back then that the best strategy would be to dismount a dead horse, but where is this dead horse? Is it not perhaps time we shifted our view and start thinking about “dismounting” our old ways of managing our people and start leading the way that our people would like to be led?
By implementing a more interpersonal way of managing, we might end up with people who are more productive, and work harder and faster because they want to and not because they must.What about if we dismounted the way we look at productivity and rather implement flexible work environments and work times, in order to create better work environments for our most important assets – our people?
I believe that if we implement a more people-centric approach to managing our businesses, we will get a lot larger output on production a smaller turnaround of staff and in general a healthier company culture as people will be led the way they would like to be led rather than continuing with the usual carrot and stick approach.
So, show me that dead horse?
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