Books have been written about (and entire industries dedicated to) the best ways to manage talent. Salesforce has its own take on how to become a great manager in the Manage the Salesforce Way trail on Trailhead. While it’s written with Salesforce in mind, the philosophies on management, leadership, culture-building, and just about everything else are transferable to any business environment.
The thing to always remember is that people are at the heart of every business. Businesses need both visionary leadership and great day-to-day management to succeed. Leadership and management aren’t one and the same — while leaders typically set vision and strategy and drive company goals, managers work more at a team level by focusing on priorities and execution.
Practically speaking, adopting a management framework can both help all of your company’s managers develop skills and strategies for themselves and their teams. Salesforce’s Great Manager Framework defines the five characteristics that make up a great manager:
A great manager:
A great manager:
A great manager:
A great manager:
A great manager:
Great managers aren’t just born as great managers. They work to develop management skills, build trust and communication with colleagues, and learn ways to motivate, empower, and support their teams. Setting expectations, providing feedback, and conducting performance reviews are three essential elements to managing talent. The Coaching and Feedback module on Trailhead is a great resource for developing specific skills in these areas and understanding why they’re so important to the health of your business.
Let’s look at a few key areas to start with:
Coaching is all about helping others learn and grow themselves. Telling others what to do and teaching them how to do it are important parts of coaching. But telling on its own isn’t coaching — it’s important to understand when to wear a different managerial hat.
Dig deeper into coaching and telling strategies in the Coach and Develop Others unit on Trailhead.
Coaching is a conversation. Sometimes it’s a quick hallway chat about something that just happened, other times it’s a series of focused one-on-one meetings to plan your career development. Coaching can cover a lot of ground, and lots of topics are good fodder for coaching conversations.
The benefits of coaching are real and far-reaching. Coaching can help your team members:
Salesforce uses a simple approach called GROW to help managers become more effective coaches. GROW stands for:
Goal: Establish the objectives
Reality: Identify what’s happening
Options: Identify options and make choices
Will: Identify what will be done
GROW is simple and gets results. Our Motivate and Champion Trailhead unit can help you understand and develop strategies for using the GROW framework as you coach your own teams.
Feedback is key to improvement; how can we get better if we don’t know what to work on? Talking to somebody about missing a deadline or losing a contract can be awkward, but talking about things when they go wrong is essential to growth. That means learning to give, and receive, feedback.
Our Trailhead unit, Give and Receive Feedback, breaks down the art of giving and receiving feedback into an actionable frameworks you can learn and utilize. Develop the three main skills at the core of using feedback as a manager:
And if there are performance issues with an employee who seems to have great potential? It’s worth it to both you and the employee to put the work in to get things back on track.