HR HR
Making good Managing staff is one of the most critical skills a turf manager can possess. HR management guru David Bancroft-Turner, who returns as a keynote speaker at the upcoming Australian Turfgrass Conference in Melbourne, presents a simple yet effective model to employ at your facility.
A golf club maintenance crew is made of many personalities and skill levels. Being able to effectively manage each person and bring them together as a cohesive team is critical to the overall success of your operation 28
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hen I look back at my leadership and managerial career, there are many exciting aspects that I could write about. Unfortunately this article doesn’t cover any of those, but it is about something that is as crucial to you as breathing, particularly if you are a manager of people or are about to become a manager of people. This is the bit of your job that you are going to have to get right because if you don’t the rest won’t work. I’m going to give you a model to work with (if you don’t like ‘models’ then it’s not a ‘model’, it’s a new and different way of doing things that will give you results much more quickly – oh, and it will help all those people you are managing as well) and a process to follow that will save time, get more accurate results and help build fantastic working relationships with your colleagues. The situation is this. You have a work colleague called Sam and you are his manager. Sam’s performance could be better. He’s not terrible, but he’s not brilliant either. And you want to get him to be brilliant. There’s something about Sam that makes you think he could be very, very good. In summary, he is a guy with potential that is not being realised. This should be familiar to you as this is an all too common situation in all organisations. In order for people to be brilliant at what they do they need to satisfy five different criteria and here they are in this model that I have designed to make it easier for you to manage others.
AUSTRALIAN TURFGRASS MANAGEMENT 18.3
FACTORS THAT CREATE BRILLIANCE 1. Clarity: Everybody needs to know what is expected of them. Makes sense doesn’t it, but they also need to know about a range of other things about their role/job that may not be so obvious, such as: l What order things have to be done in; l The timeframes involved; l The measures applied to each aspect of their role; l Who they have to interact with and the boundaries of each person’s job (who does what); l Why what they do is important; and l The outcomes that are required. I’ll stop now as there are too many to list here but hopefully you get the idea. 2. Attributes: Attributes are defined as the emotions, dispositions and personality preferences of a person – some people call them behaviours and behaviours are nothing more complicated than what people say and do and the way they say things. Example: If you are going to be a brilliant air traffic controller you need what we call ‘an eye for detail’. Now some people have this and some don’t. It would probably be a good idea if you an air traffic controller to have this attribute (I can’t imagine an air traffic controller saying ‘Ah yes, we can get another four planes in that sector no problem, just squeeze them in, it’ll be fine...’) Other attributes for a range of roles may be things like: l You are comfortable with your own company, or you need/prefer the company of others; l You are prepared to take decisions with/without referring to others; l You suffer easily with nerves/anxiety/stress, or not;