By Sylvia Ndeleva

Looking back at my years of experience I noted I had met various characters of supervisors in line with my various positions of work. My major experience came from a law firm. Although it was tough and overwhelming for me, allow me to share some learnings that can help HR practitioners in guiding employees to advance professional excellence. 

Know your team; Take time to know people before engaging with them. Don’t learn about people from a third party. No one is perfect including you. By doing this we are able to assign work depending on each person’s areas of strength and use others’ strengths to blend in the weakness. We use this as an opportunity to understand the challenges at hand and find solutions together. I believe as a team we can also do: 

• Regular check-in to ensure we understand work progress and areas of corrections 
• Establish a clear goal with clarity – Being clear with the end in mind enables everyone to understand what is to be achieved. 
• Embrace the power of delegation. -Delegation creates trust and enables utilization of one’s strengths as you are able to become more self-accountable. 
• Being able to sincerely understand your team’s well-being is important as this will enable them to express their struggles either personally or professionally and seek support. 

Embrace Failure; Through delegation of work with guidance or no guidance you have the ability to understand employees’ areas of character and strengths by using their mistakes as points of correction and building capacity. Every failure is an example of a laboratory which enables you to try various experiments and finally make the final decision which leads to success. Every mistake brings learning which enables the teams to grow and become better. We embrace failure to establish building blocks which will create leaders who mentor and coach their teams rather than doom them in judgment. Understand the gaps and develop steps for resolution. 

Control your emotions; Never mix your personal and professional emotions as this highly clouds your judgment. A junior employee will be in a position to give you honest feedback if you take time to listen and read between the lines. A balance in emotions can take a long way even in sharing advice. We need to be keen not to limit a motivating staff. You can replace staff but you can never replace the potential, efforts and creativity. I have also that learnt you can never replace a persona. Be keen to not discuss your personal matters within the work set up as this might affect you if your information falls into the wrong hands. 

ICU Acknowledgement; In reference to the people’s acuity, coach-like training should acknowledge in public and correct in private. An acknowledgement will go a long way to motivate and build confidence in your team. Through this, staff are able to correct gaps and update you on successes even without asking. Being able to stop demining staff members will go a long way in building trust. You can build your reputation without deeming others’ lights. I believe there is enough light and positions sufficient for everyone.  

Your success is not because of you; You need to realise that your team is the key to success. Your team is like an army, the greater the pillar, the more confidence and success you will have. Take time to understand your team to create and build trust.  

Avoid office gossip and hearsay; Get information from the source. If you build genuine trust, staff will be open to sharing honest information and feedback. Not everything you hear about an individual is true. Don’t allow closed-office information to let you judge an innocent person. People know more information about others than you. Being able to understand information or stories from both sides is key. Asking the right questions which creates room for appreciative curiosity is important. Coming into a conversation with the individual with an open mind creates room for not prejudging but thinking through and giving clear responses in various situations. 

Be your own person; You are fearfully and wonderfully made, therefore, don’t let staff change their character to please you as their character and honesty play a major role towards overall organization success. We are all unique and with this bring different puzzle pieces towards overall success. Our uniqueness will enable us to push through and wither the storms in various situations as we all bring out different ideas /opinions which enable us to come out of crucial situations.  

 We have the ability to create a heavenly work environment. Let’s make a difference! 

Reference and Credits: 

Dianne Murphy -People Acuity -Self Leadership, Strength at work and Coach Like Leadership 

Mr.Ndungu -Advocate of the High Court and CS