My first ever job was in 1995 working at Pizza Hut. I spent almost 4 years working at various stores, being promoted, losing my job, going back again, changing stores, training and managing staff and so much more. I learnt a very valuable lesson at Pizza Hut when I was continually late or skipping work and continually saying “sorry” to my manager. The Assistant Manager said to me one time – “If I was really sorry, You wouldn’t keep doing it”.
This resonated with me very much at the time. Later on in life, I also learnt this lesson from a different manager – You are allowed to take credit for your employee’s work. As long as you are also taking responsibility for their mistakes.
When combined, there is something very powerful to learn about managing staff.
If you’re going to manage people, tasks and businesses, you need to be ready to take responsibility for all the mistakes that happen. You can speak to the staff member, you can speak to the person that made the mistake. They can say sorry, it won’t happen again. But it’s your job to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
What you should be doing is working with the staff member, training, teaching them, giving them the support they need to get better and not have it happen again. Management of people isn’t about managing of jobs and tasks, it’s about people. And so, you need to make sure the people are working well.
A lot of being a manger is reading and giving reports. But managing people is about improving skills. Making people better.
It is always important to me in all my jobs, all my roles in life that I should always make myself better, always try to learn new skills and gain new knowledge. And I always encourage everyone I work with and manage to do the same thing. It’s not about blaming, it’s not about finding out who made a mistake and them getting in trouble. It’s about identifying the problem and creating a fix for it. With people this is usually with more training, sometimes more monitoring, and sometimes unfortunately, letting that person know they aren’t suited for the role. And so this is what I encourage in the DigiGround office.
Everyone is also encouraged to take responsibility for their mistakes and learn from them. There is an avoidance of blame. The least important thing in any situation is who is to blame. The most important, I think, is how we can prevent it from happening again.
Check out my webpage at www.johnluhr.com.au to learn more about me and to read the complete story.
