Tips for Managing and Developing Your Staff

By Christopher Hoenig
Mon, July 01, 2002

CIO — Gardeners constantly do three things: pick the best quality seeds, prune regularly to keep the plants shapely and healthy, and spend hours preventing pests and then treating the plants for any damage sustained. Those same three things should dominate any leader’s approach to people management and staffing, whether on the small scale of a team or through a worldwide performance management system.

Seeding the Staff

In organizational leadership, the equivalent of seed for your garden is the behaviors and values of your people. That vision must be clear and ultimately linked to strongly held values and specific behaviors. If you have a fuzzy vision or weakly held values, your organization can grow?but it will not have the health and productivity you intend.

Vision starts at the very beginning of the hiring process. Ask yourself the question, Can this person become a leader in the organization? It doesn’t matter whether you’re hiring functional specialists or line employees. At McKinsey & Co., where I was involved in recruiting and hiring for several years, we always asked the question?even about the youngest associates?Can we envision him as a partner? More often than not, it was that question that either distinguished a candidate or sunk him.

If you can find and bring in the best, then use consistent principles in developing them. At my current employer, the federal General Accounting Office, the leadership team has three core values: accountability, integrity and reliability. They are so deeply held within the organization that, one way or another, they influence key hiring decisions.

Be sure to concentrate on specific behaviors that you want to encourage. Specificity and consistency inspire hope, investment in self-development and healthy expectations. In contrast, there is nothing more damaging than an attempt to create leaders that is vague and inconsistently applied. It breeds cynicism, miscommunication and destructive competition. I have worked in organizations where this consistency exists and others where it is absent. The difference is like night and day.

Prune for Shape

You need not only a vision of your ideal employee but also of your ideal organization. Specify the right skill and knowledge mixes that will add up to a well-shaped company. Then make sure other leaders in the organization understand the shape as well, because more than one person will be pruning at once. Above all, know how the target shape relates to your overall strategy. I’ve seen countless staff development systems that seem completely disconnected from business purpose.

Continue Reading

What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Don't have an account yet?
Download this complimentary Gartner report, Best Practices for Supporting 'Bring Your Own' Mobile Devices, and learn approaches organizations have used to address these challenges and how virtual desktops make applications more secure and supportable in a BYO world.
Learn how to maximize control and minimize loss with SafeNet, the company that Frost & Sullivan named the "clear market leader" in software license management.
Learn how you can connect with customers and suppliers for business-to-business e-commerce more affordably with SAP Information Interchange OnDemand. Using prebuilt profiles, you can make changes within your supply chain quickly using a minimum of your valuable resources.
Changes in business objectives and advances in technology compel many businesses to reassess their B2B integration capabilities to seek further process efficiency. We find that very few enterprises make a large change to their B2B integration process for a single reason; instead, multiple factors combine to create the need for change.
Do you know what seller types you have and what it takes for them to succeed? Online information sources and social networks have made basic product information and recommendations so readily available and ubiquitous that the role of the 21st century salesperson is now more so than ever defined in terms of his or her ability to add value to the customer.
Enterprise mobility: Most IT leaders say it's transformational, strategic. But only 18% said in a recent study that they have a comprehensive strategy for mobility. The problem: Lack of expertise, time and resources, among other issues.
How "mobile ready" is your infrastructure? This Mobility Knowledge Vault provides a wide variety of expert advice on how to strike a balance between end user ease-of-use and security. Prepare your organization with primers on data encryption and user authentication, device disablement and devising an employee-liable device strategy that makes both IT and users happy.
This Webcast introduces the business challenges facing sales today, and provides an overview and demonstration of how SAP Sales OnDemand can be used to address those challenges.
In just 3 minutes, discover how the cloud-based SAP Business ByDesign solution delivers the comprehensive business management software your subsidiaries need, and the streamlined data integration your parent company wants.
Learn from and Network with Your Peers with CIO Confidential
The role communications can play in the success of projects.
Watch this whiteboard presentation to learn how to transform the Internet for enterprise applications with no hardware, no software and no code changes.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Sponsored Links

High performance. Delivered. Click to see Accenture's client successes

Master the cloud with the power of convergence from HP

Connect with IT leaders redefining mobility at the Enterprise Mobile Hub

Choose New and manage one device instead of 170

Choose New for 8x the firewall and NAT performance

Check out a smart way of mobilizing your business with enterprise-ready Samsung Mobile.

Redefine your data center with HP servers.

Enhance your business with Windstream IT Solutions. Speak to someone local.

BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion. Different mobile devices. One platform.

CYBERMARYLAND | Learn Why Maryland is the Epicenter for Cybersecurity

Get Ethernet speeds from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps - Comcast Business Class

Cognizant. Leading in Business, Application & Technology Services

Collaboration: driving better business outcomes

Gain cutting-edge insights at MIT in 2-5 day executive programs.

Click to see how Accenture has delivered high performance to clients

Complimentary Gartner Report on BYOD: Media Tablets & Beyond. View Now

Elevate storage agility and efficiency with HP 3PAR storage.

Choose New and slash the number of devices you manage

Customized information views & Twitter events at New Fulcrum Point

Splunk translates machine data into "aha" moments for IT and the business.

ManageEngine Desktop Central - Automate and Audit Your Desktop Management! Learn More...

Cloud Readiness Starts with Intel® Technology

Visit the Virtually There Learning Page to learn how to use virtualization to your competitive advantage.

Free: Hunter Muller's "The Transformational CIO."

Join us for an upcoming Microsoft 365 live online demo event.

Discover your easiest path to unified communications

Virtualizing Your Infrastructure Just Got Easier

Connect with global CIOs now at Enterprise CIO Forum

Resource Center