How to groom people?

Below is the story from Google as it is copied from the NYTimes. It tells about grooming your people in appropriate way. Read the story first and then learnings that I drawn from it.

He (Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation) tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team.

“He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,” Mr. Bock recalls.

Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved.

“And a year later, it’s actually quite a bit better,” Mr. Bock says. “It’s still not great. He’s nowhere near one of our best managers, but he’s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

Learnings according to me:
1. Never take things at its face value. Try to go to the roots of the problem
2. Check if things can be improved
3. Help people improve i.e. provide training or conducive environment
4. And most importantly, love your people but give them recognition (promotion) only when they deserve it

Comments

Amit Deokule said…
Dear Mandar,

IBM was one of those companies which had unque way of handling people and retaining that uniqueness..An Organization may be having good staff but if structure goes wrong or strategy goes adverse then staff or system or values do not work. It is always inter-dependent. Mckinsey 7 "S" rule is fantastic. Thanks for this!
Mandar Thosar said…
@Amit that's really important. Recognizing, respecting and nurturing balance of inter-dependence would do miracle for the businesses.