Are you managing your team or yourself in the Zone?  Are you providing the right level of pushing and pulling to your team to promote the best of them?

Managing in the Zone means that you are individually managing your people at the right pace and degree of influence.  However, the only way to know the correct degree is to better know your team members and closely watch for signs of too hot or too cold management. 

Too Hot Management: 
This level of intensity causes your team members to burn out, quit, or shut down.  It fosters enemies and division within the team.  Good people leave your team unger this level of intensity.

It creates an uncomfortable environment. 

Too Cool Management:
This level of intensity causes your team members to take it easy and spurs/fosters laziness.  Lazy people develop and good people who want to be challenged leave.  A resistance to change develops because people that are left like it easy. 

It fosters a “Friends” environment, and protection of your friends becomes more important than the job or company. 

It creates a too comfortable environment.

Analogy:  Management is a lot like cooking – it can be too hot and it can be too cool.  If a steak is not cooked to the correct temperature, or too fast, or too slow, it can ruin the dinner. 

Management is a lot like this analogy.  The leader must manage his team in a manner that each individual person reaches their full capacity of performance, pruning, production, and progress. Each person is different and each person can move from Too Cool to Too Hot quickly. 

A LEADER must be a READER of people.  You cannot keep the “heat on” an employee for too long and not know that that person will burn out, quit, or shut down. 

On the other side of the same, if you are too cool with the person you are leading, then you must understand you will end up with laziness, resistance to change, and people wanting to be your friend and not be lead by you. 

It is a balance – what is the right temperature for one person is not the same for another.  Remember, to be a LEADER you must be a READER of people.  Learn the different attitudes of your team.  Know what is too much for a person to handle and when it is not enough.  This is a learning exercise for the leader that never stops.  The more you learn about your team and the way they react to situations the better you will be to moderate the temperature that is applied.

Lead On!
Sutton