A Review Before Reviews

There we have it: you’ve learned that you have a duty as a manager to ensure that you’re giving your staff the best possible opportunity to be happy, motivated, and able to grow. It’s not about finding the right person for the job. It’s about finding the right job for the person.

Most of the time, this task is achievable with time. You can help people find their groove. However, there are times when this is an impossible task given a particular member of staff and a particular team. We’ll explore more about what happens when individuals don’t work out in Chapter 8, ​Game Over​.

Here’s what we covered:

• We learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a model for exploring what motivates human beings. Money and possessions occupy the lower part of the pyramid, whereas self-actualization goals—the ones concerned with the fulfillment of human potential—are at the top. When mapping this on to the workplace, you can see that you have many opportunities to contribute to fulfilling the higher-level needs of your reports.

• We then explored the zone of proximal development as a way of understanding how people improve their skills. We saw how it forms the core of effective delegation and mentorship. We also saw how you can push the proximal development frontier via skill trees, thus enabling your staff to continually build toward their career goals.

• We finished by learning about cathedral constructors and bazaar browsers, two different but equally important personal traits that your staff may have. We saw how you can satiate those that fall into either camp.

You’ve now got a lot of material to talk about in your one-to-ones. Make sure you do so. Next up we’re going to be diving deep into a special one-to-one that usually happens twice a year: the performance reviews. But don’t worry, with some guidance you’ll learn to look forward to them.