10.4 Know what your people are like and what makes them tick, because your people are your most important resource.
Develop a full profile of each person’s values, abilities, and skills. These qualities are the real drivers of behavior, so knowing them in detail will tell you which jobs a person can and cannot do well, which ones they should avoid, and how the person should be trained. These profiles should change as the people change.
If you don’t know your people well, you don’t know what you can expect from them. You’re flying blind and you have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t get the outcomes you’re expecting.
a. Regularly take the temperature of each person who is important to you and to the organization.
Probe your key people and urge them to bring up anything that might be bothering them. These problems might be ones you are unaware of, or they may be misunderstood by the person raising them. Whatever the case, it is essential that they be brought out into the open.
b. Learn how much confidence to have in your people—don’t assume it.
No manager should delegate responsibilities to people they don’t know well. It takes time to learn about people and how much confidence you can vest in them. Sometimes new people are offended when their managers don’t have confidence in how they are carrying out their responsibilities. They think it’s a criticism of their abilities when it’s simply a matter of the manager being realistic about the fact that he or she hasn’t had enough time or direct experience with them to form a point of view.
c. Vary your involvement based on your confidence.
Management largely consists of scanning and probing everything you are responsible for to identify suspicious signs. Based on what you see, you should vary your degree of digging, doing more for people and areas that look suspicious, and less where what you see instills confidence. At Bridgewater a host of tools (Issue Logs, metrics, daily updates, checklists) produce objective performance-related data. Managers should review and spot-check them regularly.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio