Management Insight – Reflection on Stephen Green

What are the interesting points you learned about management from Stephen Green?

 HSBC is big and has a lot of people under his control, yet his management style is simply to understand the staff (empathy), and make them feel developed in their life. He points out when the staff made mistakes by regrouping and rebuilding, human beings are not perfect, make mistakes, and need a chance to regroup and rebuild.] As he accepts the mistake the employees made. I agreed with him when he said, “if the job people are doing is always marvelous, you are not being honest.” As my experience, this way is not just to give people a chance to show their abilities, but also to make the staff feel close to you as it realistic for people's everyday life and they are one of them who in the situation. It is also up to the manager how he or she can take advantage of this.

It is important in both management and teaching to show empathy.  To try to motivate or develop good working habits, we need to have empathy for staff to understand how they see a situation.  When we can see different situations, we can make better decisions that will help the entire team.  However, there are times where you can show empathy, but will have to make decisions that your staff might not like. 

 Talking about “making the staff feel close,” you need to think about “professional closeness.”  Staff can be friends outside of work and work together, but as leaders, the relationship has to be professional.  If leaders are friends with staff outside of work, it can cause trouble when leaders have to make decisions that the staff might not like.  Therefore, one “rule” for professional closeness is:  If you do it for one staff, you need to do it for all of them.  For example, I also do this with the students:  if one gets chocolate, they all get chocolate.

Stephen talks about empathy [you are working with humans, not machines. You have to understand how they are likely to be seeing the world….] to me this is something really needed in an organization as I am doing this at my workplace as well. You cannot achieve your goal unless your people are willing to work with you with love and dedicatedly. When you can share how you see the world and get to know how your staffs see the world it will bring such motivation to the staff as they happy to do the work done with you. As a leader, you are respected more because you understand your employees' situation and are willing to learn their cultural perspective, even if those are obvious or mysterious.

To achieve goals, people need to be willing to work. Also, with the word “love.”  Some people “love” their job and some people “hate” their job.  As a leader, you can be like a “father” and love your staff, but this should be a “professional father” with responsibilities connected to work.  Of course, you can listen to your staff’s personal problems and give advice, but as a leader, it is not your responsibility to solve their personal problems.

Another point in how Stephen talks about when he has to mediate to bring different people to work together. I like the idea that he would spend one-on-one time with everyone involved to understand better what is that make it difficult. And he focus on the common ground in the organization after he comes to the chairing discussion to get people to contribute and unacceptable behavior rather than just kicking out the staff. As a leader, you kind of understand this.

This has been one of your most effective management skills – bringing staff together to work well with each other.  It’s important to meet with staff one-to-one.  How often you meet depends on your time and the type of problems.  It’s important to have a group staff meeting once a month and a formal private evaluation once a year.  If you feel one-to-one meetings are beneficial for your staff, you can schedule them when it’s convenient for you and when the staff member is least busy at work.  However, remember that one-to-one meetings take a lot of time, so they should be scheduled when you aren’t very busy.  Also, you should also keep a record of these one-to-one meetings since this information will be used in annual evaluations.