Conventional training for managers suggests they spend time working with their employees to develop their skills and focus on improving their weaker skills to meet the requirements of the job. Great managers get results-but they do so by breaking this rule. In fact, great managers choose to take an entirely different approach.

The fact is, manager jobs are challenging enough when you consider the need to deliver results with a multitude of different people who have different personalities and varied skills and abilities. If an organization is really looking for results, they need to focus on letting the managers do the manager jobs without micromanaging how the managers generate the desired results. Sometimes that means letting people approach manager employment with a unique, novel, and surprisingly effective, though unconventional, approach. It means letting managers forget about trying to change people and develop employee skills that are lacking and, instead, giving them the freedom to select employees and nurture employees who can use their own talents and skills to get the job done-in their own way.

Manager employment typically dictates that the manager is the one who should tell the employee how to do the job. But truly great managers get results by telling the employee what the desired result must be and then getting out of the employee's way and letting that employee do the job, utilizing his or her own strengths and creativity. As long as the employee gets the results desired, the manager doesn't critique the employee's method and try to teach the employee a different approach.

This is a unique concept for many of those who are hiring for manager jobs. Human resources professionals and executive vice presidents typically want to hire managers who talk consistent with conventional management training. They are not always open to accepting a new approach. Yet great managers have proven this new approach is the successful way to manage people.

Consider the amount of time, energy, effort, and resources that are involved in trying to make someone change something about his- or herself or learn a new skill. Now consider how much time, energy, effort, and resources might be saved if a manager chose instead to let the employee have some autonomy in the performance of his or her job duties, thus making the job more enjoyable and satisfying for the employee and very possibly much more effective, as well. The fact is, trying to force an employee to do a job in a specific, particular way often results in an unhappy, disgruntled employee who does not do the job as successfully as he or she might if they were permitted to use their own talents to develop the job.

Consider this very simple scenario. Let's say you are the manager of the newspaper delivery personnel who are responsible for delivering newspapers to consumers' doorsteps on a daily basis every morning prior to 9:00 a.m. Traditionally, these newspapers have been delivered by a person carrying a large canvas bag filled up with rolled-up papers and that employee walking up to each front door and depositing the newspaper on the doorstep. This is how it has always been done. That is the job description.

You, as the manager, hire several new delivery people. However, you soon learn that your fastest and most efficient newspaper delivery person is not doing his route on foot. Rather, he is delivering his newspapers on a bicycle. The result is being accomplished-and perhaps even more effectively than other employees are doing the job. But the technique is different-and does not follow the prescribed steps for doing the job.

Still another new delivery person does not use a carry bag for her newspapers. Rather, she pulls a little red wagon around behind her with all of the newspapers on it and deposits the newspaper on the doorsteps. Again, the result is being accomplished, but the person is taking her own initiative to do the job the way she wants.

Finally, you discover still another new employee is using a slingshot to fling the newspapers from where he stands on the sidewalk to the doorstep and is not walking up to the door at all! The scenario is the same. Only in this case, the employee is developing his slingshot accuracy skills and having a great time delivering all those newspapers, so he is the happiest employee of them all!

As a manager, do you ''correct'' the way these employees are performing the job-or do you allow them each to do the job in their own unique, preferred way-as long as the papers end up on the doorstep of each home before 9:00 a.m.? Isn't it more effective to work with your employees and let them harness their skills, talents, interests, and creativity to get the desired results? Why would the company want people like you in manager jobs to spend your time and energy trying to change the technique the employee uses when the results are already being accomplished?

And yet, that is exactly what many organizations do expect. They expect jobs management to be accomplished by providing detailed steps that must be followed by all employees and then requiring managers to strictly enforce those steps as a law instead of a guideline designed to help the employee do the job as effectively as possible. Manager employment is and always should be about getting the desired results, not following a particular formula to get those results. Knowing this-and doing this-is what makes great managers great-and helps them deliver the results. It is also what enables great managers to employ bright and innovative people who often exceed the desired results and make the company stand out above the crowd because they know how to think outside the box.

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