Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated

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Simple Rule One

Understand What Your People Do

In today’s organizations, managers often do not know what the people who work for them actually do. Blinded by the assumptions of the hard and soft approaches, they tend to focus either on the formal descriptions of people’s jobs (what they are supposed to do) or on their interpretations of people’s personality and mind-set (what people are supposed to be like). As a result, managers do not properly understand people’s actual behavior: what they really do.

Why does this matter? Because people’s behavior at work is performance in the making. An organization’s performance is nothing more than the combined effect of people’s behavior—their actions, decisions, and interactions. When managers don’t ...