No one is born knowing how to manage people. It’s a competency (i.e. a combo of skills, knowledge and attitudes) that is learned over time – with training, practice, hard knocks and hopefully good role models along the way.

Whether you directly supervise a group of employees or serve as team lead/project manager, aligning and enabling a group of people to deliver results can be daunting, tiring, and at times darn lonely. Or darn frustrating. Your employees assume you know the answers to a myriad of questions, from the company’s decision-making rationale on annual increases to solving a key technical issue on their project to resolving a conflict between two departments. Your peers and your manager want a piece of you too. You’re often pulled in many and at times conflicting directions.

Everyone loves to assume training can fix things. It’s a concrete event that can be checked off – done. It offers the hope that a person’s stumbling blocks will somehow disappear once she or he completes a workshop or eCourse. It also allows a manager to hand off an issue to a facilitator in a classroom, rather than having a straightforward conversation with an employee.

Well maybe they’re not magic – they’re pretty straightforward. When considered together though, they work magic in helping people to deliver at their best. There’s a jargon-y phrase for what I’m talking about (and I’ll pay money to someone who comes up with a more down to earth description btw) – it’s called Human Performance Improvement. This field addresses the question, how can I best enable the performance of myself and others?