Henry Ford on the Skills Every Employer Wants from their Employees

If you’re searching for a job or looking to hire an employee, you might be wondering what employee skills to focus on in your endeavours.  Every manager has their own preference and their own needs, so there’s certainly some variance across employers and industries. However, the advice of Henry Ford II could be considered a universal foundation of essential employee skills.  In his essay Business: An Introduction, Ford outlines several “qualities that make a man [or woman] an asset to business.”  Let’s review what Ford considers to be the essential skills every employer looks for when hiring an employee.

An Effective Way To Manage Poorly Performing Employees

Employee performance often makes or breaks your organization, especially in the case those employees with significant responsibility.  Unfortunately, we don’t always end up with employees capable of performing as well as we’d prefer.  When such an incident arises, it becomes the management’s responsibility to deal with the poorly performing employee.  While there are many management tactics for dealing with inadequate performance, the one made famous the by the American President Lincoln may be among the best.

As outlined in Donald T. Phillip’s book “Lincoln on Leadership,” Lincoln was confronted with the task of finding a General for the Union Army that could both build and successfully fight with it.  Unfortunately, most Generals he appointed would prove to fail on the latter of Lincoln’s requirements.  Through the use of a precise management technique that relies heavily on leadership and tact, the President was able to rapidly weed out ineffective Generals until he found one that performed as per his requirements: General Grant.  Here’s the strategy Lincoln employed to manage and remove an inadequately performing general:

How to Repair Broken Employee Trust with an Apology

As any good manager knows, trust is harder to build than it is to lose, so it should be carefully protected.  However, even the best managers make a mistakes and do something that breaks an employee’s trust.  Sometimes it’s intentional and we later regret it.  Other times its unintentional and we may not even be aware of what’s occurred until it’s pointed out by someone else.  Regardless, rebuilding trust is a vital skill - perhaps it should be called an art - that can help resolve these situations.

Have no illusions: you cannot successfully rebuild trust without an apology.  While some might be tempted to wield authority and demand respect, a more successful tactic is to swallow a bit of pride and issue a sincere apology.  If done skillfully, an apology can repair even the most damaged relationships and lay a solid foundation for future positive associations between the parties.  At the very least, issuing an apology illustrates that you believe the relationship is valuable and worth continuing.  Of course, for it to be effective, both parties must share this belief.  If not, your efforts will fall on deaf ears (though if you’re really good, the apology can convince them otherwise).

In general, a successful apology takes responsibility for the action that broke the trust and employs empathy and sincerity.  But the best apologies have these additional elements:

Developing a Trustworthy Personal Reputation

As a manager, much of your professional success will be determined by your reputation, particularly in the case of motivating employees and solving internal team conflicts.  We’ve previously discussed how building a trustworthy reputation is essential to succeeding on these fronts.  However, to garner such a reputation, you must, believe it or not, first build trust with people.

Building trust as a manager isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do - often times the deck is stacked against you as many employees, jaded by years of bad experience, automatically distrust those in charge. Fortunately, there are some tried and true methods you can employ to establish and maintain a trusting interpersonal relationship. In particular, these five steps can dramatically improve the level of trust your employees have in you:

Successful Management Requires Trust

Managing a team successfully requires more than technical competence, as anyone who’s ever had a bad manager can tell you. Equally important is leadership and open communication (among other things). One often overlooked characteristic critical to these two former qualities is trust. By building trust with those you manage, you can elevate your potential for success and get more out of your employees. This will be first in a series of posts on the role of trust in management, the benefits it provides, and methods you can employ to build this critical quality.   Today I’ll discuss what trust is and why you, as a manager, should strive to build it with your team.

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