People management is a critical piece in your soft skills portfolio, helping you grow in an organization regardless of domain, discipline, experience, or seniority. Some people have a natural flair for working with people and evolve to be good social participants in an organization’s ecosystem.
To be good at people management, you need not necessarily be a manager—although strong skills in this space can help you climb the management ladder faster than people who lack such skills.
However, most often when we think of people management, we categorize it in two ways—managing up and managing down. How an individual is able to align his work and expectations with that of his manager and what kind of a rapport he has with the manager are typical questions asked in the corporate world.
Similarly, how a manager is able to work with his team, showcase their work to get them the required visibility, and help them maintain their work-life balance are all important elements in determining his success as a people manager.
One area that is often neglected in all of this is peer management—also known as managing across. This is an equally important piece in people management and where we need to look at how well employees are able to work with their peers. For example, how well is a fresher able to work with another fresher or how well is a CxO able to align with another CxO?
In a recent study, employees ranked co-workers as the highest factor in determining their happiness quotient in a workplace. The Employees' Choice Awards Best Places to Work ranking is a very dynamic list every year, and coworkers is a growing part of the rankings. It is welcoming to see performance appraisals in most organizations take these parameters into account by building a feedback mechanism that forces input on how well peers are able to work with each other.
Healthy competition can help an organization succeed. However, watch out for unhealthy competition and weed it out in the early stages. Unhealthy competition often causes friction and animosity, which can negatively impact work relationships, productivity, and work culture.
There are ample resources to prevent or mitigate such unhealthy workplace competition. If you haven't heeded similar advice before, today is the perfect time to wake up—the day where people value peers as the most important factor in determining their happiness.
Effective peer management is very important—although quite difficult—to achieve. Collaboration helps, but equally important is escalation at the required times. So, let’s pause and revisit whether or not we have accounted for effective peer management as part of our people management strategy. Doing so will clearly help us and our team create a positive impact in our workplace.
