I’m 21 years old, fresh out of college, and I land my first official career job; I’m hired as a second-grade elementary school teacher. In fact, I taught elementary school 2nd to 5th grade over the course of six years. And during that time, on average, I had about 32 students each school year. And my biggest ambition, my biggest hope during that time, was that every single student, every day, would walk out of the classroom understanding every single concept that I taught.
So that means that I expected every day, all 32 students to walk out of the classroom understanding everything I taught in math, reading, writing, science, social studies, PE – whatever it was. When teaching multiple subjects that is not reasonable, right? But I was optimistic. I was this bright-eyed, 21-year-old new teacher, so optimistic to go in and shape these young children’s minds.
Unfortunately, the reverse started to happen to me.
I was waking up in the middle of the night, having dreams that Johnny didn’t understand the math lesson I shared that day, or Shayna’s mom would call me upset that Shayna didn’t understand the reading passages that were assigned. And I just couldn’t deal with the fact that I couldn’t teach to the individual student’s needs. There were 32 students, and while I brought in all different kinds of modalities, all the things that we had been trained on as teachers, I wasn’t delivering 32 individual lessons times every single subject times every single day.
I mean time – there is no time. It is literally impossible to do that. And it’s one of the reasons why I decided to leave teaching as a profession. Fast forward to entering corporate, and I’m a leader. During my time as an official people manager, I had anywhere from one to six direct reports. This was the time that I could really lean into individualizing the approach. And this is the challenge I’m giving you today as a leader – are you individualizing the approach for each of your direct reports?
Assuming that you have fewer than 32 direct reports; I’m not talking about your broader team, I’m talking about your direct reports. Ideally you have between four or six, I’ve certainly met leaders who have ten. I would challenge you to challenge that, to begin with. But if you have a reasonable amount of direct reports, are you leading and creating an individualized approach for them? This is so relevant, considering that I see companies trying to retain and recruit new employees.
They’re leading with bigger salaries and bigger bonuses. And look, if pay is fair, that is not necessarily the driver. Now it could be for some of your individual direct reports, but other things such as flexibility is a big driver for some of your direct reports as well. So I challenge you to get to know your individual direct reports. What is important to them? What are their career goals? Do they want flexibility? I mean, look, return to office – if there is not a broader company policy, if you as a leader are given some opportunity there, then create an individualized plan.
There may be some direct reports that want to be in every day, others who only want to be in two days. Can you make accommodations for that when the work can still be done, when we can still get high productivity? When you are creating an individualized motivation plan, engagement plan, recognition plan, just the day-to-day setup, you are treating people as human beings. We have got to lead with humanity.
You’ve got to remember that they are individuals with different experiences and emotions; everything as a human being is individual to the person.
So I challenge you as a leader, are you creating an individualized approach for your direct reports where you can? When you do so, they will be more likely to stick with you and become high producers alongside of that!