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Getting the Best Out of People
By Paul Humphrey

An interview with Margaret Townsend,
The Institute for Business Technology's Management Development Consultant.
Let's do the hardest question
first: why do you do what you do?
There is the obvious point of enjoying the skill of helping someone to make a shift in their approach or in their performance. Part of what keeps me going is
you never quite crack it. It's a bottomless pit of improvement.

You do the hands-on training and coaching for the programmes you design, don't you?
Yes. That's a big factor for me. In the end it comes down to - does what you're doing work - and I never take it for granted, it's a day by day test. Also, I'm certainly the opposite in profile from most of the people I work with. The managers tend to be action oriented and I'm reflective.

But if I understand your work, it is a lot about appreciating differences in people, isn't it?
What fascinates me is that managers believe all people want to be managed the way they want to be managed. People don't. Managers hit trouble that way. I do a very fast psychometric test sometimes, to kick a programme off. I divide the room up into the various different categories of individual, I's, T's, F's, S's … and they see very quickly that the needs of each category are very different. When managers can notice the differences in people, they've leapt a major hurdle.

When they can appreciate the differences, well, now they stand a chance at getting the best out of their people. When they sit in judgement they simply get the worst out of them. It was one of the first things I noticed when I started out in my career at IBM, back in South Africa. It's a gift to be able to get the best out of your people. When I had a manager like that, I did great! And these days managers are more stressed and 'busy busy' than ever. They need time to figure these things out and the courses give that to them. They come up with a lot of very good stuff.

So you think managers generally have a tougher
time of things these days?
I went back to school in '98 - '99 and did an MSc in Organisational Change. Change was already on everyone's lips years prior to that, but subsequently it has accelerated so much more. Managers these days have cultural change (from mergers/acquisitions) to cope with, transitional change, personal change. Any of these things stretch a skill to its limits, but many have to face lots of these things all at once. So the ability to be a bit more curious, a bit more aware of differences has a big impact. The people most aware of difference are best at dealing with it. You get better performance all round.

What made you so interested in this approach?
It has to be my own background, I suppose. My father was an accountant and my mother was an Afrikaner farmer's daughter. It was like fire and ice. He was very English, cricket and all that. She was tempestuous and very creative. She was tremendously skilled in transforming properties, actually. But the whole of South Africa was an unusual place to be at that time. I went to an Afrikaner Nationalist school, incredibly traditional, with the head boy and prefects walking up the aisles at assembly with the white South African flags. 'Crossing the flags' ceremony, every day. Strange to look back on. Mind you, drama studies worked out well. I was the front runner in all the school plays. I got all the best parts, because my first language was English! I even sang duets with Roseanne Botha, the Premier's (PW Botha) daughter.
When I went to Capetown University, the difference was considerable. It was incredibly liberalist. But I certainly gave politics a wide berth. Politics was a life or death thing back then. Later when I joined IBM, I had great training and I really noticed what good managers could do for their people. That, plus my background in psychology studies, laid the foundation for the 'appreciative
inquiry' approach.

What is 'appreciative inquiry'?
We're quite conditioned to looking for problems and to using certain problem solving approaches. 'What went wrong?' 'What's not right here?' It's one way of looking at a situation, but not the only way.

As a practical example, Tim Henman did very well in Wimbledon 2001, but he was beaten by Goran Ivanisevic. Let's say you were his coach. Can you imagine - just prior to him going out to face Lleyton Hewitt for the first time - you saying - 'now let's learn something here. What went wrong in that last set with Ivanisevic?' No! The last thing you mention is that set! You ask about when he's played the best, the great things he does in his game, which of those great things could he do more of … that's where his attention needs to go for performance improvement.

That's the concept of 'appreciative inquiry'.
Not everyone is naturally gifted as a manager but anybody can improve. Peter Drucker sums it up well when he says 'Mathematicians are born - but anybody can learn arithmetic.' Appreciating the differences to get the best out of people is a learned skill. It certainly takes time and a few modules to really ensure the result. Of course, it's not the only one I deal with and not the only one a manager needs, but it's one where the results can be dramatic and very worthwhile all round.

Thank you