In my teaching entitled The God Kind of Business, we looked at finding the crew for your ship. This is now the expansion of that principle into a full module.

Without personnel, without staff or employees, your business cannot grow, it cannot function efficiently and you will never reach your full potential. So it is very important that you know how to manage our personnel.

And so that is what this teaching is dedicated to. I trust that by the time we have finished you will have learned a few things about how to handle the people that work with you as the manager or the owner of your business.

Important Questions

Every one of us has certain very important things that we need to find out in life. The first thing that you need to find out is who you are. That might seem a bit obvious, but the truth of it is most of us never found out who we are yet.

So many people are still going through life trying to find themselves. They think they know the person that they see in the mirror, but the truth is most of us really don’t know exactly who we are. And until you know who you are, you really cannot apply yourself fully to everything that you do in life. So it is very important that each one who is working for you knows who they are.

The second thing is we need to find out what we want. That again might be obvious.

You say, “Well I know what I want.”

You would be surprised how many people are thrashing around, trying to find some joy and happiness in life and not really knowing exactly what they want.

And then an absolute essential is we need to find out where we belong. If you don’t know exactly where you belong, you can’t fit in, you can’t function and you can’t accomplish all that you have in life.

And so in this first Section that we are going to be looking at now is going to address some of these things, and I’m going to show you how to help your personnel find these very important things.

Now I have done a very good series which is also part of this course. It was done a long time ago when we were kind of transitioning from the ministry side to the business side. It is called The Way to Success.

The Way to Success will help you to personally reach your potential. So as a manager you are the first one who should have gone through this material to understand exactly what principles are involved.

Importance of Job Satisfaction

And then once you know how to apply it to yourself, you must learn how to apply it to your staff. You must point the way for them. Everyone who works for an employer; every one of us who have a job and we all have some job, the most important thing in life is job satisfaction.

That is the key to true efficiency and it is the key to faithfulness. We need to get satisfaction from the work that we do. Since we spend a large part of our day most days of the week in our job, if there is no true job satisfaction you have an unhappy person, an unfulfilled person and you are not going to get from that person the potential that you require.

And so we are going to look at this subject on personnel management under the subject of the Six Building Blocks of Personnel Management. I’m going to give you the six blocks very quickly and then we are going to look at the first one in this Section. The six blocks are:

1. Identification

2. Motivation

3. Protection

4. Direction

5. Correction

6. Compensation

Those are a whole lot of words that mean nothing until we expand them into the principles involved and we will be doing that here, covering the subject in detail. I think by the time we are finished you will know a lot more about yourself and the people that work for you.

So we start with our employees, our staff or personnel; those who work with us, even if they are partners with us in business. They are the other people apart from you.

Find Who You Are

The first thing that you must do is to help them find out who they are. Well a good starting point might be to find out who you are. I assume that since you have risen up successfully as an entrepreneur, as a business leader and a manager that you by this stage have found out who you are.

If you haven’t, go and work your way through the Way to Success teaching and find out who you are first, otherwise you are certainly not going to be able to find out who they are.

Paint Pictures

It is very important that you have a clear image. We have spoken about the importance of imagination and pictures this in so many places. Pictures motivate. They give a direction. Pictures control the way we do things in life. They are more powerful than words. And so each person needs an image or a picture. It is up to you to paint that picture.

Why is it so important to have a picture? Because to reach out, and to receive and claim the things we want in life require faith, hope and love as I have taught in the Way of Blessing.

And probably the most important principle that I taught there, which applies to all realms of life, is not ‘Name it and Claim it’ as some of the Faith Movement are trying to teach. Rather as I said, it is to ‘See it and Snatch it’.

Until you see it you’re not going to snatch it. Until you see the image, the picture of what you are supposed to be, you can’t reach out and grab it and lay your hands on it. If that picture is too vague and too unclear, you are thrashing around in the dark, not knowing where you are going.

So it is very important that every single person that you are working with has a clear picture and image of who they are. You must help them to see, not just know with their mind or understand intellectually, but there must be a very clear picture.

If you could as an artist paint a picture of yourself, what kind of picture would you paint? If you could close your eyes and see yourself the way you are and know it is not actually what you look like in the mirror strangely enough.

We have to go deeper than the physical to get an image of who you are. It is up to you to paint that picture for every single person before they will reach their full potential.

Identify False Hope and Goals

Now you need to identify some of their false hopes and goals. You see a wrong image always leads to disappointment. And for many people the image that they have in their mind is the totally wrong image altogether. They have been trying their utmost to reach this goal and this image to become what they think they are supposed to be and continually failing, because they have the wrong image.

They have false hopes, they have false goals in life and many people have set themselves goals that are totally unreachable. They want to become things that they could never be. They are trying to do things that they will never be capable of doing.

So yes it is wonderful to have a goal and we should always reach beyond. Again I have covered this in the Way to Success. We should always be reaching ahead to improve and to grow.

I have dealt with this in my teaching on Personal Growth, but sometimes people are trying to reach for a goal that they are nowhere ready yet to reach. They are trying to be what they are totally incapable of being right now. You need to address this and deal with it right from the beginning.

Get rid of the unreachable goals because they only lead to despair. They only lead to the person wanting to give and just throw in the towel and say, “I’m just wasting my time here.”

You’ll never obtain from such a person the potential that they can have in your company.

Identify Their Temperament

Now you need to identify the person’s temperament. We have been speaking about temperament in just about every teaching, because temperament is so vitally important.

Are you able to sit down with somebody and help them to identify their temperament? I find that most people actually can’t. Even though we have taught on temperaments extensively; even though we’ve laid out all the strengths and the weaknesses as well as the signs of the different temperaments, I find that most people still get it wrong.

Let me give you a quick rehash of the important aspects of identifying temperaments. Temperament is always based on two parameters, one horizontal and one vertical. The first is emotive expression, expression of emotion and feelings. Then there is assertion of will. Stick to those two parameters and you will find out what temperament a person has.

Don’t look at them and say, “Well I see that they have this characteristic and that characteristic. I see that they have this strength and that weakness, so obviously this person must be that temperament.”

Look at Emotion and Assertion

Most people are at least three different temperaments periodically. You cannot identify a person from those qualities. You must look at the emotion and the assertion. Does this person express their feelings or hold back?

It’s not a case of, “Do they have emotional feelings?”

Everybody does. When you look at the person, when you react with them can you see them expressing their feelings and emotions?

And does this person assert their will, or do they withdraw and let other people dominate and control them? Or do they tend to be more assertive and forthright? Do they say what they really think or do they hold back?

How do they act? Do they act in a strong, assertive manner, or do they act in more of a withdrawal, following type of manner?

These are your two parameters and all you need is high and low. There are varying degrees of this. Some people are slightly assertive and others are very assertive. Some people are slightly nonassertive and some are totally unassertive.

There are different degrees. Don’t try and get too complicated. Just look at high and low. It’s the same with assertion. Look for high and low.

As you pick those two you have four combinations and you will find your four temperaments. Find out what is the main temperament that the person sits in most of the time. You can assess that very quickly. I can assess that within five minutes of meeting a person for the first time. You have known your staff for probably even longer than that. You should know by now what kind of person they are most of the time.

The Two Parameters

Don’t look at all the characteristics. Look at those two parameters and realize that every person, although they sit in one prime temperament, they can always swing to one of the adjacent temperaments.

You’ll find that people tend to swing more comfortably one way than the other and generally you will find that they swing more the one way in a work situation and more another way in a social situation.

So make sure that you assess how they are swinging in the work situation because that is the situation that you are dealing with right now.

Explain Their Temperament

We have covered the importance of placing people in the right kinds of jobs according to their temperament. You should have done that when you interviewed this person for the job in the first place.

Before you even gave them the job you should have assessed that. But even though you know what the person’s temperament is, I guarantee that they don’t know what it is. So it is important that you sit down and help that person to identify his or her temperamental make up.

Point it out and say, “I can see that you are this way. Do you realize that you have this temperamental mix? I see in you that you tend to respond that way and you seem more comfortable there. Are you aware of what your temperament is?”

Help the person to know who they are because most people don’t know it.

Identify Their Strengths and Weaknesses

And then once you have identified that start identifying the strengths and weaknesses. The moment you identify the temperament you know immediately what their strengths and weaknesses are.

You may have met this person for the first time. You may be interviewing them for a job for the first time. But the moment you have assessed a person’s temperament you don’t even need to know more about them.

You don’t even need to have had any experience with them. You don’t need to know any of their friends or contacts or anything about them. You know more about them than they realize.

When you can come across that confidently and say, “I see that you tend to be more of a driver temperament. Obviously you are very work oriented and time oriented, and you are concerned about getting things done on time.

“You would prefer to spend time in work rather than spending time socializing with people.”

You see somebody who has an analytical orientation and you can say, “I see you like to get the job done right. You don’t like to do a half job. You like things to be done well, and you don’t like to rush into anything until you have thought it through very well. I can see that you are that kind of person.”

They will sit up and say, “Wow, how did you know that? We’ve only just met.”

You see immediately the person starts to identify who they are.

Use Their Strengths

Now identify their strengths and capitalize on those, because these are what you are going to be using in the business situation. These are what you need in order to get that employee to give you maximum output. So identify those strengths, capitalize on them and make sure that these are what the person is going to use in their work.

It is no good employing somebody in a job that is going to major on their weaknesses, then you put them in the wrong job. Use their strengths.

Say to them, “I see that you are really very good on this. I see that you are good at getting the job done on time. That is why I have put you in a job that requires deadlines. And there may be a lot of pressure in this job but I see in you the strength and the capability to handle these deadlines. There is nobody else I can trust with this. You are the person for the job.”

Immediately they will say, “Yes I am! I can see it. I’m the one.”

You have given them a picture. You’ve given them an image.

Don’t Ignore the Weaknesses

But everybody also has weaknesses. Don’t ignore them and pretend they don’t exist and say, “I see you have great strength in this. Let’s go for the job!”

Somewhere along the line that job is going to expose that person’s weaknesses.

You can’t say, “Well that’s just tough. I guess you have some weaknesses and we will have to just live with them.”

No, change is possible. Don’t just ignore the person’s weaknesses. Set them a goal to overcome their weaknesses.

Say, “Okay I can see you are pretty weak in this area of contact with people. So we are not going to put you on the phone to handle all the customer queries, because you are going to upset the customers and chase them away.

“But we are going to give you a little bit of exposure at times to people. You must learn to work with other people. So I’m going to give you a responsibility to interact with some of the other staff members. I am going to put you in charge of this weekly thing that involves interacting with the people.”

Whatever it may be, find out what their weaknesses are and begin to give them a few little things; things that are not of major concern and will not affect the company or the income and the sales. But start helping that person to overcome their weaknesses, because if they can overcome those weaknesses with a strength they already have, imagine what kind of employee you have?

Imagine what potential you have here in this person. They have overcome their weaknesses, and some of their weaknesses eventually start to become strengths. You will have a model employee. But you must help them to find it. You must identify and you must help them to identify what their strengths and their weaknesses are.