IF you want to do a good job of managing people, you must be able to help them grow in competence and understanding. You must be able to teach them. Two promising young supervisors start out with equal desire and equal opportunities for advancement.

But do well for a time, earning promotion, regular pay raises, and the respect of their superiors. But then one seems to level off-“hit his ceiling”-while the other keeps going up.

The difference, as it often turns out, is that one has learned how to help and teach the people under him, while the other has not.

Focusing on Individuals

The first principle for working effectively with people is recognize the tremendous impact of modern business conditions on the variety of men and women in an organization. There are staff specialists in training, communications, operating research, quality control, production, scheduling, advertising, and any number of other areas.

These special areas mean not only that the people you deal with talk differently, but also those they think differently. A man who works over a long period with carefully picked samples, precise formulas and exact numbers is likely to develop a quite different frame of mind from that of the man who deals with subtleties of public opinion, general trends, and highly subjective judgments.