Hello friend, hope you brought your cup of coffee!

Let’s chat a bit about needs today. It’s one of those foundational business concepts, worth internalizing as you grow into a management role.

At the most elementary level, a business exists purely to deliver value to society. But if nobody needs that value, what would be the point of the business? It would cease to exist.

So, needy people are critical. Well, their needs, not needy people.

Luckily for us, some really smart folks have already unpacked this concept from multiple angles, and today’s letter is about adding their insights to your management toolbox. Maybe you have heard of them, maybe not - but I hope this chat helps you reflect on how you are leveraging these models to improve your effectiveness as a people manager, and extracting the best performance.

Mr Bond and Dr Evil

As a manager, you have stakeholders. These stakeholders have needs. They expect you to deliver some form of value to meet their needs. Sometimes though, expectations are mismatched. Like we see here with a captive Mr Bond.

Why do mismatched expectations occur? Usually, it’s because you didn’t understand their needs well enough. Or you assumed something you shouldn’t have. It can get messy and ugly when you find yourself in this position.

It can be damaging to your career if it’s a pattern - internal and external stakeholders won’t put up for long with a manager that’s not meeting expectations.

If only there was a way to frame this challenge and deal with it effectively and repeatably.

When it comes to managing people, I have my 3 personal go-to models. They are old, but I consider them “classic”. They have served me well over the years with my teams. Let’s take a look.

1. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Human needs are layered in a hierarchy, and lower-level needs must be satisfied before the higher-level needs get much attention. In people management, this means that your employees will pretty much be obsessed with their lowest level need that is not met (like job security) before they can be motivated by higher needs (like recognition and personal development).

   If you understand where each team member is on this hierarchy, you can effectively motivate them, and progress them to higher level needs like self actualization. In my experience, the more people you have with higher level needs on your team, the higher the performance of that team.

2. Herzberg's 2 Factor Theory: There are things that make people unhappy in the workplace (Hygiene factors) and things that make people happy (Motivators). The two are completely different and do not overlap.

   Find out what is unhygienic in your team and fix asap to bring back to baseline performance. Then supercharge that baseline performance by focusing on motivators.

3. Daniel Pink - Drive: People have 3 intrinsic motivating factors - Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Daniel argues that people innately want to do things that matter. They want to have impact.

   Figure out how to align their role to these intrinsic factors and you’ll bring out superior performance in your team members.

Your key takeaway about Needs

Right up there with “Value” when it comes to management, “Needs” is a critical concept. Your ability to understand your internal and external stakeholder needs and act on them will make or break your success as a manager. With your own people, it will help you extract the best performance, leading to better results and outcomes as a manager.

Action Point: If you haven't yet, start figuring out where each team member stands in terms of their individual needs and strategize on how to address them effectively.

Your goal is to have a personalised plan to address the lower level needs of each team member and then get them hooked on the higher level needs.

It is the higher level needs that intrinsically motivates people to high performance.

Hope you enjoyed today’s coffee chat (in a letter) - catch you next week!