Your Business might be digital. People running your business is not.

This post is not going to be about technology. Believe it or not, I am not going to discuss digital. I know, that is surprising given that everyone is talking about it and everyone has some new shiny job headline with the word digital on it. In fact, this is what a very good colleague at everis named the digital "polvorón"  taking into account how difficult is to process all the information and discussion that the term is generating lately (the same happens when you try chewing a polvorón).

In this post I am going to write about some genuinely and sometimes surprising analog devices named people. I have to admit that as a good engineer, I find it a lot more challenging (and interesting) to deal with people than to deal with technology. As a good friend told me when I was starting my IESE's PDD education: "I look forward to see you discussing the People Management module case studies when you cannot solve it using an excel spreadsheet".

Constantly working with technology and IT can lead us to think that people works in the exact same way that a software product does: through a (more or less attractive) user interface, generating outputs to certain inputs in a predictable way (maybe with some "bugs" associated to given functionalities). Truth is no software product has even come close to the degree of complexity of human behaviour (we'll, at least we are trying). In the end we always work with people. Our business are ran by people. Some managers and executives seem to have just forgotten about this, trying to solve their problems using people as if they were mere excel (or big data analytics if you want to be more trendy) variables. To be honest, I think that some managers just wish they could interact with their teams by using some kind of a predefined API.

Countless articles and books have been written about people management. Countless organizations have implemented policies and initiatives to foster people management. But the truth is (again) that it all comes down to individuals, and how they interact with each other, so no formulas or complex IT-based analytics can replace a real human relationship.

Sorry if you have read the entire post trying to find the holy grail of managing people in the conclusions I'm about to write, because I'm not going to make any rocket science here: if you run a business, get to know your employees. If you lead a team, get to know your team. Not by measuring them, not by analyzing them using some digital trendy systems and generating fancy statistics. Not by e-mail! Get to sit down with them for a coffee. Listen to them. Look them in the eye. 

"Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end."  - Immanuel Kant