I started doing sales in the beginning of the 1990’s and whether I wanted to or not, I incorporated some of the then valid principles of work. You get a paper with sales goals, time limit and all freedom of this world to choose the way to do it. Employee training and employee development were strange foreign expressions for business in Serbia at the time. They throw you in the water without asking if you know how to swim but you are happy to have a job. In the first years, you dive more than you swim, nothing makes sense, but somehow you start to swim with different styles. Your nose is mostly above the surface of the water.

Then you become a manager and you automatically expect your employees to survive the “puppies thrown into the water” test. You think to yourself: if I survived, everyone can do it if they wanted to. That’s when I learned to wear a classic boss hat that can best be described by the following examples of questions towards employee: Why are you 3% below the May plan? How do you plan to redeem the sale? What’s happening with expenses in your department? Are you aware that the budget is the Holy Grail!?

We are decades away from that time that brought great changes. Only when I stopped acting like an ostrich who keeps its head in the sand and when I raised my head a little, I realized that the world had changed. Everything has become more complex –from the process to demands we ask from people. Quite logically, we can’t expect employees to come to the company with all the necessary knowledge, not to mention the need of employees to understand the culture of the corporation he has just come to, which is impossible to learn in books. Employee development is becoming a key motivating factor, as well as probably the only true competitive advantage of a company. Development takes time, patience and great dedication! In these situations, it’s good to replace a boss hat with a coaching hat. Help an employee to get from point A to point B, do not give advice, ask questions, listen carefully, and allow him/her to tell what’s on his/her mind.

The unpredictability of market events as well as the speed of change are so great that business sometimes looks like a jungle. You go with a team through a thick jungle, vines hang around, numerous dangers lurk, but satisfaction is also along the way. From time to time you need to climb the tallest tree and take a look at what is happening. We put a leader’s hat on when we have climbed the tree, which helps us determine the direction of the company’s movement. Then we go down, tell what we saw and what we decided, and then together with the team we head in that direction. Now, the real art is to know when and which hat to wear. It’s not easy to notice when we have gone too far with wearing one of the hats or whether one of our them has been lying in our closet for too long? It’s the art of management of our time that brings the beauty of creation and development.