Michael Van Dyke, founder and CEO of Serengeti Enterprises and a part-time professor, is offering a seminar that should be increasingly relevant these days: “Doing More With Less.” The workshop, to be held Oct. 16 at the Reston Campus of Northern Virginia Community College, is designed to help managers deal with the increasingly common trend of shrunken budgets and smaller staffs.
How did you get started in this field?
For 25 years I was a production manager for theater music and dance events. So I was that manager trying to do more with less. My undergraduate degree was in communications studies education, the study of how communication helps people do more, and I found I became more interested in training people than actually performing the work of having to do that. I sort of slipped into it sideways, I guess you could say.
Who’s the typical person taking this course?
The typical person is either manager of a department within a larger organization or, in many cases they are small-business owners who are managing their own people.
Is there any one piece of advice you find yourself giving people over and over?
Two related pieces of advice. One is to make sure that you reinforce your good employees. So the tendency is to focus on the weak link or poor performers. According to a Gallup poll last year the No. 1 reason why people leave their jobs is they feel underappreciated. In order to keep morale at a high level it’s important then for the managers to not just take for granted the high performers but make sure they compliment and reward them to reinforce that good performance. The second thing is to be very observant of the strengths that you see in the people working for you and capitalize on those.
Has interest spiked in the seminar recently?
I think it’s becoming more intense in the last few months. Having your senior management telling you that you have to do more with less has been going on for a number of years.
