Coach Train Learn

Getting Your Feet Wet

Sometimes getting ahead means initial shocks and challenges to your system.

And then you can really push on to make progress.

Walking the fields this morning after a heavy night rain, I couldn’t avoid the big puddles - there was just no way through. Not only had it rained hard, it had been dry for a while and nothing was getting through the clay laden ground.

So, I had to get my feet wet. The walking shoes I use had no claim to be water proof. I knew that - they knew that. I was in for a drenching - in the foot area anyway!

There was quite an initial shock of the cold on my feet and once I was in, I was able to push on without worrying about it any more.

Indeed after only a short while, sure, my feet were still wet and surprise, surprise, they started to warm up again.

When I got home, my feet were dry quickly and, in fact, even warmer.

In business, there are all sorts of things our day job brings us that could give us cold, wet feet. They slap us in the face usually just when we don’t want it as well.

Most times they are issues; challenges we avoid, because the cold and wet equivalents in business are discomfort, challenge and, horror of horrors, even confrontation.

And whilst we don’t like the consequences we suffer each day, we like confrontation even less, so we let things slide - even if it’s just a little. we mumble in the background, blame everyone and everything else even.

So we edge around them, day after day, cautiously. Until the day comes where there is no other way and we plunge in, get through it and build ourselves up for the next time.

Experience shows us that it wasn’t that bad, actually. We got through it and survived. It’s that first moment that you have to have the courage to take that first, wet, cold step!

And became stronger. Much, much stronger in the process.

Cold, wet feet don’t bother us anymore. I don’t worry about the experiences I’ll have when walking. They are surmountable and in some ways, a different experience I like to have once in a while.

Today, whenever you are reading this, think about something that is your patch of cold water to walk through, and face into it right now.

Take the first step right now, today, because it will never be the first step again. The next time, those feet of yours will know that once you get your feet wet and cold, there is another warmer, drier side, just around the corner.

Delegation Is All About Effective Management

It is well known that effective leaders are those people that understand what delegation is and who also have the required skills with which to delegate tasks effectively.

A manager who is not good at delegating tasks to a team, will soon find that they start to burn themselves out building their stress levels.

The hallmark of a strong leader is that it requires learning to let go and be strong enough to put your faith in others, to do things that you do not need to do on your own.

You must also appreciate that there is a right way to delegate things and a wrong way to delegate tasks. The wrong way will lead to failure, whilst the correct ways will ensure success.

It’s vital to understand the means of delegating tasks to team members is.

Many managers simply do not know where to start and so will struggle and may even end up still having too much work to do by themselves.

Experience is however a great teacher and so by learning through trial and error methods you will soon get the hang of it.

This in turn does mean having to practice delegating tasks regularly on a day-to-day basis to your people, whose skills will gradually evolve in these new areas.

Alarm Bells Ringing?

Life creeps up on us.

When we have the day job coming at us seemingly incessantly, we absorb, adapt and get on with it, just because we’re in the thick of it.

This is when we are at our most vulnerable.

The creep of unsatisfactory performance is hidden away from us, because we lose focus sometimes on what’s happening around us.

Indeed, we can get too close to the action to see what’s happening.

Imagine being somewhere that is similar to where you manage your team.

It’s easy to see there the positives and negatives of what they are doing, as if our senses are more finely tuned.

When we play at home, we allow inadequacies to happen, because they are beneath our radar.

Familiarity ensures that we have blind spots and miss some of the standards that we set out to achieve in our management.

Being able to stand back and see what we are achieving and measured against what we want as a manager is pretty important, especially where we have been in post for a while.

Sometimes, it helps to literally publish the standards you want to achieve, with the support and input of your team members, just so that you all know and that it’s really clear, what you expect and want.

At other times, you might find yourself doing a personal ‘quality audit’ against a checklist you have within you.

‘Just what are we achieving here?’

As you refine this approach, you will become more sensitized and able to define more quickly and easily when performance gets out of line.

When this happens, you will find that the alarm bells ring quietly and often, as you fine tune to achieve the best.

No crisis, things just get back into line as you go.

Finding the Time with Red Circles

Ask any manager and they will tell you one of the biggest challenges they have, is the time that seems to always be filled.

A manager’s life is, indeed, a busy one.

The opportunity is to understand exactly what is important enough to occupy your time, and what really isn’t.

There are vital activities in a manager’s life that often get shunted to the back of the queue.

So often, these are the activities that are the ones that actually are critical to success.

These are activities like coaching, developing individuals and team, planning, relationship building and more of the like.

Managers find it tough to make time for these because there is always so much ‘more important’ stuff to do!

Yet a small investment of available time in each week will make more progress in reducing that level of urgency in some of your less productive activities.

It’s just a question of how!

That ‘more important’ stuff just isn’t that important in the big picture, it is, for some reason more demanding - some might say ‘urgent’ - and it needs to decrease.

So, take out a red pen, check your diary or your calendar, find one hour (you need to be withdrawn from your urgency addiction slowly!) and circle it.

This is your hour for the non-urgent and yet vital times in your week.

In week two, find two hours, with an initial target of 4 hours a week.

The red circles are impenetrable times where you find a quiet spot and get on with the bigger work you do.

Not the impositions on your time that are maybe someone else’s problem; nice things to do; fire-fighting and more.

When you show the courage and focus to make this investment in yourself and your development, you will quickly reap the benefits.

Show and Tell - And Stop

Delegation is a very valuable management tool.

It enables a manager to do less of the activities they don’t personally need to do, whilst enabling members of their team to take some of this workload and gain from it.

They gain from the valuable experiences they now enjoy as they explore new challenges and build up their skills, from the delegated tasks you creatively engineer for them - real tasks, suited to their needs as well.

This is a real win-win!

When the task is delegated, there is a fine balance between how intrusive a manager is in the ‘how’ of what they want the task done, as distinct from the ‘what’ it is that the task will deliver.

It’s so easy to overwhelm the person accepting the delegated task when you overlay your personal ‘how’ on them as the only way the task can be done effectively.

So a great way forward is to actually show the individual concerned what the outcome needs to be like - telling them what’s important to you in that outcome - and then let them get on with the exploring the best way for themselves.

When you watch a small child, they learn from you showing them things.

They also learn from those times when you supervise them loosely and they explore for themselves.

In both these circumstances, the time you let them be, is where they will find the most amazing of discoveries.

Your people are just the same.

They need to explore freely for the best value experiences for themselves and in the long run, to develop as very valuable and capable members of your team.

The Managing of Middle Management

It’s funny how differences of opinion can happen.

This week, I came across two sides of an opinion and was able to observe the response to both.

A middle manager leaves.

His team are relieved, because he wasn’t much liked for his seemingly lazy behavior, poor communication skills and inability to manage with just a little discipline at least.

His own manager is very disappointed to lose ‘a great manager’.

Who is right?

For members of a team, their needs are about getting information, being listened to, having development support and someone who is effective as a manager. If they get someone who they get on well with and even like, that’s a bonus.

For a line manager, they need a middle manager who delivers results, they aren’t too usually interested in how these are achieved.

Is there a way to satisfy both sides of this?

Great middle managers do the right things in the eyes of their team - being demanding is perfectly alright, as long as it is fair and consistently applied throughout the team.

Results are achieved purely because these behaviors are precisely what’s needed to get good results.

The managers of middle managers sometimes don’t get close enough to the ‘results’ they want, until it’s too late.

By being distant from the action, they fail to notice when results aren’t being achieved. Worse, they think they see them being delivered, until it’s too late - and then sustainable results are often out of the window - gone.

Worse still is when key individuals feel that their direct manager is not performing adequately and their more senior manager seems to miss all that.

Then they really do get demoralized.