Coach Train Learn

Key Tips For The New Leader

In this week’s blog post, Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements, shares his thoughts on ways to start out best as a new leader. You can find out more at his excellent blog at goalsandachievements.com

Key Tips For The New Leader

If you are like most of us you initially feel great when you secure your first leadership role.  A few months down the line you can easily find yourself in a position where you are lacking confidence and finding it a struggle.

So what are my 5 key tips for the new leader?

Key Tip 1: Be Prepared For The Dip

Stepping into a first role as a leader or even into a new leadership role, you are going to hit some sort of dip.  Rather than being surprised by it, recognise that it is going to happen.  After all you have probably moved from the top of the tree at the last level to the bottom of the ladder in your new role.

Key Tip 2: Don’t Be Over Ambitious

Yes you want to achieve results.  At the same time it is important to remember that being a leader is a marathon rather than a sprint.  You don’t have to achieve everything straight away and the reality is that it is not feasible either.  Focus on small things first and build momentum.

Key Tip 3: Listen Before Implementing

There will be things that you will see as the new person that others are missing.  Armed with this you could easily get into implementation mode.  A much better strategy is to focus on listening to others ideas, insights and contributions.  After all it might just turn your good idea into a great idea.

Key Tip 4: Take Care of Yourself

Leading is demanding.  To stay on top of your game you need to take care of yourself.  Leadership is as much about leading yourself as it is leading others.  Try to take consistent actions to keep you on top of your game.

Key Tip 5: Create A Support Network

It’s tough and often lonely at the top.  That is why a support network is vital.  It might be a mastermind group, a coach or mentor or even a membership forum.  Find what is right for you and get the support network in place.

Bottom Line: Leading is tough.  However, doing some simple things well can set you up for early success as a new leader.

Duncan Brodie is a leadership and management expert who can help you and your people achieve extraordinary success. Check his website out at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

Cleansing Life’s Little Irritations

In everyones’ lives there are minor irritations that get in the way of making us feel fulfilled and let us get on.

So often, they seem so trivial that it would feel a bit silly to be making a fuss in getting them resolved, especially where it might necessitate some sort of confrontation with someone else.

Yet when we do accept things that bug us, we are starting down a road of tolerating that slowly and surely begins to build up.

Once these are things in our lives that we allow to pass by without resolution, it can move from being a series of small annoyances – each in their own way trivial – to a much bigger animal that causes stress and frustration.

In business, when we lead others, the most effective are able to quickly find these sources of irritation and firmly resolve them.

Be they issues with people, resources or external factors, the strongest leaders understand clearly what is within their own influence and actively – pro-actively even – take steps to fix these issues fast.

Capable leaders fix them before they get anywhere near a big enough accumulation to become the bigger problem.

Indeed, for those who can act this way and do, problems are minimised. For those who don’t – often blaming the world and his mother for their challenges, with ‘it’s not MY fault’ – it’s their own behaviors which are the bigger problem.

It’s difficult for anyone not to carry a few unresolved matters around, yet accumulations of such things we tolerate are really a choice that we personally make. Choosing not to resolve such issues is therefore a choice too.

And, where we accept this – our own, conscious choice – it an indication of shortcomings in our capabilities, as much as anything.

So, here’s the challenge – notice those things that you’ve been tolerating recently and resolve, today, to stop. To get them off your back, right away, today.

Once a month, rinse and repeat.

Give yourself clean space to do what you do best – lead your people effectively.

You might find this link to the ‘Mark and Angel Hack Life’ website helpful too.

Let Your People Find Their Answers

It’s almost second nature to managers. Their team members come and share a problem with them and seek solutions. The manager, on cue, solves the problem and everyone’s happy.

For managers, here’s where the problems start. Although it’s ever so nice to feel the pride of being ‘the one who knows everything’ in the eyes of their people, it can be both repetitive and time-consuming for the manager after a while.

You see whilst it’s nice to be a hero and help everyone, the more you do it, the more they come to see you and get help.

Which actually helps no-one.

The manager ends up with a permanent knock on the door to fix the issues their people find, stopping them doing their own job; the individuals fail to develop properly because, well, they have a manager who fixes everything for them!

For the individual team members this can become quite frustrating, because they are always waiting for the boss to be available to solve their problems. It can seem arrogant that the boss is the only one with the answers.

The solutions given might not be quite the fit they want to deliver and even more of a problem, it can be boring when you simply get told what to do, rather than challenged to find solutions yourself.

And the solutions the manager finds are simply the thinking of one person, so others who might want to air their thoughts may find that the potential synergy of many, simply gets lost as our hero solves the problem all by themselves.

There’s an easy way round this.

Managers need to ‘not know’. When faced with an issue or a problem, a simple discipline to ask questions first will always create better outcomes both for relationships as well as results overall.

A simple ‘Well, what are you thinking…’ to ‘How do you think we can fix this…’ and everything in between, will get the best from your people. The phrasing of the language is vital. Softly supportive will build the relationship. Hard and challenging might scare team members off.

As you build their confidence to solve problems themselves, your office might become a much lonelier place and, as eventually people only rarely tap on your door, you can feel warm inside that they are all much better employees because of it.

Too often as managers we are the ones who know all the answers. Too often those answers are not the best fixes, and too rarely will our people develop and grow unless we facilitate that growth.

Step back; let go; be creative with your ‘not knowing’ and reap the benefits.

Be Timely With Confrontation

Confrontation is a challenging activity to undertake. It’s one that many managers fail to achieve in their role, all for the want of a seemingly easy life.

The challenge comes when those things which they have failed to face into accumulate and then come back to bite them.

The overwhelming level of challenge when so many matters have been unresolved will reach the tipping point and disaster strikes.

Confrontation when performance is below requirements is challenging enough; leaving it to brew – for the manager, the individual and the rest of the team, leads to an overall insecurity and stress levels that will lead to bigger consequences.

Many a time a manager has complained that they either cannot retain employees.

Yet further, deeper scrutiny will show that their own inability to confront their employees and maintain consistency and standards had a significant part to play.

When poor performance or indiscipline need to be faced up to, small and often is much more effective and less stressful for all than big and rare, particularly at the start of a workplace relationship.

By challenging these standards regularly – especially at the start of a role – a manager’s expectations quickly becomes understood by all and compliance will follow.

When you disagree with what your people do, ensure that you tell them fairly, promptly and simply, with a hint of firmness thrown in.

By ensuring it’s timely and relates to the one incident at a time, you will ensure that you are seen to be fair and determined and the occasions will happen less and less often.

By leaving important interventions too long, the matter becomes a big one and much more effort – more confrontation – is needed.

And this helps no-one.

Creating More Time

When I work with clients, one of the things that most often comes up is that they want more time. In the busy, challenging world where we try to shoe-horn more into our days, the cry for ‘more time’ has never been louder.

Yet when you think of it, the demand for more time to do the things we do, is actually an impossible dream. No-one can have more time.

There is only one lot of time any of us have, because time is finite. You cannot make more time.

We just have to be smarter with the time each of us has available to us and the challenge is to do with our time, that which makes it more effective.

Before looking at how we do this in the workplace, it’s also – in fact probably more – important to ensure that we have the balance between work, play and home just right.

If one is out, then the others suffer and usually make the one we are spending more focus on than we should suffer too. Just a thought.

In the workplace, when we want to ‘make more time’, we need to re-evaluate what we are doing with the finite time we have.

So, it’s worth considering just what we need to do more of; do less of and indeed, stop doing altogether (whether this means actually stopping doing some things that really add no value at all, or delegate this work to people who will variously:

a) benefit from learning new skills
b) be better at it than us anyway
c) be a better value proposition (i.e. cheaper than us) to deliver the same (or even better) standards than we could.

So, what will you do less of, do more of and stop doing today.

That’s how you make ‘more’ time.

Self-Managing Your Leadership Conversations

When leaders talk to their people, they face some difficult challenges. Whilst it’s very important to get the balance between giving information and building the relationship, the very nature of their relationship can get in the way.

Unless the relationship is very sound and the self-awareness of the leader is quite acute, balancing talking and listening may be hard to achieve.

Leaders are by definition, some way up the hierarchy, so there is a natural tendency for employees to bow in deference when the leader is talking. Although this might not go quite so far as intimidation, it will always be quite close.

Similarly, leaders having something to say is quite compelling, because they might have useful information to impart as well as give clues about what they think of the person listening to them.

So in leadership, there is an inherent role to ensure that the balance of any conversation ensures that individuals feel they have a close relationship with the leader – and in most circumstances, only the leader has the status to make this happen.

Whilst in many conversations the ‘two ears, one mouth’ rule works effectively (see this blog post for more), a simpler one might be of value when leaders engage with their people as individuals.

By simply ensuring that each side speaks for an equal amount of time, leaders can ensure that their people really feel heard, especially when they show they truly are interested by listening actively.

Being self-aware enough to appreciate when you have said your piece in a conversation and then giving the other side space for their say, is a challenge many leaders fail to achieve.

The most successful leaders balance the conversation as they recognise the value in giving space to others too.