Coach Train Learn

Personal PR – How To Fly Your Own Flag

On many occasions of any career, there are times where it’s vital to represent yourself fully. To make the best publicity you can for ‘yours sincerely’. And there are easy tactics you can use…

Whether you are applying for a promotion in your existing organization; looking for a new job altogether; or simply experiencing a performance review, there are steps you can take that will enhance your outcome.

Most, if not all individuals, find it hard to tweak their achievements to make the best of them. Whether this comes from naivety, modesty or simply a misjudgment of what they can pluck from their experiences, it’s hard to say.

The truth is that long hours wringing hands and fretting need not be suffered. Because in the main, all you need when being assessed is already within you. All you need to create a really effective candidate – or A+ result in your performance.

There are six key steps (plus a bonus!), to making the most of your assets:-

1. Start Early

Be aware. When you are in the thick of experiences and learning, always, but always be prepared to make a note – however small – of something that you did. You don’t have to write a whole portfolio of it, that can come later (just kidding!). Just notice when things happen.

2. Link to Role

By being aware of what you might need to take careful note of before you start looking for it. Here you’re simply looking for the categories upon which you will ultimately be tested and then you can start to create a list of your personal activities (the ‘What I did’ of your evidence).

3. Keeping Up

As you create this list of your activities, you categorize them as you go and as the evidence piles up, create a note also of the gaps too. Then you can pro-actively ‘create’ the activities you need to make your offer almost irresistible. You will become rounded and thorough and then have the luxury of deciding not just that you have enough, but you have a choice of evidence you can talk about when you are being assessed.

4. ‘I Can’t Find Enough’

It’s vital to understand that the evidence you create does not need to move mountains. A clear action you personally took, where you can demonstrate just four simple elements – What you did; Why you did it; What the outcome was and What you learned is perfect – and keep it short and succinct. It gives them clear facts and a space to ask you more too – A perfect candidate!

5. Last Minute?

Left it too late? No problem! All you need is a kindly colleague to ask you the questions and push you for answers. It’s amazing at what we leave out or underestimate in ourselves. With focus, it’s possible to create quite comprehensive evidence if you are coached to create it in a couple of hours with a ‘coach’ friend drawing from you the actual – even where you think there are few.

6. Blagging!

Actual lying can never be condoned – least of all because you’ll get found out and if you were successful and got something without really deserving it, likely as not it wouldn’t suit you anyway. You can – and must – embellish, by really stretching out all you do in a category and make it really sing for you. Every scrap of paper evidence; every single impressive fact and figure pile up to become much more interesting to assessors.

7. And Finally – A Bonus Step!

Always but always focus on what you did. Yes, you personally. Using ‘we’ and’ they’ won’t cut it. Be brave and strong and shout about you out loud. Use the ‘I’ word and really show what you are made of.

We all do pretty good work. We all deserve that you be recognised and in the main, we don’t shout about ourselves enough. And when you don’t, who will?

How to be a Management Legend

Being a management legend in your own lifetime might seem to be something of an impossibility. A dream you sometimes dream when you are having one of those spare moments (like you do!).

So, here’s the skinny on how to make this possible, with the minimal of effort.

When you look at the quality of management out there in the real world right now, you might find that being a legend is not that difficult.

Here are three prerequisites of legend status:-

A good manager is able to deliver the required results. Indeed it isn’t hard to drive employees hard and for a while to run any business or team in an environment of fear.

Legends are more than this.

Any old manager is able to make friends with the employees in their team and be that ‘Good old boy (or gal)’ for a while. Being a good buddy for those you manage isn’t hard for a while.

Legends are more than this too.

Some good managers are able to come up with a bit of a plan for the foreseeable future (and there are less even of these than you might think). It’s something of a plan on the ‘back of an envelope’ sort of thing, but it’s better than nothing.

Legends are different to this as well.

So, to create legendary status as a manager, there are four key steps that go beyond the ‘good’ and become legendary:-

1. Deliver Results

Legendary managers go beyond delivering for the short-term, vitally important though that is – especially in the climate of right now.

Focus on results for today is simply not enough to get your legendary badge. You have to go further.

There needs to be an understanding that whilst today is allowed to take up some of your management style, legendary managers have an eye on the future too. A future where there will be broader demands on the team to deliver results and to be much more effective that will need to be accommodated.

So legends are constantly considering the needs to be even better in the future. To develop their people through challenge and support that encourages risk-taking for employees – but in an environment where they feel safe enough to give it a go.

Results for today are who we have become as a society – as good managers – the greatest and the legends do more to focus on the today – and the tomorrow.

2. Create Relationships

Legendary managers are well thought of by their people. Indeed they are memorable and would often feature on that most famous of lists – three people who have been the biggest influences in your life.

Legends know that relationship building is not something that you can turn on and off at will. They know that the very best really, truly, live relationships.

They don’t really need to work at it – except perhaps at first – because it’s something they do naturally. Building relationships is about being out there with your people. Talking with them and much more importantly, listening to them and valuing them because of that.

Legendary managers are able to tread that fine line that divides familiarity with relationship. They – and their people – know what’s allowed and what isn’t.

Relationships are also about fairness, equality, trust, rapport, keeping promises and more. Relationships are that togetherness where each would – and will – go the extra mile. Manager and employee – together.

3. Vision for the Future

Legends come from having a motivation and drive that is irrisistible. An ability – a charisma – where their people can’t help but come along with them.

To get there requires inspiration and the skill to see the possibilities and share that energy with your people. When you dream for yourself, you know that it’s possible.

When you bring your people along to collaborate on the possibilities, then they will always remember that you had them there with you at that momentous time.

Having a vision is a great idea. Co-creating a vision together with your people is unexpected and unbelievable – they will love you for it.

Being a management legend is simply an amazing opportunity not only to deliver the results you want, but also to do that with purpose. The purpose of being with your people on their journey too.

Be Yourself as a Manager – No-one Else

There’s a way of sensing when a manager is ‘putting it on’. It’s a sense many, if not all employees have, to some extent or the other – and they will quickly sniff you out…

It’s very tempting as you manage a team new to you. They expect great things of you, the ‘new broom’ manager coming in to shake things up a bit and make the difference.

It’s a clean slate for you too, as you move into this new management role. A new team of people to work with. Maybe even a new organization too.

Those old experiences where you could have been so much better are behind you. Maybe these new employees won’t know the old you. That one who might have done the job even better.

So you try to be something different from before. Perhaps it goes beyond the learning you’ve had from the past, where things didn’t always go quite to plan.

You are free of those times where you got caught out – more likely got caught short – in your management. So you can start again here – and be different.

When you learnt those lessons, perhaps even some of them were made public – in addition to those where you yourself knew that you could have been better, you could have wished them away. But, if there was anything about you, you didn’t because you learned about yourself. Learned how to ‘do differently’ (otherwise known as ‘better’) next time.

So now you have the big chance to be different and you want to try it on. Thing is, that sixth sense of your people. They can tell when a manager isn’t being authentic. They just can. Employees have suffered generations of managers and so they know when you are simply not being the true you.

And you know, they want the true you, because that’s where they are able to get to know you – understand you and, above all, respond to you and the way you do things.

If you try to be someone you aren’t, it will be clear. And in addition to seeing through you playing a part, they will come to resent you for actually trying to be someone you aren’t. They will feel besmirched that you weren’t trusting with them from the start by showing them the true you – the inner you.

Your authentic self as leader will be the easiest and most effective way to be your best and you really will be respected for it.

And as you lead from the heart, the model you set will be followed by your people. They will be authentic with you as well.

Delegation – To Whom? When?

In a recent interview, Ron Dennis of the McLaren Formula 1 team said,

“I’m the executive chairman, but if I delegate a role, I’ll step away & let that person get on with it”.

When we lead and manage teams, we cannot stand alone and do it all by ourselves on our own. Our role is to get the best from the many…

Delegation is all about clearing our own desks of the ‘stuff’ that comes at us and giving the tasks to others. We do this for a number of vital reasons:-

1. We delegate to others strengths

Low confidence is one of the biggest challenges that organizations face. Helping others to see their greatnesses is a big step on the way.

So we give them work they are good at, love to do and can deliver perhaps even better than we can ourselves.

‘Catching others doing things right’, is a great mantra for any manager or leader.

2. We delegate to others weaknesses

Now, where this works it’s a great solution on all sides. When we show confidence in others to develop their weaker skills – as long as we hold their hand on the way – it builds capability and also team capacity.

Care is needed that we acknowledge exactly where these are not weaknesses just because they haven’t had the time to develop – they simply are a weakness.

And we don’t push something that will only reduce confidence and a sense of failure.

3. We delegate our own weaknesses

Why struggle with talents we don’t have? Where we know that we simply aren’t good at some things why keep trying?

Great leaders give their own areas of absolute weakness or ineffectiveness to others who are not only more capable, but also will benefit from showing their capability too.

4. We delegate our own strengths

Of course there are some elements of work where our role requires our personal skills and usually leaders are recruited because they are good at it.

Where succession planning, employee development and motivation would find it valuable, delegation of areas where a leader is very skilled is a worthwhile activity.

It also helps leaders from staying within their own comfort zone too – just doing what they are good at – which can be synonymous with what they ‘like’ to do.

5. We delegate to develop people

We might pick out specific activities that we usually deliver ourselves and pro-actively choose people who would benefit from having these delegated to.

This is part of structured development planning where the delegation is a focused ‘gift’ from the leader to the individual.

6. We delegate for efficiency

As highly paid leaders, we can, of course, choose what we do. Because of this, we need to be fully focused to ensure our organization gets full value from the higher reward the role gives to us individually.

In effect, we delegate everything we possibly can where – very honestly – we decide whether an activity can be delegated with no loss of performance in the organization – sometimes in the longer- rather than the shorter-term.

We can then get on with our own job description and let others get to theirs.

A couple of key points on delegation

As Ron Dennis said this week in the article in the Mail On Sunday Live magazine, delegate and leave them alone to get on with it. There is a rider to this. Be there, at least at first where they might need support.

Delegation is not about closing the door and letting them struggle.

Great leaders keep a watchful, supportive and distant eye on those to whom they have delegated.

How far can you go with delegation? Well, probably much further than you think.

Building Relationships – To Make Business Changes Easy

Relationship building is a vital element of any manager’s activity.

It has to be an incessant and pro-active behaviour which is – or becomes – the very essence of any manager’s personal style.

When we work with change, it’s going to be challenging for our people to accept, so the relationships we have with them will be strained by default.

We are doing something to them which is going to have an impact – it’s almost always our fault.

Where no real effort has been made to create substantial relationships with the individuals in a team, the more challenging it will be to make sure that change is delivered successfully.

The Challenge

Building relationships isn’t hard. Many managers find that creating the necessary time to build conversations with each and every one of their team is difficult.

When this is the case, it’s important to take a close look at how time is used and consider different ways to work.

Sometimes managers are not focused enough to make sure that they do their own role. It becomes easy to take on tasks which are less demanding at the expense of making time for their people.

Yet relationship building is the core of a manager’s activity set. The role is to manage people, not to push a pen around or work with objects. People are where the focus has to lie for any manager worth the title.

How To Do It

As a simple step to making relationships work, target having one-to-one dialogues with a set number of your people each day. Try to ensure that the way you interact with them is to value them.

An easy way to do this is to let them do most of the talking, by triggering their thinking with open questions that seek information. You can then easily let them talk and do most of the listening when that is your goal.

This can have a remarkable effect that shows them you care about them as individuals and that you have the time to make them feel a valued member of the team.

Investment upfront will then pay off when the tricky conversations take place in changing situations.

© Martin Haworth 2011. This is an expanded version of just one of many change management ideas, from Resilience in Change. For your free – downloadable today – ‘Managing Change’ Super-Simple Success Tips e-book, visit http://www.ResilienceInChange.com

Under New Management

My football club has a new manager. So I set to thinking about just what he might be doing on his first day.

Clearly, there will be a need to be introduced to all the key people on his team – and not just the players – so that he has at least got some sort of idea of who does what and where each of them lies within his remit of management.

Of course his behaviours will come under quite a bit of scrutiny too and how he comes over will – at least for the beginning of his reign – create an environment which is very important for the early days.

Now, managers have an obligation to deliver results – none more obviously than a football manager. Positive results will be great if they are instantaneously successful and they will also need to stand the longer test of time, during which overall team performance will be judged.

Like in a race, position in a league gives an obvious assessment of how they do and by definition, how their manager has delivered too.

In the cut throat world of football management, managers are only judged on results and, perhaps sadly, not really how they deliver them.

So there are managers out there in the industry whose attitudes and behaviours run the whole range. From out and out dictators, to the highly approachable ‘people-persons’. There’s no simple template that sorts out the winners from the has-beens.

On that first day, there is probably one asset that will be second-to-none for this new manager.

In his interests too, listening carefully to what each and every member of his extended team say will build relationships and trust in him – with the added benefit that the longer he listens, the better he will understand the individuals who will have to perform their duties – often on his behalf as they cross that white line onto the pitch each week.

Best wishes then to Eddie Howe at Burnley FC!

For an extended range of activities that the best managers focus on on their first day, here’s a link to an article I wrote a while ago http://supersuccessfulmanager.com/blog/10-things-better-managers-do-on-their-first-day/