New Leader Tuesday-Beware Under or Over Managing

May 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

New Leader Tuesday at Management Excellence

New Leader Tuesday focuses specifically on the topics that all of us face as we take on this most difficult of all business challenges…leading others. In addition to this regular blog feature, I’m launching the New Leader e-newsletter.  If you are a new leader or, if you are responsible for new leader development on your team, the content is designed to help support your efforts.

–

The first year of your first job responsible for others (supervisor, lead, manager) is the early-awkward phase. Your technical or functional expertise and someone’s perception of your potential for leadership got you here. Your as of yet undeveloped or at least under-developed communication and coordination skills are what will carry you forward.

Making the transition to leadership is like suddenly shifting your dominant side from right handed to left handed for all of your major activities. Doable with practice, but darned awkward along the way. You’ll make mistakes…that’s expected. The goal here is to minimize the serious mistakes while accelerating your learning and acclimation.  

A common challenge for early leaders is to gauge how much to manage. Too much and you are micro-managing or even worse, doing your old job through others. The outcome is resentment and frustration over you as a leader, and an unhealthy working environment. No one does their best work for a micro-manager.

The other side of this early leader trap is under-managing. Sensitive to how much you and everyone else hate being micro-managed, and sensitive to not wanting to upset the group dynamics, your brain tells you to step back and let things go. Your brain is wrong. You falsely believe that your hands-off style will be appreciated and admired. Quit thinking about that “Boss of the Year” coffee cup…it’s not coming your way anytime soon with this style.

5 Suggestions for Getting the Management Volume “Just Right”

1. Attitude is Everything. Approach your new role with the Zen form of “Beginner’s Mind,” which embraces an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions.  Your enthusiasm, optimism and desire to support others is a great foundation for building a healthy working culture. And let’s face it, you might be a technical expert, but you are definitely not a management expert. Instead of masking your journey of discovery, embrace it…everyone knows that you are new to this role.

2. Answer the “Why?” Your team members need clear context for their work and everyone needs to understand what’s expected of them. I beat this drum a great deal. People (you included) do their best work when they have context for its connection to a bigger picture. For help on this, see my post: Gaining Critical Context for Your Team’s Mission.

3. Learn and repeat often: “How can I help?” As people grow comfortable with you, they’ll have no trouble sharing where the obstacles and barriers are. Help knock those down and you’ll be doing your job.

4. Emphasize Teaching, Not Telling. Your gut will be saying, “tell.” Your gut is wrong. Telling gets the task done, teaching creates sustainable improvement in team and individual performance.

5. Step-In As Needed, but Step Carefully. Things will go wrong and you will have to step in and pitch in…and yes, direct. When you get involved, don’t condescend or accuse. If someone dropped the ball, deal with it in private after the crisis has passed. Never waste a good crisis or problem…they are outstanding opportunities to teach and as a result, strengthen your leadership credibility.

Moving Forward:

When you signed on for the role of leader, everything about how your success will be measured, changed.  Your job is to get the team to the destination, and that doesn’t always involve leading from the front. Learn to modulate your management intensity to the situation. Too much or too little will poison the environment. It’s critical to get it just right. Not easy, but critical.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check our Art’s latest collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. 

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

New to leading or responsible for first time leader’s on your team? Subscribe to Art’ New Leader’s e-News.

To talk about a workshop or speaking need, contact Art at via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Career, Leadership, New Leader Tuesday Tagged With: , ,

Just One Thing: Services ARE Performances

May 20, 2012 By 6 Comments

Just One Thing

The “Just One Thing” Series offers ideas for professional and business improvement in small, digestible pieces, one at a time.

From the book: Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic:

“Services are performances. From the customers’ perspective, the people performing the service are the company. A careless bank teller is a careless bank. An arrogant waiter is an arrogant restaurant.”

Few things evoke as much negative emotion in otherwise kind and gentle souls as a bad experience as a customer. Focus in your mind on your last really bad customer service experience and you can sense the tension in your neck growing along with the rise in blood pressure. That bad experience becomes “the company” for us.

The Aetna Rep who yelled at me for seeking clarity on how a claim was handled is the face of this firm to me.   (I escalated that one and was correct.)

As managers and leaders and individual contributors who serve external and internal customers, we intuitively know that every encounter we have…or our people have, is an opportunity to represent the organization. Why then are good customer experiences the minority and great customer experiences a rarity? The fault is ours…for poor hiring, for failing to establish and reinforce values, for lack of accountability…and for generally not giving a shit enough to make sure our organizations are properly represented by people who care and who serve.

The phone representative who agreed with me that Frontier Communications was pretty screwed up, is the face of Frontier to me.

All of the strategy plans, reorganizations and training sessions in the world won’t make up for the failure to respect and serve and honor the customer. It’s arrogant and deceitful to believe you as a leader are representing the interests of your stakeholders if you fail to create remarkable customer experiences through your team members.

Poor customer service is an outcome of a series of flawed and sometimes fatal decisions by people not invested in a cause beyond biding their time and collecting a check.

The battle axe of a grumpy, rude receptionist at the local Doctor’s office is the face of that practice.   

We are all of us at times consumers of healthcare services. These purchases find us at our most vulnerable, our most frightened and even our most ignorant. We are placing ourselves and our family members in the hands of strangers…shedding our clothes and dignity and hoping our trust is not misplaced. While there are some institutions that get this right more than they get it wrong, few that I’ve encountered do it on the scale of Mayo Clinic. I’ve no doubt from my time there that it starts with careful hiring for the right values…and comes from an unyielding commitment on the part of everyone in that institution to reinforce the core values.

Mayo is remarkable in part, because they recognize that every encounter is the face of Mayo. From the workers in the cafeteria to the receptionists greeting and serving patients to the nurses, doctors and administration, the performances are choreographed to serve customers.

What do your team’s performances say about you as a leader and about your firm?

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check our Art’s latest collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. 

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

New to leading or responsible for first time leader’s on your team? Subscribe to Art’ New Leader’s e-News.

To talk about a workshop or speaking need, contact Art at via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Just One Thing, Leadership, Performance Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine Podcast-Executive Coach Mary Jo Asmus

May 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Cover art for Leadership Caffeine PodcastThere’s a secret to why I have so much fun producing this podcast. I only interview people who fascinate and inspire with their stories and ideas. The subject of this interview, Executive Coach, business owner at Aspire CS and popular leadership blogger, Mary Jo Asmus, hits the bullseye on all criteria.  And yes, as I offer in the opening of this fun interview, if Mary Jo had a fan club, I would be a card carrying member!

I’ve hosted a fairly steady stream of authors in the past few months, and it’s enjoyable in this interview to focus on a great person and professional and not a book.

Mary Jo describes a fascinating journey from executive inside Big Pharama to entrepreneur to someone celebrating the ten year anniversary of her successful coaching business.  Along the way, we gain some great insights into Mary Jo, her approach to business success and her ideas on the fast growing profession of executive coaching. In this last area, whether you are considering engaging a coach or becoming one, her insights and ideas are worth many times the price of admission to this podcast.

Enjoy meeting Mary Jo Asmus! 

Leadership Caffeine Podcast Episode 17-Insights from Executive Coach Mary Jo Asmus [ 29:40 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

After listening to the interview, make certain to check out her blog and services at Aspire-CS.  She consistently inspires, educates and provokes some important and often introspective thinking on our work as leaders.  I think so highly of her writing and blogging that with her permission, one of our collaboration efforts was included in my recently published book.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check our Art’s latest collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

To talk about a workshop or speaking need, contact Art at via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

Filed Under: Leadership Caffeine Podcast Tagged With: , , ,

New Leader Tuesday-Gaining Critical Context for Your Team’s Mission

May 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

Note from Art: I’ve long wanted to establish a consistent blog feature focused on helping first-time leaders navigate this challenging career stage, and here it is. New Leader Tuesday will focus specifically on the topics that all of us face as we take on this most difficult of all business challenges…leading others. In addition to this regular blog feature, I’m launching the New Leader e-newsletter and have some more programs slated to announce in the near future. Join us here at the blog for New Leader Tuesday, and register for the subscriber only-content via our newsletter. (We never share your e-mail information.)

–

Many first-time leaders are given the equivalent of “battlefield” promotions with no more context than, “You’ve done a great job, you’re in charge.”  If you end up on the receiving side of this “Go get ‘em Tiger,” philosophy of leadership development, it’s important for you to quickly gain context for your team’s role and accountabilities.

If no one volunteers this information, it’s up to you to piece together the information and then arm your team with it. Leading is one heck of a lot easier if everyone understands the mission!

Katie (real person, different name) ended up in one of these “Hey, you’re smart, you’re in charge,” promotions with little guidance and absolutely no context for accountabilities. Here’s how she handled it:

We move at hyper-speed in this business. We all understand our day-to-day jobs, but once I was placed in a lead role, I wanted to gain a better picture of how our performance was measured, how we fit into the bigger picture of the firm’s goals and even what my direct manager’s goals were, so that I could align the team and give feedback around these measures.

Through a series of interviews with my manager (when I could catch her), and my peers…and my internal customers, I was able to piece together a better understanding of how we fit into the picture and what people required and expected of us. I built a crude scorecard to use with the team and when my manager and her manager saw what I was doing, they actually jumped in and helped me improve the scorecard. It’s now a standard tool used with similar teams in our different locations. It keeps us all focused on the work that matters, and it keeps us striving for improvement.  And all I did was start asking the right questions.

Katie did more than ask the right questions, and it appears that her manager had good insight in tapping this smart and aggressive person on the shoulder to lead. She used some of the questions outlined in Practical Lessons in Leadership to help her get going.

Key Questions For Katie’s Direct Manager:

  • What are our firm’s key strategies and goals?
  • What are your goals?
  • How does my team impact the company goals and your personal goals?
  • What are we accountable for? How are you measuring us?
  • What is your perception of how well this team has been executing in recent quarters?
  • How will I be evaluated as the manager?
  • What latitude do I have to make changes on the team to better align with the goals.
  • What time constraints am I operating under?

Key Questions For Katie’s Cross Functional Peers (Internal Customers):

  • In your experience working with my team, what works? What is broken?
  • What do you wish we would do better? (Prioritize)
  • Are we aligned on the firm’s goals?
  • What are your team’s goals and how do we impact your achievement? (Here are my team’s goals…let’s compare and contrast.)
  • How do our combined activities impact our other internal/external customers?
  • Do we have formal communication between our two teams to ensure that we get and stay on the same page?
  • Are there shared measures of performance that might help us monitor our work together?

The Bottom-Line for Now:

For any leader, mastering the art of asking good questions is a critical success skill. In Katie’s case and in the case of any new front-line leader, gaining context for your team’s mission, accountabilities and key measures is important. Sharing this information with your team and creating tools to measure and monitor performance around these key issues is critical. Be politely relentless in seeking answers to these highly relevant questions.

We’ll cover questions for market-facing teams and external customers in a follow-on post.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: New Leader Tuesday, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Just One Thing-Vary Your Routine For A Change

May 14, 2012 By 2 Comments

The “Just One Thing” Series: Professional Improvement is Best Enjoyed in Small, Digestible Bite-Sized Pieces-One Idea at a Time.

Most of us are creatures of habit. Same route to work…same people on the train and even our work has a familiar cycle…daily lunch with the same crowd, weekly updates, monthly reviews, quarterly briefings and seasonal events. Work long enough in the same role and you can tell the time, month and season just by the event in process

Routines are comfortable..and at the risk of being redundant, habit forming. Eventually, routines become mind numbing.

While breaking the routine is uncomfortable and even frightening for some, deliberate effort to do things differently will stimulate neural activity…wake you up and revive a mind that’s grown lazy and sleepy.

Yes, you’ll be learning. New situations require active assessment and trial and error, and eventually, they lead to learning. Your on-going routine shuts off this mental fitness work and our brains become blobs of gray-matter, growing sluggish and fat.

5 Thought-Starters for Varying Your Routine:

1. Take the path less-traveled. Take a different route to work and pay attention to the new details as you drive. When you get to work, play the equivalent of “this picture isn’t the same,” and jot down as many details as you can recall about this new route.

2. Change up your fitness routines. I know many professionals who are “religious” about their fitness programs. They subscribe to a strong-body, strong-mind philosophy and you can set your watch by the time they’ll show up at the gym. You also know that people are creatures of habit within their workout routines. If that’s you, try mixing up your pre or post-work workouts with different activities. This will minimize boredom, keep you striving and to ensure you exercise different muscle groups in different ways.

3. Change-up your lunch routine. One day a week, find someone in your firm you don’t know well and ask him or her to join you. Don’t talk about yourself…ask questions and listen.

4. Meetings are mind-killers…try mixing things up. Rotate responsibility for facilitating your recurring meetings. Encourage people to put their own twist on the meeting when it’s their turn. Reward people for creative and effective approaches!

5. Read. Read outside of your preferred genre. Read outside of your industry. If you are on the move, change read to listen (podcasts, books, book summaries etc.). Same rules apply. Mix things up.

Bottom-Line:

We all learn in different ways…by listening, by writing, by talking, by reading, by doing and so forth.While you don’t have to vary your preferred method of learning, try something different within that method. Break the routine and enjoy the new rush of energy and ideas. Of course, the next step is doing something with these new ideas and insights, but that is a post for another day.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check our Art’s latest collection: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)

To talk about a workshop or speaking need, contact Art at via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Career, Just One Thing, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , ,
Next Page »