New Leader Tuesday-7 Ideas to Help You Survive Your Sink or Swim Leadership Lessons

New Leader Tuesday at Management Excellence

Just slightly tongue-in-cheek and all too true.

There was a time when prevailing wisdom for teaching people to swim involved chucking them in the water and letting them flail and flounder. This Sink or Swim (S. o. S.) method of teaching is likely responsible for more than a few really bad moments for the unwitting victims and a lifetime of terror-inducing flashbacks for many.

Oddly, we subject a good number of first time supervisors and managers to a similar rite of passage in what I describe as S. o. S. Leadership Development. It’s quite similar to the swimming lessons above, except in this case, the naïve victim/first-time leader is chucked into the middle of a team and instead of waiting around to see if swim prevails over sink, the promoting manager is off to his/her next challenge with not much more than a “Congratulations and Good Luck.”

You’re on your own. Start paddling and kicking!

7 Ideas to Help You Survive Your Sink or Swim Leadership Lesson:

1. Try and get a handle on your mission from your elusive boss. There’s something he wants from you beyond not screwing things up. Figure it out. Numbers? Reports? Keeping the Peace? Track him down, thank him for the support and extract information on the mission.

2. Assess your situation, part 1. If the team is generally performing well, your first activity is to not muck things up. No one asked you to breakdown and rebuild the team in your image. You’re there because someone said the group needed a supervisor, which might involve signing vacation requests and expense reports. Check your ego…and save your organizational design ideas for your next decade in management.

3. Assess your situation, part 2. Does your team look like they’ve been in a pitched battle for months with no rations, no support and no hope of survival? If yes, figure out the battle is and go in search of reinforcements. Your team needs help…they need advocacy and they need some relief. They don’t need yet another chucklehead issuing orders and kicking back while they fight the good fight. Earn your stripes and help the team through a crisis. When the crisis passes, step back and start doing your own work.

4. Gain some much needed ground intelligence. Meet with your team members and use my almost magical 3 questions: What’s Working? What’s Not? What do you need from me? Reinforce the things that are working, ask for help from your team members investigating what’s not working and work like hell to respond to reasonable requests for help.

5. Trust but verify. People sense whether you naturally trust or distrust them. Start on the positive side of this ledger with your team. If someone loses your trust, it’s time to engage.

6. Use the boss test to see if you are on the right path. Tell the boss what you are doing and if the response resembles, “Why the #$%^ are you doing that?” it’s a good time for some clarifying questions. If the response is more like, “Great, now get out of here,” you know you’re on a path that is either right or at least not annoyingly wrong.

7. Learn everything you can about delivering effective constructive and positive feedback and then do it! If you only have one tool in your leader’s kit, this is the one you need. Dispense positive and constructive behaviorally focused feedback linked to business implications early and often. Feedback is the one thing most teams and individuals don’t get enough of.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

File this in your memory banks under, Dumb Ass Approaches to Leadership Development, and vow to not do it this way when it’s your turn.

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