Last week I wrapped up two different cohorts of my Experienced Manager Program. In twelve hours of program time spread over multiple sessions, the ideas and insights flowed, and I left impressed with the passion so many have for their work leading and managing.
Here are some of my favorite insights from the program:
1. The early influences in our lives are some of the strongest on our motivation to lead. Parents, grandparents, teachers, and coaches are oft-cited as early leadership influences that inspire people to take on leadership roles.
2. Thinking differently for navigating today’s complicated and complex (they’re different) challenges, yet it’s challenging to avoid our tendency to converge around familiar solutions. We need help and guidance on tools and approaches that challenge us to think differently in our work.
3. It’s difficult but essential to cultivate an outside-in view of our organizations to identify how to strengthen or change.
4. The time invested in thinking through the leader you aspire to be is priceless for recharging your leadership batteries and providing the motivation to level up performance. It helps to reflect on prior leader examples and focus on our values and the impact we aspire to have on those who work with, around, and for us.
5. If you do one thing better every day, make sure it’s: listening. Nothing beats genuinely listening to someone for showing respect, engendering trust, and improving the communication process.
6. Ideas are essential for successful problem resolution, yet our approaches for generating ideas are linear and convergent. It helps to bring lateral and divergent thinking to our various situations before converging on possible solutions. Importantly groups and teams can all learn to be more creative and productive with their creative activities with coaching.
7. If you do just one thing to strengthen your decision-making effectiveness, make it: reframing. Framing problems differently results in unique and creative solutions that otherwise might remain dormant.
8. The research is unambiguous on using goals to promote high-performance (yours and theirs). Fewer, larger goals positioned as “promises” (Marc Effron) encourage learning and help you generate a significant impact for your organization.
9. Being part of a high-performance team is a remarkable experience. Developing a high-performance team is hard, deliberate work. (And, we don’t always need a true team. Sometimes a group is just fine.)
10. Seeing ourselves as others do is essential in identifying areas where we need to level up our performance. We need quality, timely feedback from those who see us in action, and we need to understand how our actions and approaches affect others. The feedback we need transcends the type we get on 360-degree reviews. We need more and faster context for how to change.
The Bottom Line for Now:
I love the insights we generate in the discussions, cases, and activities in the Experienced Manager Program. Yet, I think the most important part of the experience is exchanging ideas and developing new relationships. Something almost magical happens when you bring together a group of professionals hungry for new ideas to level up and scale their performance.
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