The lowest cost, highest return investment in the workplace is to help move someone closer to realizing his/her professional dream. This is simple and powerful and with creativity, often within your control to pursue for someone on your team. Here are some thoughts on why you should do this and how to get started. Remember, it takes “just one thing” on your part to make a difference!
You will be tested many times during your first go-round as the individual responsible for others. Know that everyone is watching your responses to these tests.
Handle them properly…even adequately, and your credibility for leading will rise. Get them wrong and you’ll become just one more faceless first-time supervisor in the process of being turned into grist inside the organization’s cultural mill. Here are 5 ideas to help you successfully navigate these tests:
Regular readers know my perspective on those who lead without authority. I’m a huge fan. These are the people who turn good businesses great and who power teams with the kinetic energy created by their constant motion.
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. Here are 5 suggestions to help you get this right.
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. What do your team’s performances say about you as a leader and about your firm?
Performance counts. Efforts are nice, but ultimately, you are evaluated on the results of your team, not the amount of work you put into achieving your results. Here are 7 ideas to promote high performance with your team:
Yesterday, a valued colleague described a fascinating professional interaction and used the phrase, “listening with intent.”While I imagine it is something on the level of “seek first to understand,” the phrasing works for me. It connotes a significant and deep personal investment in focusing on another human…something lacking from most of our interchanges in life and in the workplace.
Right after avoiding it, the most commonly employed managerial strategy for dealing with feedback is, delaying it. The first approach is poor form… the latter approach is cruel.
If speed, adaptability, learning…and the need to innovate are more than buzzwords and corporate clichés, but in fact are the requirements for success in this fast-moving world, then building cultures, teams and people capable of succeeding in the matrix must be a priority.
Teaching others to employ effective decision-making processes is one of the most important and often ignored responsibilities of those in leadership roles. Unfortunately, training your team to look to you for the calls on how to fix problems and move forward is much easier than teaching your team members to stand on their own for most issues.
