231: Avoid the biggest mistakes managers make

The Corporate Yogi Podcast

INTRO:

Hey, thanks for tuning in to the Corporate Yogi podcast, I’m your host Julie Zuzek. This pod is YOUR dedicated time for growth, developing practical tools to use with your team and other relationships and to learning deeply about who you are and what makes you tick! Because you are a brilliant and powerful being and I want you to invest more time reflecting on WHO are being, not just WHAT you are doing. Doing is awesome, but BEING, well that is where the magic happens and what makes you truly feel fulfilled. You’re going to love this episode on the biggest mistakes that leaders make. So here’s a look at what you’re going to learn today

1 – In the first segment I’ll reveal the 3 biggest mistakes

2 – Then in the second segment we’ll talk about your leadership legacy

3 – And in the last segment I’ll give you a 3 step process to start defining your leadership brand

So get out of your head and into your heart shall we?

SEGMENT 1

For those of you who are managers I know you’re striving to be the best manager you can be. There’s no end to the number of articles, blogs and books about Leadership, but most of them are overwhelming and theoretical. So today I wanted to do something different. I wanted to give you real advice from my real clients about what they really want from their managers. No theory today, just real world practical advice you can translate into action immediately. And we’re going to start off by talking about the biggest complaints that people share about their managers. Remember every day all day, I’m working with clients and I get to hear what they really want and what they’re most frustrated by. Do you have an idea or a guess about what it could be? OK I won’t leave you in suspense any longer, here they are, the top 3 mistakes that managers make. Starting with #1 not giving enough feedback, the 2nd is not having proper career conversations, and the 3rd is Lacking vision and confidence. How did those land with you? Any surprises in there. Well there shouldn’t be. At the end of the day people just want to be seen and heard. They want to know you’ll stand up for them and they want to know you care. Great leadership isn’t complicated, but it is time consuming and it does require consistency. Before we dive in deeper to each of these 3 I want to check in with you. Do you feel like you’re guilty of any of them? What about your employees, what would they say? Would you have the courage to check in and ask them? OK let’s start by talking about feedback, it’s a delicate balance of how to give it just right. So I’ve gathered a long list of ways we screw up when we give feedback. Buckle your seatbelt bc this is a list of 5 ways we screw up when we give feedback, then at the end I share a couple tips of how to give feedback correctly – OK< the first way we screw up when we give feedback is - We don’t give enough feedback. Our team members want to hear from us, they’re craving feedback and they want lots of it. Feedback helps them to know if they are on track with their goals. It helps them know if they are delivering in alignment with what is expected of them. It helps them to know if they are growing in the right ways. We also screw up with feedback when we don’t give the right context or situation of what happened. Brene Brown is famous for saying being clear is kind. So that means be really specific about the environment our employees were in, and the circumstances they were in and the people they were with. We screw up with feedback if we don’t give both positive and negative feedback. Usually we’re hard wired for one or the other based on what our manager did with us. It’s just as important to deliver the constructive feedback as it is the positive feedback. So be thorough and use the full spectrum when you give feedback. We also screw up if we are not authentic or sincere, because this distracts people from really absorbing what we need to tell them. ∫p when we don’t follow up on the feedback we give. It’s not enough to just have a productive conversation, in most circumstances it is important to circle back and have a follow up discussion so we can see if we’ve made progress, or have any other questions. Here's a scenario about not giving enough feedback that I hear from time to time. That people are actually surprised when they are fired for non-performance or put on a PIP. When the truth here is that their leader should be bearing some of the responsibility for the lack of performance. Tough Love – if your employee is surprised when they’re fired for being an underperformer, it actually says more about your performance as a leader than their performance as an IC. It’s time to hold up the mirror and take a good hard look at yourself. Now I’m not talking about layoffs or redundancies or reorgs, I’m talking performance. Your team members are actually supposed to know where they stand at all times, and as a leader that is YOUR responsibility to communicate this to them, whether it’s comfortable or not. So if they’re surprised when they’re put on a PIP or fired, that’s bc they’re wasn’t enough feedback given prior to that. And lastly I want to share a few tips for giving feedback. Remember not everyone loves receiving feedback the way you do, so it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re getting through. This applies to constructive, tough feedback. You want to watch for your employees’ Edge behaviour to know how they are receiving what they’re saying. Do they look like their absorbing it? Or are you seeing edge behaviour of shutting down or getting defensive. To confirm this you can use the playback tool, which looks like this. I want to make sure you’re getting everything we talked about today, can you play back what you’re taking away for me? And if you notice there’s any resistance on the feedback, make sure you’re not being absolute with it, you’re explaining it as situational. What I mean is, if you give tough feedback to someone that they can be guilty of using a harsh or negative tone of voice, that might make them defensive to accept that feedback. But if you use the SBI framework or qualify the feedback with “sometimes you use a harsh tone” then they’ll be more likely to accept it. So that’s enough talk about feedback, let’s move on to talk more about ways that we screw up when we don’t prioritize career development conversations. I could really summarize this entire conversation with one statement. At their core, people just want to be seen and heard. They care about their future and they want you to care about their future too. A lot of managers avoid this conversation bc they’re scared they’ll find out their employee wants to leave their organization for somewhere else, or that their dream job is in another industry, but this is a gift you should welcome bc sometimes there isn’t a logical future career job for them and they have nowhere to go in your org. But in the meantime, they’ll be extremely loyal and focused to you. And let’s be honest, things change over the years. By the time two years rolls around things could be vastly different. Also in tech, the average time spent at a job is 2 years, so you really have nothing to worry about. Do your best to make your employee’s dreams come true, whether they’re at your company or elsewhere. Remember, people want to learn and grow, and you want to be the one who facilitates the growth. And remember, it’s not up to you to have all the answers, you just need to be a good listener. Career conversations are really personal development conversations, so dive right in. Now let’s move on to the 3rd biggest mistake leaders make – not having vision and confidence as a leader. Employees want to work for someone who will inspire them and stand up for them. This is the factor that makes your employee loyal and want to go above and beyond in their performance. Confidence allows us to make decisions in a timely manner and it makes people want to follow us. Having a vision for the team and where the team is going and being able to eloquently share that vision is so important. These days we wrap all this up into the buzzword storytelling, or I sometimes call it vision casting. I don’t care what you call, so long as you do it regularly and your team members believe in your vision! OK let’s wrap up segment 1 here – the 3 biggest mistakes that leaders make are not giving enough feedback, not having regular career conversations and lastly not having vision and confidence.

SEGMENT 2

In the first segment we talked about all the mistakes that are made, and now I want to give you an option of how to redirect your energy and make sure you avoid the mistakes. its time to dive into one of my favourite topics, leadership legacy. Your leadership legacy is the culmination of every single interaction you have with others. Becoming intentional about your leadership legacy is perhaps the most important mindset shift you need to make as a leader. However, most leaders don’t spend any time thinking about it, or they misunderstand what it really means. They mistakenly think of legacy as what we leave behind after we’re gone, or how people will remember us. What will be dedicated to us after we’re gone? A park bench? A hospital wing, a scholarship or bursary? Or you might think about legacy as, how many people come to your funeral to pay tribute to you? What will your obituary say? these are all legacy, absolutely, 100%. But, this is a very narrow-sighted way of thinking about our leadership. We have to understand that legacy is so much more than that. It’s more than just how we are remembered after we’re gone. It’s about how we make people feel. It’s about what we teach them. It’s about how we treat them in each and every interaction that we have. Your leadership legacy is the culmination of every single interaction you have with people. What is your impact on others as a leader? Here’s a definition: Your leadership legacy is the culmination of every single interaction you have with others and the impact you have on who they become as leaders. You have a massive opportunity every single day, through every single interaction you have with others. Who do you choose to be? What kind of impact do you want to have? When we start to think about legacy in this way, it really helps us understand and boost our confidence to realize exactly how powerful we really are. A CEO I coached once articulated this really well to me. He said that because of his role, people just naturally looked to him for reassurance about the company and how they were doing, and it wasn’t just in formal meetings or emails he sent out, those intentional “teachable moments”, it was in everything he did, said, wore, reacted to, it was in what he wore, and how he spoke. He said the moment I step off that elevator in the morning, I am ON, and people are looking to me for data and information. Sometimes we mistakenly think people are only learning from us during the teachable moments we choose, BUT, the truth is, they are learning all the time, even when we’re screwing up. I love to use the flight attendant example – no not the oxygen mask one, this is a different one. If you’re ever on a flight that hits turbulence in a big way, what is the first thing you do? Think about it. You look up at the flight attendant to see how they’re responding, and this is your north star. So often, this is exactly what leadership is, people are looking at you to see how you are responding. What will they see when they look at you? I want to share a story about leadership legacy from my career. I have a leader who had a massive impact on my career. He wasn’t originally my direct leader, he worked in another area of marketing. But he called on me many times to do projects for him and take on extra work, which I always did and said yes to. So fast forward two years later when the company underwent a massive reorg and layed off a bunch of people. He let go his entire team and hired me to be the only person in his department, and let me tell you, we did some amazing things together. And in the short time I worked for him, he had such a massive impact on me, and his actions still resonate with me today. I feel like this was one of the first times in my career that I had a manager who really made the effort to appreciate, and value me. He taught me many things in those years that I worked for him, but most important that it’s ok to take risks and make unpopular decisions and TRUST YOUR GUT, that is the legacy that he instilled in me – always trust your gut. It was not a popular decision for him to clean out his whole org and then bring me over to rebuild it, but he did it bc he trusted me and trusted his gut that said I was to the right person for the job, Part of his legacy is believing in people and taking risks, and he passed that lesson down to me. So many times in my career I have made unpopular hiring decisions, just because they felt right. I could never logically justify them. And they always, always paid off. That is his legacy alive and thriving in me. OK we’re wrapping up segment 2 here and our discussion on Leadership Legacy. It’s not about how we’re remembered when we die, it’s about the opportunity every single day, through every single interaction to teach and impact others. Let’s wrap this segment with the definition of leadership legacy, Your leadership legacy is the culmination of every single interaction you have with others and the impact you make on who they become as leaders.

SEGMENT 3

If you want to avoid making these leadership mistakes, the SECRET isn’t just about what to avoid doing, it is much more powerful for you to focus on how you want to show up as a leader and what you do want to do. This means having a clear vision for who you want to be as a leader, and this means developing a leadership brand. And you build this brand through a distinct 3 step process. Step one – determine primarily the first impression you want to have as a leader. This is quite literally boiled down to summarize how people would describe you as a leader. To do this, start by making a list of least 5 leaders you admire. And this can be someone real who you actually worked for, or a coach or author you don’t know. It can also be a leader expert like a Brene Brown, Oprah, Reed Hastings, James Clear, Tim Cook, Sheryl Sandberg; Bill Gates; Warren Buffet, who is famous and you’ve never actually met. But you need at least 5 people. Write out a list of 5 names and write out the positive qualities they each have. Then go through and circle the items that are in similar, coming up with at least 3-5 qualities that you want to embody as a leader. Then it’s gut check time. Is this the impact you want to have as a leader? Or when you make a short list, it may help you discover that you want to impact people with different things. Either way, go through the process and end up with 3-5 important qualities you want to embody as a leader. Step 2 of determining your leadership brand is thinking about impact. Make a list of 5 – 7 of your greatest accomplishments or projects. Big or small. It could be something you worked on for a day, or for 2 years.. Write out the list and then analyze the list to determine WHAT you are known for. Be introspective and list 5-7 of the most common compliments you receive from others, whether you agree with them or not. Then review the list and either pick one you believe to represent your greatest strength, this is your impact. Step 3 of determining your leadership brand is coming up with your unique or quirky quality – this can be something you’re known for, or do regularly in meetings like start each meeting with a personal check in, or a meditation or signing off your emails in a unique way, or how you interact with others. This is where you need to figure out what your freak flag has on it, and let it fly. It can be a small, tactical thing like a meeting protocol or a big thing that is more philosophical like how you manage employees. And there you have it, that wraps up segment 3 - we’ve just started to define your leadership brand with these three things, defining your strengths, the Impact you have on others and creating your freak flag.

WRAP UP

OK it’s time to wrap up this episode on how to aboid the biggest mistakes managers make. As always, if you’re inspired by the content today, please share this episode with a friend, colleague or on social media. You can also subscribe to this podcast on my website at thecorporateyogi.com. If you want to book a time to chat with me directly, to discuss your leadership or about coaching in general you can find my booking link on LinkedIn or Instagram @thecorporateyogi. And as always, remember, that any fear, or resistance you hold inside of you, is simply just your greatness in disguise.