Welcome to the New Manager Podcast.
I'm your host, Kim Nicoll. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well.
Today's episode is all about Q4. We are now in Q4 of the year and
it's time to pause and re evaluate.
And I have a very simple checklist that I want to share
that will help you to both stay on track with what your goals
are so you don't feel lost or overwhelmed or also like you're
not stuck at a plateau in your career in your work.
And it will also set you up for some of the conversations that
you'll want to have with your manager as we get into the end
of the year and also with your team as we get towards the end
of the year. This episode will go live at the
end of October and I am telling you the next two months will go
by so quickly because of holidays and changes in people's
schedules and just end of year wrap up.
And what's interesting is whether this is a busy time of
year for you or a slow time of year in your business and the
the business that you work in. Either way the last quarter of
the year tends to go by really fast and all of a sudden it is
January, we're in the new year. And I want to make sure you feel
like your feet are on the ground, that you know where you
are, you know where you're headed, you feel confident about
what happened this year and that you have a clear sense of what's
next. So with that, welcome to this
episode and the cue for checklist, the first question to
ask yourself is, where am I? It sounds so simple, but it's
easy to get heads down in the weeds and react to all of the
things that happen every day, especially when you're bridging
that gap between being an individual contributor and being
a manager. When you're a manager,
especially a new manager, a lot of the time you're trying to
negotiate between being really good at a specific function or
task and the tension of realizing your job is not to be
the best at that task, it's to manage the other people who will
be doing that task. So it's a very different
perspective. There might be times when you
have to wear both hats, so sometimes you roll up your
sleeves, you get right in there and you actually do the work
alongside your team, which is amazing.
But there will be other times when your job is to pull back,
take the big picture, make decisions about what is the
priority, how to communicate that to your team, how to
communicate that to other teams that you work with.
You might have the job of communicating with another
manager about setting expectations around capacity or
around response times. There are other kinds of
conversations, other decisions that you're going to be making
when you are a manager. So it's easy to get in a flow of
doing things and you can look up in Q4 and look around and say,
wait, where am I? Wait, what's going on?
Where am I? What's happening?
That's a normal thing. And especially as we move
towards the end of the year, one of the things that might be
happening is performance reviews.
Now every organization addresses this a little bit differently.
For some organizations, they do their performance review cycle
in September, others do it in July.
Some do it multiple times a year.
Some companies do not even have a formal review process.
It's very ad hoc, very loosely structured.
There's not necessarily a singular correct way to do it.
The most important for you as a new manager is to have an
understanding of how this works and hopefully this is not a new
idea. One of the things when I work
with my clients one-on-one is we want to get a sense of what are
some of those, those key checkpoints and milestones where
you'll be expected to give feedback for your team and also
for yourself so that you can build a plan and be prepared for
when that happens. And then not, you know, be
staying up late in November and December trying to type in
everybody's feedback and remember you know, gosh, what
did we do this year. So you know at this stage we're
we're in the beginning of Q4, we're in October.
You want to pause and ask yourself where am I with respect
to performance reviews? Is that something that is going
to be coming up in the coming months, in the coming weeks?
And even if it isn't, it is something you might want to keep
in mind as you're having your last team meetings of the year,
your last one on ones of the year, Where am I?
As you're coming into the end of the year with your team, you
might also want to have time set aside in one of your team
meetings to do like a big picture appreciation and lessons
learned conversation with your team so that they both feel
appreciated for all the things that they did well.
And we're getting some clarity about any changes or adjustments
that we'll want to make in the future based on some of those
rough spots that might have come up over the course of the year.
So that's the first question, Where am I realize where you are
in the year and take stock of any conversations or specific
end of year tasks that you know you'll want to be planning for
so that you don't wake up one day and think, Oh my gosh, I
completely forgot I had to do this before I went on holiday
vacation. So my second question, what's
happening? It's kind of similar, right?
Well, first is just where am I in the year with all of the
things? And then second, ask yourself
what's happening? What's happening?
What are we doing? What have we accomplished?
Like what is happening here? And this is also where you want
to ask yourself, gosh, what did I do this year?
What's happening now that maybe we didn't anticipate when we set
our work plan at the beginning of the year, which is now almost
11 months ago? What's happening?
Is anything happening now that is coming to bear as the results
of an unanticipated change in your industry or in your your
organization? Maybe your organization went
through a leadership change and it had this ripple effect that
you're still feeling the effects of.
We wanted no, we want to take that time to just check in and
ask what's happening. This is also where I encourage
you to look for the wins. It's so easy to become overly
focused on the challenges, on the things that are not going to
plan, on the places where we feel really uncertain or where
there might be some friction. And I do not want you to lose
sight of what are the wins. Always be looking for the things
that are going well, in part because you want to have an
accurate perspective. And if you're only focused on
the challenges and the things that don't feel like they're
going well, then you will have an inaccurate perspective on
what's going on. And this can have an adverse
effect on you as well as on your team.
Because if you are feeling like things are not going well, maybe
I'm not doing a good job, maybe I should have done things
differently. That can very easily erode your
sense of confidence. And when that happens, we tend
to get smaller. We tend to feel more reserved,
more withdrawn, more hesitant to speak up and to ask for things.
And that can mean that you end up keeping yourself smaller and
not speaking up and advocating for yourself.
And also, you might inadvertently do the same thing
for your team. And you might feel hesitant to
advocate for your team and to ask for resources or to have
tough conversations if your confidence is feeling eroded.
So it's really important when you ask yourself, OK, wait,
what's happening? Look for the wins, especially
the small ones, because you also want to grow and learn from
those and notice you know, not just the gaps.
And also you want to consider when you ask yourself, wait,
what's happening, connect that with the broader context of
what's happening in your organization, maybe even what's
happening in your industry on a bigger level, maybe even in the
context of wait, what it, what else is happening in the world
that may also be affecting my team, myself, our clients.
That is also influencing where you're working and how you're
working. We are not separate from the
broader context. And so, you know, it's important
that you remember to look at that because that helps inform
what does it mean. So for example, maybe you look
around, you say, wait, what's happening?
Oh my gosh, my team is not performing at the level we
expected them to be performing at, at this time of the year.
But if you take that bird's eye view and you ask yourself, well,
what is happening in the bigger picture, what's the broader
context? You might realize, well, we had
a few people who left the company and we didn't replace
them. So everyone's workload increased
and you might say we had a really hard time handing off
work because of this other, you know, system that got replaced.
And so there was a a lag in how things were able to get
accomplished. Or you might say we have this
one really big client and they went through a massive
leadership change where they then you know were non
responsive and they they re evaluated their budget and we
really had to work hard to retain this client.
Now that the, you know the the prior champion who loved working
with us has no longer is no longer here and we had to
rebuild relationships and so we want to really remember.
So part of your work is, yes, being able to understand and
kind of get in the weeds from time to time.
But when you're asking yourself what's happening, we're taking
that bigger picture, that bird's eye view, to understand the
broader context. That might also include how is
what is happening on your team. How does that connect with the
bigger organizational goals? What are some of the other
constraints or capacity changes or challenges that happened and
affected your team over the course of the year?
And you want to have an understanding of that so that
you can present not just the kind of specific facts and
metrics around the measurable dollars and time and headcount
and you know where the, you know, the goals and targets met,
but also understanding what else was influencing or affecting
that. That becomes so valuable because
others in your organization may not have that perspective.
And so you want to be prepared to not just say this is what
happened in terms of the performance or the results of
myself and my team, but you also can then provide meaning by
understanding the broader context and helping to convey
that to the, you know, your manager and to the other leaders
who might not see that It's such an important part.
And this is so much of the the mindset, right, like
understanding what are you looking at and what does it mean
and then being able to convey and communicate that in the most
useful and the most effective way.
So the third question that we ask after where am I?
And what's happening is we ask what's next?
And this is something I want you to consider both for your team,
what's next for your team? Is there anything that you need
to be thinking of for them and what will be called upon for
them to do in the next couple of months And then transitioning
into the new year, like what's next for you as a team?
But also, this is a good time to think for yourself what's next
for you in terms of your objectives and goals in your
career and in your professional development.
This is the time of year where you can look back on the last,
you know, 10 to 11 months and say to yourself, you know, based
on my experience so far this year, this is the skill I want
to develop next. These are my strengths and I
want to learn to use them even more.
Or wow, I really felt challenged in these kinds of situations.
I want to get better so that they don't stress me out as
much. And I feel a lot more confident
in addressing this kind of challenge or this kind of
problem. And the reason why this is the
time of year for you to reflect on that for yourself is because
we are near the end of the year for some of our organizations,
our fiscal year changes in January.
That means that right now in Q4, there might be budget leftover
that hasn't been used. And so if you go to your manager
and you say, hey, let's talk about professional development,
what's next for me is I want to get better at this.
I want to learn that there's a coach I want to work with.
There's a a program I would, I would like to take.
Your manager might be able to find budget for you now that
maybe before had been allocated for something else, but that
something else ended up not happening or it ended up costing
less. And so, oh, we've got a couple
of $1000 left over and we have to use it.
And so this is such a good time to go to your manager and say,
hey, can we talk about my professional development?
This is what I'm interested in. This is why.
Here's how it works. This is why it will help.
What can we do? Do we have anything left over in
the budget that I could use for professional development?
And your manager might love this because it might also make them
look good because on their performance review to their
manager, they can say, oh, I have been supporting the
development of my team. I have facilitated them getting
professional development in these ways.
And so it might actually be really good for them.
Like you might not realize that you could be solving a problem
for them so that when their manager says, hey, you had all
this budget but you didn't use it, now they say Oh no, no, we
we did use it. We were really very thoughtful
in the way that we used the budget that had been allocated
to us. These are the kinds of of things
that when I was first a manager, it never would have occurred to
me, right? Because my mindset at the time
was, oh, I don't want to ask for things and I'll just do it on my
own. And so many of my clients are
like that too, like very hard working, very high achieving,
very self reliant and you don't even realize that there might be
budget available that needs to be used before the end of the
year. So if that is happening in your
organization, I want you to know about it because it's such a
great opportunity for you and for some of us, OK.
If you're in an organization and your fiscal year runs July to
July, then that means that when you transition into the new
year, you're actually at your mid year.
It's not the new year for you in terms of the fiscal year, right.
You're kind of midpoint, but this is still a great time to
ask because you are now midway through the fiscal year.
And so you can begin to think about what would you like to ask
for that maybe had not occurred to you six months ago when they
were you know, planning the budget.
This is the time where you might say, OK, we're now halfway
through the fiscal year. And as we're talking about the
goals for the second part of our fiscal year from January to
July, here are the things that I would like to, you know, learn
and grow into. And here are the resources I
would like what can we do? Is that available?
And when you present it like that, you're really presenting
it as a thought partner. You are coming with a solution.
You are demonstrating that you are taking real responsibility
for your career growth and for your professional development.
And this is a good thing. Not only is that signaling your,
you know, inherent leadership qualities and the fact that
you're really taking charge of your career, now, you're also
working with your manager. So they don't have to.
They don't have to be the one who says, you know, I've been
watching you and I've noticed you're really good at this and
this thing needs a little help. So I've found it, you know, a
training or I've found a program or a coach for you.
I think so many of us, it takes us a while to realize that's
actually not how it works. If it does, amazing, but it's
generally pretty rare because your manager is worried about
their own career development and they have a lot of other things
to do. They don't have that same
visibility to understand what you want, where you want to go,
what's difficult for you, what your uncertainties are.
They just, they don't have that insight.
But you do, 'cause you are the one who is in your life.
You are the one experiencing yourself every day.
And so you are the one best positioned to identify, here's
what I want, here's why can we do this?
What's next? Be thinking of that and it can
be so difficult when you're, you know, kind of overwhelmed by
what's happening day-to-day. It can be so easy to lose sight
of the big picture of your career and your life and what's
possible. You know, we can get just very
reactive in the moment trying to put out fires or just, you know,
getting through a day. And I totally get that.
And that's why, you know, as we were coming into the end of
October. I wanted to be sure that this
was on your radar, asking yourself what's next, not just
for your team and in this particular organization, but as
you think about your career, your life.
I mean, I really think that your career, your professional life
is one of the most long term relationships that you have.
Even if you pivot careers or you change professions, you're
working life is like this whole other relationship journey and
it is really helpful when we're thinking about where am I,
what's happening, what's next, right.
We want to have those questions active in mind and the end of
the year as we approach November and December, it's such a like a
natural part of when to think about that.
I actually met with a client today.
We met in person for the first time.
She actually lives in Europe, but she was in San Francisco for
a conference. So we we got to meet up in
person. It was so cool.
And one of the things we talked about that she described and I
love this, she talked about the like the rhythm of life and the
rhythm of her work and the rhythm of the business that
she's in. And I love that, in part because
it really does remind us and point to things are not supposed
to be the same all the time. We are dynamic humans.
We live in a dynamic and changing world.
Our careers are also dynamic. There is change.
There's an ebb and a flow. There is a rhythm to all of this
and that includes having time to be really engaged and active and
also time to rest and reflect. To take that bird's eye view and
kind of get a sense of like what next, you know, like based on
where you are now and what's happening now, what's next, You
wanna ask yourself that question?
So that is what I wanted to offer to you today.
If you want to work with me one-on-one, then go into the
show notes, book a consultation and we'll talk.
The consult is free. We'll get a sense of what's
going on with you, where you want to go next and how I can
help. And I also have my next group
program. You can join the wait list now.
The next cohort will be happening in February of 2024,
but you want to get on the wait list now to be sure that you
know when enrollment opens. So you'll also find a link to
that in the show notes below. Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you have a really great week and I will talk to you next
time. When you're more effective at
work, you're happier in your life, and when you're happier in
your life, you're more effective at work.
I can help. Go to my website kimnickel.com
and sign up for a coaching consult.