Welcome to the new manager podcast.
I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well.
If you are new to this podcast, my name is Kim nickel.
I'm a coach, and I know that I've had a lot of new people
listening in, because I can see that the numbers of downloads on
my podcast have been growing and I can also see that you are
listening in from around the world.
Old, you might not know this but I am in San Francisco, but you
might be in all kinds of places. I know I have a lot of listeners
across the us but also Canada. So hello to you.
Also in the United Kingdom. So I'm waving to you all.
I've got a lot of listeners calling in and listening from
Australia, which I love and also the Philippines which is a very
special to me in my heart. Because my mom is from the
Philippines. I have a lot of relatives and
just a lot of history there. So I really just want to start
today's episode by giving a bit of a, shout out to you to my
community of listeners from wherever you are listening from.
And this is an interesting thing to just to offer as a
reflection, which is no matter where in the world you are no
matter what kind of organization you work for whether it's in
health, Care or in technology or in a law firm or in philanthropy
or for the government but I have clients that work in all these
different Industries. But so interesting is that many
of the challenges that come up in the course of managing humans
and working with humans at work, they will show up in every part
of the world in every industry because you know where humans
are not always. He's really good at learning how
to work with each other. So, here we are.
Learning some new ways of thinking about it and some new
approaches to try out yourself in your workplace.
Ultimately my goal and my desire is for you to feel more, he's to
feel less burdened to feel more capable and confident in how you
deal with all of. The humans at work and all of
the human stuff. So that brings us into today's
episode. Oh, and I also wanted to share a
celebration that also connects into my topic today.
One of my clients was we were talking about all of the things
that she has learned and accomplished over the last
several months of us working together.
She said something really interesting.
She said my boyfriend has noticed a change and I asked
her, like, what does that mean? What I have, what has he said?
And she said that her boyfriend commented that she doesn't talk
about work as much as she used to and that she's a happier
person and I love that so much because I think sometimes we
don't even realize how our work experience effects all these
other areas of our life. And so she wanted to work on
work-life balance and she wanted to Learn how to set better
boundaries at work and how to communicate more directly.
And as we were working on that, one of the effects is that she
has been able to achieve better work-life balance and so she's
feeling less overwhelmed. She has more time for other
things and hobbies and things that she cares about and she's
generally feeling happier in her life.
Which means that when she's spending time with her
boyfriend, she's like Less interested in talking about
work. I mean partly because she gets
to bring that conversation to me.
Like she has time on her calendar, where she knows she's
going to talk about work. We're going to coach on what
she's being challenged with and really help her to develop her
skill set and her mindset so that she can be the kind of
leader. She wants to be at work and then
when she's with her boyfriend, she just gets to enjoy.
Being with him and doing things together.
So I love that and I wanted to share that with you.
So today's episode, I wanted to speak to you about the emotional
labor of managing people and what that can also bring with?
It is a sense of isolation or a feeling of loneliness because
what happens is and you know, initially before we manage
people, one of the ways that we connect with and bond with our
Colleagues is by complaining about management and I don't
mean this in a in a deeply negative way but in the same way
where we look to connect with others through shared experience
through empathy and talking about, oh yeah this is kind of
frustrating or yeah. I don't really know what
management or what leadership is thinking.
I don't know why they're doing that.
It's often one of the easiest things to connect with.
Colleagues about is commiserating to share in the
frustrations that you encounter when you're working with people,
but then what happens when you are managing people number one,
you start to feel a bit more pressure to maintain kind of
like a peaceful tone, so you certainly would not want to
complain to your team about the challenges that you're facing
with. The people that are, you know,
in higher up in the organization, but you also will
probably feel more guarded about voicing your concerns to your
peers and colleagues. Because now it starts to seem a
little bit less like a little bit less okay to do that.
And there's more of this sense I've noticed with my clients of
feeling like that's not how you want to.
Build relationships at work and needing to be a bit more guarded
with what you talk about and how you talk about it.
You're being a bit more strategic a bit, more thoughtful
and this sense to like it was okay to connect with people
through that kind of commiserating when you were an
individual contributor but now is a team lead, the message that
you want to be sending is different and the other thing
that happens is that the higher up you go and the more More
responsibilities. You get that starts to feel like
more pressure, right? I've talked about that before
this feeling that there's more pressure.
Now, there's more at stake and as this is happening very often.
Your manager is now even busier than before.
So has less time available, and they might simply have less
energy to do any emotional labor for checking in with you.
Even if They are really well intentioned and they really want
to support you. They are already just busy and
overwhelmed and may not be able to provide that level or
frequency of support so that can happen.
And so what, you know, we tend to do when we start to feel more
pressure and a little bit more guarded and a little bit more
overwhelmed. And if you're facing new kinds
of challenges, so when we are managing people, there's a lot
of emotional labor in the sense that you are now not simply
managing tasks and work getting completed.
Now, you are managing different personalities, both the people
on your team as well as managing up your also.
Now, managing expectations in a new way you are managing
confidential information. You might have information that
Will affect your team and it might be around layoffs or it
might be around planning. You might have access to
information that you know, will affect your team.
And yet you are not allowed to share that until like you get
the go-ahead or there's some other event that needs to
happen. So you will also have access to
more behind-the-scenes information that now you have to
hold in confidence and can't talk about that with your team
and the people that you see most often.
One of the things that, you know, when I asked people to
tell me what are the signs of a great manager, you know how like
what are the things that a great manager does.
A common thing that comes up is people will say oh my manager
really Shields me from all this other noise or from all these
other demands. So I can really focus on the
work that I need to do. Well, That's great.
But then, when you're in the role of needing to Shield
people, that becomes part of the emotional labor that you're now
doing to help your team to focus and to keep all of the, you
know, negotiation or pressure or concerns that you have
perspective on. Now, you're now keeping that
away from your team. So if you find that Becoming a
manager and stepping into this higher level of leadership
leaves. You feeling a bit more isolated
a bit more lonely because you don't feel like you have folks
that you can talk with about that and also feeling somewhat
drained because now there's all this other work around the
emotional management that you didn't you didn't fully realize
coming into it. What would that entail?
All I just want to name this to normalize it and I'm so that you
can see it and start to think about it in a new kind of way
rather than simply being reactive to it or feeling like
you have to keep your head above water.
Instead I want you to just realize oh it makes perfect
sense. Of course, there are all of
these new things that are being asked of me in this job and I
didn't fully Realize it. And that's why I'm feeling that
sense of being drained, right? Or that sense of being isolated.
So there are three maybe four things.
It was debating on. And if this is like three things
or four things, but I think it's kind of like four things and the
framework I'm going to share with you is something that I
shared very recently with a team.
I was facilitating a session for them, they were having a
week-long team. Off-site and they brought me in
on the first day to do two hours to facilitate some conversations
that they were wanting to have with each other.
And here is the framework that I offer to them.
That I want to offer to you because it will help you to both
become aware of all of the emotional labor part and also I
find it a very helpful framework that you can keep with you.
Like it's very lightweight, it's not complicated.
Added and it can give you that moment of perspective.
It can help you learn to think strategically and give you a
little bit more space so that you know what to do next.
If you've ever felt like what like what do I do next?
This might really help you with that.
So the first thing is to Simply pause and this is what keeps you
from being Active taking a moment to pause, gives you a
little bit of time to gather your thoughts and get a fresh
perspective. And in the session that I
facilitated last week, one of the people on the team, had such
a great contribution in the conversation and she said, oh
oh, oh this is what this is what I needed.
You know, earlier in the month, she said that she had been
responding to emails, very Very quickly and she thought about
it. Now she thought, if I had just
paused then I would have reduced the confusion because she was
responding very quickly to her emails, but she wasn't giving
herself time to pause and reflect gather, all the
information, and the perspective she needed.
And so she was acting quickly, but it was increasing the amount
of confusion, which Increase the amount of work and increased.
The amount of emails that were moving between like everybody on
the team. And so the pause is really
important because that is what will save you time and it will
save you energy and by extension, it will save time of
everyone else and it will help use everyone else's energy
better as well. So, taking a moment to pause.
Pause and then three things to follow and this is a framework.
I want you to think about how you can use this in your own
work, Day celebration observation, and iteration
celebration is when you pause and you ask yourself what's
working? What are we doing?
Well, what is going surprisingly?
Well, what did we not expect to go this?
Well you want to celebrate it for a couple of reasons.
One is there's a lot you can learn from the things that are
working and we very often can skip that because we think
everything's working there. Great, let's move on.
But you actually want to pause and get more Curious to
understand what's working. And why is there anything we can
learn? From the celebration that will
help us with this new challenge. Also celebration feels good.
People want to feel acknowledged I want to feel recognized and
appreciated and celebrations, do that, even if it's something
small, we don't want to wait for the big stuff to celebrate, we
want to celebrate each little step along the way because that
is what helps us continue to keep going, especially if we're
facing other kinds of challenges.
The second piece is observation. This is where mindfulness
becomes really helpful because mindfulness is the Of being
observant without judgment or story with observation.
You want to pause and ask yourself.
What am I noticing right now? You want to look for behaviors
rather than judgments or stories?
This is what will help you to also uncover any assumptions
that might not be serving you. That might be getting in the
way, so that pause and be observant.
Just notice, what am I noticing In This Moment?
It'll also help to bring you. You kind of out of the chaos of
overwhelm and ride into the present, which gives us a little
more space, a little more calm. So you can be more resourceful
and bring more of your own insight and perspective into the
moment. This also reminds me of the
story. I shared a few episodes ago
where one of my clients had this realization where you know what
got her out of imposter syndrome was when she stopped asking, am
I? Enough is my background good
enough compared to all these people.
And instead she started to ask, what can I contribute to help
this team be successful and by changing that perspective by
taking a moment to notice to notice and be observant and ask,
what can I contribute that will help make this team be
successful? Completely changed her approach.
Got her out of the Imposter syndrome and actually got her
too. A place of feeling confident and
what she had to offer and to engage with her team in a
completely different way. And then, the last one is
iteration and that simply acknowledges that you are in a
dynamic relationship with your work.
And with all of the people that you work with, it is not static.
That means the goal is not to perfectly plan, how things will
go. The goal is to recognize, this
is a dynamic situation, things are changing.
Sure, we can make a plan but the purpose of the plan is to help
me. Think through all of these
things, it is not to cling to the plan.
It is not to wait until I have a perfect plan.
Iteration acknowledges. We learn by doing and iteration
leaves room for Change and room to experiment.
It leaves room to try different things and this is so helpful.
If you are a perfectionist If you are a really hard on
yourself, when things don't go to plan, or if you are really
hard on yourself because you feel like you don't quite meet
the level of perfection that you hold for yourself.
Then remember, you know, Perfection is not the point
iteration being actively present and engaged and dynamic and
learning like Fast learning is so valuable.
So these four elements first, we And then we can bring that pause
into. How are you celebrating?
What are you observing and thinking iteratively it when we
think to also about these different elements I find it
helps us stay connected to compassion and to Grace and you
need both. I mean as a human generally you
absolutely need some self-compassion and some Grace
but especially Really, when you are in a position of leadership,
when people are looking to you, with questions, when people are
looking to you for guidance, and people are looking to you to set
the tone that self-compassion and that sense of Grace will
help you be better because it will help to unhook and
eliminate you from all of the pressure and the overwhelm and
it will get you out of that isolation and that kind of
lonely feeling. So that is what I wanted to
share with you today and please do take this implement this.
Try this out for yourself. If you wish to work with me,
one-on-one, I am taking new clients.
I'll put a link in the show notes so you can sign up for a
consult. And we can make a road map for
what will work on and how its part of the work that I love the
most is being able to support you one-on-one through the
challenges that you face and then being able to celebrate
with you as you start to grow and really like just experienced
a better work and life experience.
So that's what I have for you today.
Thank you so much for listening for wherever you are in the
world and I will talk to you next time.
Hey, before you go, if you like this podcast, please leave a
review. Tell me why you Ian and what has
helped you. Thanks so much.
I'll see you next time.