Welcome to the new Manager podcast.
I'm your host, Kim Nicholl. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well.
I am feeling quite excited because I'm going on vacation
really soon and when this episode releases, I will be on
vacation with my partner and my brother's family.
And it'll be really nice to be away and just having time to
reflect and connect. And, you know, the perspective
that comes when you take a step back and you kind of connect
with the people that you care deeply about.
And you just begin to think a little differently about, you
know, your life and your work and how it all fits together and
what you want to do when you get back, you know, how how you want
it to be. And so I am looking forward to
having that time. And I hope that you are also
planning some time away in the coming holiday season so that
you're able to also replenish, reflect and think about, you
know, sometimes the bigger picture, the bigger questions
and not just getting through all of the demands of each and every
day. I've been thinking too, about
the episode from last week, the one about what is your role?
Because today I wanted to talk with you about defining success.
One of the hard things when you become a manager and when you're
in a leadership role is realizing it's such a different
job than just being good at the thing that you've been good at.
And when you begin to ask yourself, you know, how, how do
I know if I'm doing a good job here?
What does success look like? How can I be successful when
there are so many different personalities and so many
different things that are maybe outside of your control?
It can feel very disorienting, especially when you are a person
who cares a lot. So you're probably tracking the
emotions and the, you know, just the work of other people as an
indicator of success. And it's also really hard when
you are used to being a very high achieving, high
accomplishment person. Because when you then step into
this new role of being the manager and you're not sure you
know what success looks like, what it means, how to get there,
It can feel very frustrating. And it can sometimes be
discouraging and just really interfere with both your ability
to be your best, to do your best work, and also to have a sense
of clarity about what is it that matters.
You know, if we if we understand what success means to you, that
becomes a very orienting perspective.
So you'll begin to have more clarity about what matters, what
should you put your attention to and what things don't matter so
much. And maybe those can go off to
the side a little bit. So thinking back about the
episode from last week, around what is your role?
This also plays into the idea of how do you measure success?
Because, for example, if you feel like your role is to be the
fixer and to fix things, then you're going to measure your
success by whether or not you were able to fix the thing.
And this can sometimes be tricky because you might be in a
situation where fixing it is actually not an option.
Like it's not going to be repaired or restored to how it
used to be or how you know it ideally needs to be.
The objective of fixing the situation might not be very well
tied to the idea of success because it's just, you know,
you're like, I can't fix this, right?
Like if half your team is laid off, like that's not a thing you
can fix. And if you identify to be the
fixer in that situation, that's going to be a really hard place
to be. On the other hand, if you think
of yourself more as like the advocate, my role here is to be
the advocate, to be an advocate for my team or to be an advocate
for the customer. Or, you know, my role is to be
the one who can make it more clear how these different dots
connect. Part of my role is I'm going to
be the dot connector, the person who understands how these
different things connect so that I can communicate that to my
team and they will understand why their work is important and
how they fit into the bigger picture.
Or even the reverse, right? You might be the one helping to
connect the dots for the person above you, for your manager or
your skip level, or for the people beside you, the other
leaders at your level who are trying to collaborate.
You might be the one saying, hey, this is a perspective I
don't see us addressing and I see an important connection
between these different components.
Let me communicate that to you, get your thoughts about it and
want to make sure that it's not simply being overlooked.
So depending on how you think about what is your role, that
can have a significant influence on whether you feel you're being
successful and on the way that you are recognizing your
progress, whether you are recognizing that you are being
successful or not. So one way I want to offer you
to think about this, and this is actually a really great question
to ask. I think especially mid year, mid
year and also end of year, you know, every six months or so you
want to check in and just see if the answer to these questions
have changed or if you've, you know, maybe the answers are the
same, but you've gotten a bit distracted or you've drifted a
bit off track. So the question to ask yourself
when we're thinking about what does it mean to define a success
as a manager? How do you want to be
remembered? How do you want to be
remembered? When someone looks back at this
time and they remember working with you, what do you want them
to remember you for? How do you want to be remembered
and has you reflect on that and generate some answers, right.
Maybe it's I want to be remembered as fair.
I want to be remembered as kind. I want to be remembered.
You know, you probably, my guess is you, you probably don't want
to be remembered as I'm the person who had all the right
answers every single time. You know, I would, I would, I
want to be remembered as the person who is always right and
never wrong. You know, that's not what we're
going for. That's not the goal.
We really want to think, especially in a very human
context. You know, you have the title and
the job, but you also have a way that you are influencing the
people around you, the work that gets done, how it gets done.
And when you pause to reflect on how do you want to be
remembered, what are those words?
Because that can guide you, that can help you sort through not
just what you're doing, but how you're doing it.
How do you want to be remembered?
If you think too about some of the people that you have worked
with in your life that have left an impression, whether one, when
you look back and remember them, you remember it with great
warmth or when you look back, you still kind of cringe a
little bit like, oh, that was not a great experience.
But we can, you know, recall that the experience that we have
with our colleagues is a really meaningful one.
Like just as a human as a on a human level.
And so you can ask yourself, how do I want to be remembered?
Do you want to be remembered as resourceful, as someone who
inspired and uplifted? Do you want to be remembered as
someone who you know, supported your team or someone who was
really visionary? Or do you want to be remembered
as someone who always made sure that each voice was heard?
Do you want to be remembered as someone who really respected,
you know, like the mission or the team or the the colleagues?
Like spend some time thinking about that.
And related to that, it's this question of what do you want
people to say about you? If you think about the people
you work with and, you know, at some point they'll go on to work
someplace else and they'll, you know, be chatting with a friend
or a new colleague. And they'll say, oh, you know,
what was it like working at that other place?
And they'll think about you and what it was like to work with
you. What do you want them to say?
And, you know, how do you want them to think about you?
You can even think about this. And I want to acknowledge this
one's a little tricky. If you're a person who has a
little bit of an obsession around what are people thinking
about me? We want to slow down and
remember this question is a slightly different angle because
it's that angle of, you know, what is the effect that I want
people to Remember Me for? What do I want them to say?
I have a client that I worked with a couple of years ago and
she was someone who was often kind of over overlooked, a bit
underestimated. You know, she looked very young.
So people would assume that she was very young and then treat
her not very, not very well. You know, they would, they would
tend to dismiss her a little bit.
And so when she was thinking about, you know, how is it she
wants to be remembered for her, it was this sense of I want
people to, you know, say about me.
Oh, she's she's tough. She knows her stuff, but she's
really fair. So for her, it was this sense of
I want to be seen as like very competent, even a little bit
tough, but very fair. She did not want to be
remembered as, oh, like that person.
She looks so young. You know, she was, she was like,
no, this is how I want to be remembered.
And so would it influence then the way that she chose to show
up? Because now she's not trying to,
you know, unbuckle and undo how people are seeing her.
She's not trying to present older.
She's not trying to, you know, challenge their, you know,
mistake about her age or her abilities.
Instead, she's showing up with the emphasis on her competence,
her abilities. She's no longer distracted kind
of by the the the noise of the mistakes of others.
And instead it's more the sense of like, yeah, people make that
mistake sometimes, but they get over it because of who she is
and how she focuses and what she's there to do, the way that
she communicates, the way that she gets things done.
So consider for yourself too. How do you want to be
remembered? What do you want people to say
about you? This one is also good when you
remember that in the course of your career, so much of the work
that we do and the opportunities that come to us are by what
people say about us to others. And I'm thinking about this
right now because I have a couple of new corporate clients,
a couple of new engagements for some group workshops that will
be happening later this year for some different team learning
events. And both of those opportunities
came because of how other people Remember Me and talk about me.
And they, you know, were just out in the world talking with
someone who said, yeah, you know, who do you recommend for
this kind of a workshop? And these people said, oh, you
should definitely talk to Kim. She's really great at group
facilitation. She's really warm.
And she has, like, a very human approach.
And yeah, like the topic of time management and sustainable work
habits, Yeah, that definitely go talk to Kim.
She'd be great at this. And so when you think about, you
know, what is it that you want people to say about you that's
also about people are in rooms that you are not in and your
name might come up. What is it that you want them to
say? And so when you think about
that, that sense of who you are as a person, what your sense of
purpose or your perspective or what are the qualities about you
that are fantastic that you want to bring into the way that you
work, the way that you lead, the way that you manage.
The answer that comes up to these two questions can help you
to get more grounded, to be more focused, and then to bring it to
life. One thing I often talk about in
my teachings and with coaching is this concept of how your
being drives your doing. And very often we forget that.
We focus on the actions. What do I need to do?
But your being is all about who you are.
It's not just the what you do, it's The Who you are and it's
the how you do it. What is it that's informing
that? And that is always in your
hands. There's a lot you don't have
control over. But the way that you choose to
show up, the way that you choose to focus your attention, the way
that you set an intention for how you want to be in the
relationships you have at work and in the different situations
you're going to be faced, all of that you do have control and
influence over. So when you're you know, we're,
we're mid year now we're in, we're in June, almost into July.
And as you're thinking about whether or not you're feeling
successful as a manager, some days are going to be hard, some
seasons are going to be hard. But we don't want to lose sight
of what is it for you? What is it that points to, Yes,
you're being successful as this manager, as this leader, and
coming back to those two questions, how do you want to be
remembered and what do you want people to say about you?
Those two answers will help to Orient you and kind of like set
your compass for where you're headed next.
Yes, of course, we've got the KPIs, the OK Rs, all of the
different performance metrics and all of the external things
that are measured. But more important in my in my
book is that you have clarity about defining success for you.
So that's what I would offer for you today.
I hope you have a really great week.
Thank you so much for listening 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.
It can get better.