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.
You're listening to the New Manager podcast.
My name is Kim Nickel. I am a coach.
You might think of me as an executive coach, a life coach, a
leadership coach. My clients describe me as all of
those things because we work on all of those things to help them
be more effective and just more satisfied in their work life, in
their personal life. It all connects.
Today, I want to share with you some lessons that I have been
learning by watching the Summer Olympic Games.
Oh my gosh, I have been so inspired, so impressed, so blown
away by the hard work and the talent that I've been seeing.
And there's so many athletes and so many events and I have only
been able to see a little bit, but a couple of things really
stood out to me that I know can help you in your day-to-day work
and your life. What I've come to really believe
is that when we are feeling more confident, calm, more capable in
what we are facing at work, the rest of our lives will also be
better. You will have less frustration
to bring home and vent about with your partner.
You will be less distracted. You won't be thinking about work
so much when you're feeling better about how work is going.
And on the other side of that, you know when your personal life
is feeling fulfilling and you're feeling really happy about who
you are as a person and what you know that the trajectory and
path of your life is, and that includes your professional life.
Then you will also have a better time at work because you'll be
able to see it more in that bigger picture perspective.
Think sometimes we forget that every job is temporary.
Even if you're a founder, even that job is temporary.
There will be a time when you choose to move on, or maybe it's
not your choice, but you are suddenly released from that
relationship, either through a reorg or through a layoff.
Or maybe something happens, the company is merged with another
one and things just end. There are so many different why,
regardless of whether you choose it or it just happens, when we
remember that every job is temporary, that we're only here
for a certain amount of time. It helps to reframe, I think,
and kind of rescope the size of the problems and the challenges
that you're going to face over the course of your career.
And I like asking this question, which is what do you want to do
with the time that you have? So while you are here in this
role in this organization, what is the effect you would like to
have? What does it look like for you
to be effective as a leader or as a manager?
What is the effect you want to have on your team?
As people, you know, sometimes we have to step into a
leadership role under the most challenging of circumstances.
And while there may be a lot that's out of your hands and
outside of your control, you might simply decide that even
though things are really hard, you want to be a person who
helps to ease the load of the people you work with with.
Or you might want to choose to be the person who helps uplift
those you work with by reminding them of what they're good at, by
helping them navigate their careers, by helping them to
focus on the most important parts of what needs to happen
and setting aside the things that we don't have control of
that are maybe not so important. So our time in any job is
temporary. And coming back to what I was
initially thinking that I wanted to share with you is watching
these athletes has really given me a couple of things to think
about. And specifically, watching the
US gymnastics teams. And there are three lessons that
I'm taking away that I want to now present to you that they
might be useful for you. So first lesson is that a
powerful team has diverse strengths.
And I don't know about you, but I have watched some of the
footage of Steven Nutter Rosik, and he is the US gymnast who is
the pommel horse guy. And Oh my gosh, he is so good at
this, this apparatus, and it has traditionally been one of the
most difficult ones. And the US team of my
understanding is that have historically not done very well
at this one particular skill. And years ago, Steven decided
this was the one thing in gymnastics that he was going to
specialize in. He wanted to be really, really
good at this. And he was, you know, he was
brought onto the team because of his very specific skill and this
one very difficult thing that as a team they had a lot of
strength except for in this one place.
And so when you think about what does it mean to have a really
effective and powerful team, it includes like you might even
say, it requires a diversity of strengths.
You don't want everyone to be the same.
And so for you, when you think about the leadership role that
you have and the people that you have to work with, ask yourself,
what are my people good at? And especially if you have
someone on your team and they are really challenging for you,
like if you think like, oh, this person is just they're not
stepping up. They're not, you know, they're
not, you know, showing up the way I would want them to.
Maybe they're just very difficult to work with.
Ask yourself, OK, So what is this person really good at?
What is their strength? Maybe they're currently working
in an environment, you know, or, or dealing with stuff in their
outside life that is interfering with their ability to show their
strength. We don't always know kind of
what's going on with somebody. But when you ask yourself, what
is it that each person on my team is really good at?
What are their strengths? How can I identify and
understand what that is? Because then you'll be able to
work with those strengths and develop them and use them even
better. And sometimes people don't even
know what their strengths are because they come easily
perhaps. And they just, you know, have
always been able to be good at this one thing.
And so they might not even recognize it.
So one of the other values is when you have a conversation
with people, right? Because you don't always just
have to guess. You don't have to observe
someone and identify their strength or you don't have to
guess. You know, I, based on what I've
seen, I would guess your strength is this.
You can also ask people, how would you describe your
strength? What strengths are you seeing in
your work lately? What strengths have we not been
able to use? What strengths are you not
bringing because maybe you don't have the resources or the right
work to line up with that? Get really curious about the
strengths of the people on your team and also for yourself, what
are the strengths that you are bringing?
What are the strengths that maybe you haven't had the
opportunity to exercise in this particular space?
And also remember, when you remember that a powerful team
has diverse strengths, then it's also that reminder, that sense
of ease that your job as the manager is not to be the best at
everything. It's not to be better than
everyone at the thing. This becomes really important
when you are, for example, managing people with greater
subject matter expertise than you have.
Your job isn't necessarily to be the best at that thing in order
to be a really outstanding manager of people who are better
than you at a specific subject matter.
It's also not your job to know the most.
So you might work with people that have been in your
organization longer than you have, or maybe you're joining a
a team that has been intact for a while.
So they kind of have a way of working.
They already have a lot of organizational intelligence and
knowledge that you don't because you're new to the organization
or you're new to the team. That is OK.
Sometimes we forget that maybe the strength you bring is the
strength of the outside perspective, the strength of
fresh eyes, the strength of everything that you've learned
by having a different kind of background, either a different
kind of work history or a different kind of life history,
that now allows you to see things in a different way, in a
way that is valuable because now that you're there, you can see
things in a way that others would not be able to see.
So that's the first lesson. OK, Powerful teams have diverse
strengths. Consider that for yourself as
well As for the people on your team.
Another lesson that I got from watching the Olympics is that
different bodies have different skills and specialties.
It is amazing to see all of the different Olympic athletes and
see how their bodies are different.
They are taller or shorter or, you know, more muscles in one
part of their body and less than another.
And it is amazing to see the variety of powerful, highly
competent athletes. And they have different shapes
and sizes and different ages. And it's, it's wonderful to be
reminded that excellence doesn't look one way, that there are
lots of ways a person can look kind of on the surface and yet
still be exceptional, like world class level at the thing that
they do. And I find this is really
helpful because one of the questions my clients come to me
with, especially when they're in a new level in their career or
they're looking at where they want to go in their work is
they'll ask, well, what does it look like to be there?
How am I supposed to be? And I'll look around to see if,
you know, for examples. And sometimes that creates over
identification and over comparing with something that is
way outside of your actual style preference and the way that you
are. Great.
So if somebody said I want to be an Olympic athlete and, you
know, and they looked around and they said, oh, here's an Olympic
athlete, you know, they are a shot putter.
Oh my gosh. I guess in order to be an
Olympic athlete, I need to look like that.
OK, That would be not enough information in order to
determine if that was a useful role model, right?
Or you might have someone say I want to be an Olympic athlete.
I guess I need to look like this other person.
Instead, you want to ask that question of you know, how Like,
what are my strengths? What can I really excel at?
How do I excel in what environment and in what
circumstance do I excel? How can I really tap into what
like who I am and what I am bringing in order to achieve
excellence and realize that might look very different than
the others around me? And that's totally OK.
So your leadership style does not have to match somebody
else's. The way that you are successful
does not have to match someone else's.
This can feel kind of scary, especially if you're used to
becoming successful by kind of quietly reading the room,
learning the unwritten rules, and then operating within them.
That is a very effective and useful skill to have, right?
It's a way of kind of creating harmony, reducing friction.
It's a way of being kind of sensitive to cultural context
and social norms that might not be made explicit, but you want
to make sure that you're not abandoning other qualities,
strengths, and values that you bring just because of who you
are. And sometimes being able to
navigate that nuance and that distinction can be a bit of a
tricky thing, especially as you move into higher levels of
responsibility where you might feel like there's more pressure
for two reasons #1 when you are in that higher level, more
people are looking to you for guidance and for direction.
And the other thing is that when you are in a higher level of
leadership, there's that feeling of there's more at stake now.
You might feel more fear about doing things that seem a little
bit different than what you're being presented with because the
fear might be if I do this my own way and it doesn't work,
there's so much more at stake and others might be hurt.
Whether it's like this doesn't work, it will have a bad effect
on the people on my team or on our customers or on our
constituents or, you know, they're the idea that when
you're in a leadership role, if something goes wrong, it's not
just you, but it's those around you that are depending on you
that might be affected. So that also can create a subtle
pressure to compare yourself in a way that starts to move
against your own intuitions about how we know how you want
to lead and what kind of leader and manager you want to be.
So that's Part 2 lesson. Two different bodies, different
skills and specialties. That's all.
That's all part of what excellence looks like.
It can look different. And then my third big lesson, my
third big insight from watching the Olympics and especially the
women's gymnastics team, the women's U.S. team is have fun.
I mean, have fun, cheer for everyone, cheer for yourself,
definitely acknowledge all of your hard work and like, revel
in your own abilities, Yes. And cheer for your team, cheer
for the other athletes, cheer for everyone there because
everyone is there working hard and doing everything they can to
do well. And there was, you know, a bit
of an interview I caught with Simone Bai files, and she was
talking about another athlete who was really close on her
heels in terms of the scoring. And she said she was cheering
for her. And she was also kind of
worried. She's like, she's doing really
well. But there was no animosity in
it. There was no unkindness in it.
She was just like, I was cheering for.
I wanted to see her. Do you really, really well?
I was a little nervous because she was getting so close.
But, you know, she did such a great job.
And so I love that so much, that idea of we can celebrate and
cheer for each other, that we can celebrate and cheer for
others who are also in our field wanting to do well.
And I think especially when you are thinking about your career.
So yes, when you're a manager, for sure you want to remember to
celebrate the small wins for yourself as well As for your
team. That's an important part of
longevity of creating sustainable work environment
where people feel supported and they're willing to sometimes go
the extra mile because if something doesn't work out,
they're not worried about being punished or about something bad
happening. It's a way to foster trust and a
sense of connection with each other.
But also remember, every job is temporary.
And so there may come a time when you are looking to join
another team, either another team in your organization or
another team beyond this current organization.
And so when you're cheering for others, that requires, number
one, that you're paying attention to others, that you're
noticing who else is here, you know, beyond, you know, we don't
want to get so tunnel vision that we're only looking at
ourselves and our individual team, but we also want to look
beyond who else is here. What are they working on?
Can I cheer for and celebrate them as well?
Can I hold that sense of, hey, we're all in this together?
And even if it is a literal competition, can you still feel
a genuine sense of appreciation, a sense of joy, and a sense of
wanting to see others do well? I think one of the things that
makes that possible is when you know that you are doing your
absolute best to do what you came here to do, to be who you
came here to be, then it doesn't take away from you to
acknowledge and celebrate others.
And when we think about, you know, your career as part of an
ecosystem, like you are not just an individual in an individual
role, you're also a person who's operating in this bigger
ecosystem. That is a way to maintain that
sense of awareness of connection with others because you might
find yourself in a different part of that ecosystem one day.
You might want to maintain relationship relationships with
other people who you see doing interesting work.
And the reverse is also true. There might come a day when you
are hiring and on your team, you're trying to decide who else
do we need to bring onto this team.
And you might think, you know what?
I saw this other person, I remember them having this big
win. I remember cheering for them.
I wonder what they're doing now and if they'd be open to a
conversation about a potential opportunity or partnership.
Over here, so there's a kind of, you know, connectedness, a kind
of mutuality when we think about this in terms of that bigger
picture. And so I wanted to share that
with you too. I have so many other thoughts,
but that is what I wanted to share with you.
You know, there was an an earlier episode I did around you
will get valuable leadership lessons from everyday moments.
I feel like this week with the Olympics going on, just begin to
notice what kinds of inspiration and insights you can take from
these incredible athletes and all that they're doing.
You will be able to gather something that will help you in
your day-to-day life too. So thank you so much for
listening. Have a 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.
It can get better.