Welcome to the new manager podcast.
I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad that you're here. I hope you had a good day at
work. You know.
I was thinking how at work. Just like in life, there are
highs and there are lows, there are surprises that we enjoy and
surprises that are challenging. And you know, that is just part
of the ride that we signed up with, in being a human and
working with other humans. So I welcome you and whatever Is
it happening with you at work today?
You know, this is a time to take a moment to Just Breathe offer,
some appreciation to yourself, as a human.
You are doing the best you can with what is available to you.
You are learning as you go, which is also why you're here
listening. So just, you know, take that
moment to acknowledge being a human, can be challenging life
and work has its ups and downs. And in every moment we can take
a breath appreciate where how far we've come and also
appreciate the next steps forward towards where you are
going. So for today's episode, I wanted
to share with you this third key Element this key skill that
every manager needs. And when I first started
teaching, Classes for new managers.
This was back. I think it was October of 2016,
maybe 2017, but I think it was 2016. when I started, I really
wanted to simplify The way we talked about and teach people
management skills because you know, there are so many books
and there were so many different trainings.
And when I was a manager, you know, they gave us all of these
like charts and graphs and Frameworks for trying to
understand how to do this. Well, and my goal was I really
wanted to still and simplify what are the skills that you
need to know about in order to manage people effectively, no
matter How many people you manage, no matter how big your
organization is like, what are the very core fundamentals?
And what I landed on were two specific skills, one is
self-awareness The second is communication.
Now each of these are skills for life that you can continue to
develop and enhance. You already have a solid
foundation in both of them, right?
You're not, you're not even starting from zero, the good
news is you're already accomplished at self awareness
and communication because you successfully lived to become an
adult and you could not have done Not, if you did not already
have these two skills. What becomes interesting is when
we think about what is required to successfully manage other
people in the workplace. Everything comes to these two
skills. The self-awareness part.
Do you understand what it is that you do?
When you get stressed? Do you lash out at people?
Do you withdraw, do you seek information?
Like what? Do you do like, the more you
understand about yourself and how you like to work, and how
you prefer to communicate and what your strengths are?
The more, you understand that the better able you are to bring
your strengths and skills into the workplace.
And also, and this is really key.
The more awareness you have of yourself.
The more, you begin to understand that other humans.
Might be different, right? You start to understand do not
Everyone likes to meet at the same time of day that I do.
Or oh, not everyone is energized by conversations or not.
Everyone is comfortable with ambiguity in the way that I am.
The more you have clarity about how you yourself prefer to work
and what works for You and doing your best, the more, the Insight
arises of, oh, I am managing a team of humans, and they all
vary in what works for them. And in how they like to work,
and then, especially if you consider the Multicultural and
multilingual the, the international aspect of the
workplace, Then that becomes even more like available this
thought of, oh, right, like I grew up in a specific culture at
a specific time and I learned specific cultural norms around
how we socialize and communicate and convey respect, and that
might look different. With a different cultural
context or if I have someone on my team who has grown up and
worked in a specific industry or a specific like cultural
context, they might have learned different norms for how we
communicate, how we socialize, how we convey respect.
Like once you start to become more aware of that for yourself,
I find that Really starts to illuminate this realization of.
Oh there are so many different ways that we as humans have
learned to function effectively and sometimes the things we've
learned, they don't translate very well when we're in a
different organization or a different industry or a
different profession, or at a different level, which I think
is quite fascinating that this is so.
But, you know, that's also part of what's interesting about
being a human. I'm working with Humans.
So self-awareness is really important for some of those
reasons. The second one communication is
important because I mean, if we think about it, everything that
we do in the workplace, really only exists through our ability
to communicate to either convey information or to convey a
decision or to convey a Iron, mint and expectation, you know,
a request but also to receive and understand clearly what is
expected, what is required, what the policy is, what the timing
is. And what I see in organizations
is that, you know, communication is the easiest thing to do
poorly because as humans, you know we grow up for years and
years and years developing Beeping whatever communication
skills we can and then when we come into the workplace I mean
it just becomes so easy because it's so human.
It is so easy to have confusing or unclear or muddled
communication. Whether it's, you know, verbal
like you're in a meeting with someone and they say, do you
understand? And you say, yes, but you
actually have both different ideas about what you're actually
talking. About or whether we're talking
about Communication, in terms of the platform and tools that you
use. So how you manage email or slack
or teams or direct messages or however you track and organize
communication? So that people know what they
need to be focused on and people are all working together.
One of the things I think is interesting to in the work I've
done with startups, is that there's often this great sense
of urgency and a sense of we have to do things really fast
and what that can turn into is, like message proliferation where
people will prioritize rapid response over thoughtful
response. And what that means is it ends
up creating more and more and more messages to respond or
react to. but when we slow down a moment and pause and think
more deliberately or take more time, or allow things to kind of
breathe or settle a bit, that can actually reduce the volume
of messages that are flowing, that are kind of interrupting,
people's thoughts, space, and just letting people focus on the
task at hand, rather than being in this Very frenetic like it's
almost like a dust storm like all of a sudden all of these
messages are flying and it becomes hard to see and then it
just feels very frenetic but not a lot actually productive or
effective happens from that. So the awareness of you know,
what is the quality of communication that happens
between me and the people, I am in contact with.
How do I communicate effectively?
How do I communicate in? way that the person on the other
side can really receive and understand what is being asked
of them or what it is that I am saying, communication is, it's
one of those things that make it very excited about because we
use it all the time, it's easy to be a bit careless or to be a
bit sloppy, especially when we're very hurried or very tired
and just not thinking Deliberately.
But what's so cool is that as we develop this skill, Around how
we communicate. It becomes invaluable because it
will save you so much time. It will save your team so much
time and so much energy when we communicate.
Well, it really facilitates doing?
Good work, efficiently and effectively and Can truly
improve the quality of life just as a person, right?
If you think about how much of our stress and anxiety and worry
emerges because of the way were communicating or being
communicated with, right? Like just being able to have
clear. Calm communication.
It is a gift. It's one of those things too.
Because it's like one of these invisible skills, you can't
really see it. And it's kind of hard to measure
it, but you really know when you don't have it and you really
know and you do so communication as a skill and in all of these
contexts at work. Whether you are delegating or
onboarding or giving corrective feedback to someone or making a
request of someone or establishing a boundary and
saying, no to someone or whether you are advocating for someone,
or for something, everything that we do, especially as a
manager, really happens through the way that we communicate.
So, that was the Second skill that I really would emphasize
when I was teaching my class for new managers back in 2017.
Like, my entire program, my entire class was really built
around these two core principles, which is why I'm
very excited to introduce a new core principle today and it is
making decisions. So this is a skill that you will
need as a manager. You will need to make decisions
also about what you communicate. And when and how you will, also
make decisions about what to work on or who to assign
something to you will need to make decisions about the timing
of things. You will need to make decisions
with imperfect information. You will need to make decisions
about things that you wish you had more time or understanding
about. And so taking a moment to pause
and ask yourself how do I make decisions and because you're
human a couple things are probably true.
Number one if you have to choose between doing something that is
familiar to you that you know how to do.
And doing something that is unfamiliar that you don't know
exactly how to do. Most of the time.
You will choose the thing. You already know how to do.
And part of this is because and especially when you work in an
environment where there is a sense of urgency.
It will feel more satisfying to move quickly on something and
you can move quickly on Things that you already know how to do
even when they're not terribly important.
But they don't take as much energy and as much bran work, as
if you are needing to learn how to do something for the first
time, or if you are needing to do something that you are not
very good at and it takes a lot of time and energy to work
through it. This could be something as
simple as having a conversation with someone.
One that you feel a little uncomfortable having that
conversation? That's why we avoid
uncomfortable conversations, it takes a lot of energy.
We're worried about doing it wrong.
Maybe. We know that we need to really
create a certain outcome and we're not exactly sure how to do
that. We put it to the side.
It's a lot easier to do something, you know?
How to do that you can feel successful at and that will take
less brain power because You've already kind of built the neuro
Pathways in your brain. Your brain like is I know how to
do that. So you go do that.
Be mindful when that happens. And especially, if you've been
feeling depleted, then you will definitely gravitate towards
that because you will think I don't have the energy to learn
something new or to do something new or I don't have the time to
take out for this new thing that will take more time.
So that is one way that we make decisions.
We do the thing that we already know how to do and we delay or
defer. The thing that is new that we
How to do the other way that we make decisions is when we are
assessing risk. And another way this shows up is
around uncertainty. So, we will tend as a human to
always gravitate towards certainty.
We want certainty. We want to minimize risk and our
brain tends to relate to uncertainty as a risky because
we don't we don't know, right? Right.
In a sense this is actually what I was just talking about, but in
a different way when you are facing a perceived uncertainty
or something that you perceive as risky, you will tend to also
avoid or or not do that. This can also show up in
high-stakes conversations so let's say that you need to
present your Work to a group of very high level people.
And you do not like presenting to people, you don't know, well,
because you feel the pressure and it makes you feel very
anxious and you're worried about doing it wrong.
If you're perceiving, that opportunity as being high risk
and high stakes, you are will go into it like physical
discomfort, right? As you start thinking about it
and you will decide either like, okay, look, I'm not going to do
this or I'll do I'll delay it or I'll put it off.
You'll they'll there will be resistance around it as a human.
We tend to make decisions around what is our level of comfort or
risk and discomfort. So you want to be aware of that.
One of my students shared this with me and I really loved it.
So I wanted to share it with you.
But around this conversation of how do you make decisions
especially around what what to work on because there?
Often be more things to do, then you have room to do them.
And what my students said was, he said, well, I look for the
things where I can have the greatest impact, so the things
that I'm uniquely suited for those are the things that I will
want to focus on if I have expertise, or if I have a
particular strength or skill set, I know if I can have an
outsized effect, then I'll focus on that because I'll know that.
That's Where my work can be of greatest use or greatest
service. And I love that because I think
that can be very useful way to think about how to decide what
to focus on. Sometimes you'll, you know, just
want to watch out and make sure that you're not only doing the
things that are comfortable to you or that you like or that
your strengths are because you want to continue to grow as
well, but that can definitely be a way to decide.
You have lots of things. You might ask yourself, where is
the bottleneck that I can relieve, right?
If you realize okay, every, you know, all these other tasks are
waiting on me to handle this one thing that can be a wonderful
use of your time and a wonderful decision to make.
Based on that. You might also ask yourself
where is the growth here both for me as a manager, right?
Maybe it does mean, Raising your hand and volunteering to speak
up and present something if that's your area of growth or as
you're thinking of how to make decisions and you think in the
context of your team, you might ask yourself what will benefit
the growth of this person on my team or what will benefit my
team in making this decision. Maybe my team really needs to
learn how to do XY and z. And if we If I make this
decision, this will give us the opportunity to practice the
thing that we're not good at yet, or if you have someone on
your team and you think I really want to support them in growing
as a leader and helping to share their voice.
And so I will nominate them to present our work at this
high-visibility event so that they can grow their, their
ability to speak and to find confidence in that.
That is a wonderful way to think about how you make decisions.
And the thing I want to caution you as well.
And I see this a lot especially with new managers and especially
when you take it really seriously like when you really
want to do a good job and, you know, we talked before about how
that can sometimes get in our way.
But what I see is this desire to get it right?
And because of that desire to get it right, right?
Like whatever that looks like and the fear of Doing It Wrong
whatever that looks like, what happens is there can be a
hesitation to making decisions. It's like avoiding a potential
discomfort or potential pain. And what I want to remind you is
that you will make decisions and sometimes they won't go the way,
you thought they would, you will make mistakes.
Takes sometimes. And that is okay.
That is part of the experience, part of the ride, what becomes
important is to remember that number one, that is normal.
And number two, the leadership part really shows up when you
choose, what will I do with this.
So if you make a decision and it turns out to be a mistake or
something goes sideways, that you didn't anticipate the
questions. Into you.
Then is what shall I do now with this?
How can I learn from this? How can I use this as shared
learning from my team? How can I use this in some way?
And the danger is that if there's a mistake and I'm
telling you again, like there will always be mistakes.
Small ones, big ones, middle sized ones like such is the
nature of being a human in the world working with other humans,
things are Dynamic and changing and sometimes you might make the
wrong call, but to remember that you Are not a problem.
Right. Like what I mean is you can make
a mistake but you're not like wrong or a bad person for having
made that mistake, you know, all of us have in different times
and in different ways and we don't want to hide it and we
don't want to feel ashamed about it and we don't want to, you
know, let that mistake. Hold us back when you make
decisions, there will always be some uncertainty.
Auntie about the outcome, we make the decision we can with
the information and the abilities that we have in the
moment. And then you might need to make
another decision based on the outcome of that and based on new
information and new context and new situation.
So be mindful like when you are thinking about how do I make
this decision, be mindful that you are not Not holding yourself
back from a great fear of doing it wrong.
Because part of getting it right means making decisions and
learning from what that outcome is not always comfortable.
I will tell you that but also it's okay, right?
Like part of not being comfortable means that we're
learning and we're growing. So these are my thoughts for you
today. Three core skills, self
awareness, communication, making decisions, the one-eyed, really
invite you to pay attention to in your work life and actually
in your life life because it kind of shows up in the same
way. But just begin to notice how do
I make decisions who last thought actually related to
this? So sometimes we make a decision
based on something from the past that made sense at the time.
But now you need to reevaluate, does this still make sense for
me for my team for this situation.
Now that things have changed? Classic example is we have Team
meetings there always an hour long and they're always on
Tuesdays at 3:00 in the afternoon we made that decision
a year ago because of X y&z reason.
But now does it still make sense?
Does it still support the go And the reality of the team.
Now, having those moments to pause and re-evaluate the
decision you made before that is still playing itself out there.
Maybe it's time to re-evaluate that.
If you have said yes to a regular meeting that someone
else hosts. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate.
Does it still make sense to attend that meeting?
Or is it time to question that? Have somebody else come or step
away be? Going to re-evaluate and to
reassess based on what you're noticing now.
All right, that I promise you is my last comment for tonight.
I hope you're doing well. I hope you have a wonderful day
or night or afternoon at work and I'll talk to you next time.
Do you want personal confidential help with your
situation at work? I offer one-on-one coaching and
can help you overcome challenges reach your goals and become a
more effective leader to schedule a consult.
Go to my website, Kim nickel.com coaching and we'll schedule time
to talk about what's going on with you and how I can help talk
to you soon.