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.
I for one I'm doing great. I'm actually doing a lot better
than I was a week ago when I had a cold and I was feeling very
low energy and congested and it was not that fun.
I am on the other side of it now so that's really good.
But it did interfere with some of my plans and it also gave me
We the topic for today which is asking yourself.
Where is my growth? Let me explain what I mean.
So when I got sick, I hadn't planned it.
I had a full calendar of work things and personal things, and
as I started to feel my body slowing down, I had a little
moment of panic. It was this thought of, oh no, I
can't get sick. There's too much to do.
I have too many things? I need to do.
And I realized as the week began to progress and I was feeling
the effectiveness, I realized that I was going to need to make
some decisions. I was going to need to decide.
How did I want to spend my time? My energy and my attention in
light of the fact that I had less energy than I typically
would, and I had less energy than I had planned to.
To have, we're expected to have. And I thought, you know, this is
actually a really a perfect situation in the sense that when
you are at work, in managing people, there will be lots of
times. When you also have to make this
decision when you have less resources, less energy, less
time, less headcount, less budget.
Let you know, there are always constraints.
And sometimes there are constraints, we don't plan for
Don't expect but they show up anyways and so in that moment
there are a couple of choices we get to make.
Number one, do I push through? Is that what is the best option
here? Do I just suck it up and put in
the hours and kind of try to just power my way through this
difficult situation or is what I need to do to actually dial
things back and Slow down, take time to recover and refresh and
allow that not. Everything is going to get done.
Maybe what I need to do right now is to delegate some things,
instead of trying to do all of it, can I assign or delegate
some of it to somebody else. Maybe what I need to do in this
moment is have a conversation to reset expectations, that might
require That someone feels disappointed because things
won't happen in the timeline or in the manner that we had
initially expected. But maybe the growth is in
having that uncomfortable and direct and clear conversation.
So that decision point when you realize, okay I had a plan,
things are changing in a way I hadn't anticipated.
What do I want to do now, the way I I want you to think about
this, is from this perspective, of where is your growth, right?
Like, ask that of yourself. Where is my growth in this
situation and depending on how you answer that can guide you
into the direction that you choose.
And one of the ways to know where your growth is is to ask
yourself? Well, what is it that I would
normally do is my habit. The habit of pushing through is
that Kind of the thing that I tend to go to First, is the
thing that I tend to go to, you know, delegating first is that
what I tend to do is the thing I tend to do having a direct clear
conversation that tends to be not the thing that most people
do at first. Especially, you know, I find a
lot of it is, you know, we're resilient self-reliant, you
know, can do people so very often the first thought is I
have to do this. I have to make it work.
Have to do it all on my own and this is what can also roll into
especially over time, burnout and anxiety, and it actually
prevents us from developing all these other skills.
The skill of having the direct conversation, the skill of
allowing someone to feel disappointed or frustrated, the
skill of being able to delegate or to re-evaluate the plan.
When we keep this kind of single-minded focus.
And we tend to power through things.
I mean, that's an okay approach from time to time, but I really
want you to have a more robust set of options.
So, asking yourself, right? Like, where's my growth in this
situation? What's the thing that I tend to
do first and then asking maybe there is another direction that
might challenge me to do but that's what I'm going to choose.
So for me, you know, a week or two ago, when I was not feeling
that great and I realized, you know, I think I'm going to need
to re-evaluate all of the things on my to-do list and I ended up
deciding to not record a podcast episode for that week.
And part of me felt really guilty and bad like ah but you
know, I wanted to get this message to you and I wanted to
you know, maintain my streak of headed heading a an episode
every week. But when I paused and thought
about it and I thought, okay, Kim, where is your growth?
Here is this the situation where you need to push through and
just like crank it out or is this the situation where you
need to pause? You need to pull back and take
time to rest and recover and redirect your energy in a
different kind of way. And I ended up choosing to do
that. So I'm going to choose to rest.
I think that's going to be where my growth is in this situation
and I'm going to manage my mind so I'm not putting a ton of
guilt or pressure or self judgement on myself in this.
But actually realizing I'm doing this from a very strategic
place. I'm making this Choice
intentionally and I'm not going to feel bad about that.
I'm actually making this decision based on the
information that I have and the landscape that I'm And, and kind
of assessing like, what is the best use of the time and the
energy and the attention that I currently have available in
light of all of these other things.
And so I started to think about it, also in terms of strategic
failure, so uncomfortable, when you're used to being a very high
achieving person but strategic failure is when you decide what
is the thing? I will allow to fail right now
and I am alone. Allowing it to fail for a very
intentional and strategic reason.
Because I need to put my energy into this other thing instead.
And I was talking with one of my clients about this and they use
this fantastic term and it was this idea of the most valuable
problem. So if you've got all these
different problems to solve, let's say you've got five
different problems and you're trying to solve all of them and
you have not Energy or the resources for all five, what's
the most valuable one you can solve for?
Put your energy on that one? Knowing that there might be some
failure because you're not putting the attention on some of
those other things, but you make that choice, intentionally and
knowingly, and when you do, then that gives you the option to
address them in a different way to do.
So whether that means having a conversation about it or
resetting your own Like tations, but you don't beat up on
yourself for it. Instead, you simply acknowledge.
Okay. This is a strategic failure.
I'm willing to take, because this other thing is what I'm
going to choose to put my attention, and my work towards,
I think, I've mentioned this maybe in the last episode or so,
but sometimes there are no Solutions.
There are just decisions and for you, what I want to encourage
and invite you to is, Position of from a strategic perspective,
from a big picture perspective, what are you choosing and why?
That becomes a lot easier and a lot more of a grounded place to
live and work from rather than feeling like it's your job to do
everything. It's not.
It's actually your job to make decisions about what is kind of
coming at you. That's also, what gets you out
of Lang like have to play whack-a-mole and just respond
and react to everything that pops up instead.
It's like, okay, here's the decision.
I'm going to make about what I'm doing and why and then you
manage everything else around that.
It just feels very different because you're really standing
in more of this position of agency of being in control.
Not like being able to control all the things, but being able
to make a decision for yourself. Self based on who you are
everything else that's happening around you rather than feeling
like you're being kind of dragged all over by all of the
different demands and all of the different things that need your
attention. So, take a moment, you know, in
the coming week, when you start to feel yourself being pulled in
different directions, or you start to feel worried about all
of the things kind of on your plate, take a moment to step
back and ask yourself. Where is my growth right now?
Is this a situation where I need to give more and just extend you
know my efforts and you know work more hours.
Like is that your growth or is your growth about?
I need to think really differently about what this work
is and about what my job is. Maybe your growth is I really
need to learn to delegate and to trust and to communicate with
the folks that I feel like You know what, I don't really trust
them. We need to figure out what is
going on, so that I can build that sense of Reliance that I'll
be able to hand something to them knowing that they'll be
able to get it done. Sometimes our growth is being
okay with other people. Doing things not exactly the way
that we would do it, that can be so uncomfortable, but sometimes
that's where our growth is, because if we don't learn how to
do that, then Then number one, we become the bottleneck.
Number two, we can turn into micromanagers, not because we
want to be, but because we're not willing to let go of how
things are getting done. And number three, that can turn
us into burnout with no boundaries and always feeling
like we have to be on and available.
So that's kind of the idea I wanted to share with you in
every, you know, week. Every moment every situation.
You can pause and ask like, what am I, what am I doing?
What, where is my growth here? How do I want to be looking at
this situation? You can also look at it from
that lens of what is the most valuable problem for me to
address? Where will I allow for a
strategic failure? One of my other clients
described it as I'm going to allow some of the balls to drop
because that way we will all First and where the weak points
are in our processes and systems.
Like she had been trying so hard to keep everything together and
she began to realize people don't understand that.
We need to change the way our processes and systems are
working because I'm able to Band-Aid over everything, and
I'm able to keep things functioning and so we're never
really seeing where the systemic issue is and it was one of the
hardest. Hardest hardest things for her
to do is to allow things to fail because you know, she's like I
don't want anything to fail. Especially if it's anything in
my hands but when she realized that because she was, you know,
kind of holding everything together all the time, she's
like I'll never be able to get out of this and we as a team
we'll never really see and learn what we need to be doing
differently. So, that was her growth.
Not Choice around strategic failure so that it could
illuminate for others, where those break points were so that,
then they could take a real. Look at how to repair and
improve like the entire like system.
A good reflection that I wanted to offer to you today.
The other couple of things I wanted to mention is that I
right now, I'm running a coaching, a group coaching
program. It's really great.
It's small. Just a handful of people, all
managers. And every week we meet and talk
about what's going, well, what is challenging and what to like,
how to think about the challenges so that you can find
a path forward and it's been amazing.
The conversations are so good. Everyone has so much wisdom to
share and we've been talking about Audrey's and burnout and
compensation conversations, both when you're the one going for a
promotion and how to talk about that?
And also, if it's someone on your team coming to, you about
wanting to talk about a promotion or compensation and
like, you know, the challenges of that and how to do that.
So I'm excited about the next group that I offer if you want
to be a part of it and you want to know when, We going to do
this next group, then you need to get on my mailing list.
Go to my website, canonical.com go to the new managers page and
at the top of that page you'll see the link to join my email
list and then you'll know the next time I offer it so that you
can join. And we can have these small
group conversations about managing people being a human
dealing with work stuff managing up.
My gosh that also Comes up a lot.
Not every manager is a well-trained manager.
Most of us are just making it up as we go along, and that means
your manager also might not have received training, our guidance,
and they're doing their best. But you know what?
If you learned how to manage up, you might be able to create a
much better work experience for yourself and for them, but hey,
like, let's be here for you. So that is what I've got for you
today. Thank you.
So much for listening and I will see you next time.
Hey before you go if you like this podcast please leave a
review. Tell me why you listen and what
has helped you? Thanks so much.
I'll see you next time.