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 for me today.
I am a little bit congested. I don't know if you can hear it,
but it is now, that time of year when the cherry blossoms and the
plum blossoms are blooming. They are beautiful, but also it
activates my allergies. And so I'm a little congested
not feeling super great. But you know, that's part of
being a human, is having a human body that responds to different
changes over the course of the year.
And it actually made me think about one of the fundamental
things when I was first teaching my essential skills for new
managers class back in 2017. The two parts of that class, The
first one is self-awareness. The second one was
communication. And the reason self-awareness is
so necessary when you want to manage people effectively is
because the more you become aware of yourself, your own
preferences, your particular strengths, even noticing.
What do you do when you feel under the weather?
Are you the kind of person that retreats?
Are you the kind of person that goes into grumpy kitten mode?
Are you the kind of person who powers through?
Are you the kind of person who gets irritable and just takes it
out on everyone else because you're having a hard time?
When you understand what you do as a human, what your
preferences are, how you tend to operate best, when you
understand that for yourself, you then begin to realize, oh,
not every human is like me, and you start to understand.
If you want to manage other humans effectively, then it
becomes helpful to think about it from that perspective.
Of course people will have different preferences and
different priorities, and people will deal with stress
differently. People will deal with physical
discomfort differently. And so the more you start to
grow your own self-awareness, the more you start to realize,
oh right, I can't manage my team the way I would like to be
managed. I need to be effective by
understanding what some of the differences and the nuances are,
and as you start expanding your perspective, you will begin to
find what it looks like to be more effective managing the
specific people in the specific organization that you find
yourself in. And that will change also over
time. You might start in a small
organization and as it grows you realize, wow, this is not the
same company that I started in. The company has changed.
It also happens if you're working in a large organization.
Maybe there is a reorg or a, you know, some kind of big internal
shake up and you realize, wow, I'm having to do so much more
with fewer resources, with maybe less people, things will change.
And so the more that you have this ability to notice for
yourself how are you in your own relationship with your
experience and your perspectives and understanding your
preferences, The better able you will be to then make decisions
with the understanding of how the team and the the context
you're working in varies for yourself as well.
When you understand more about how you work and how you work
well, then you can begin to not only make decisions, but also
make requests and communicate with others so that they know.
That's where the communication part comes in.
What are you saying and how and to whom and when?
And instead of doing all of this from a default reactive
position, now we start to think more strategically, more
deliberately, and bring more intentionality into the way that
you do this. You know, I used to always tell
my students that you already have great communication skills
because you have survived to adulthood and it is not possible
to live into adulthood unless you also develop some very
effective communication skills, because that is how we survive
living and working and just being on the planet with other
humans. You know, I've often thought
when people talk about how humans evolved to survive and
you'll hear them say, you know, oh, we had to survive the the
lions and the tigers and the Saber toothed tigers.
We had to develop these really keen skills in order to survive
them. My personal perspective is I
don't think it was the other kind of creatures.
I think we developed all these skills in order to effectively
survive each other. I think that we really evolved,
you know, to communicate and cooperate, to learn how to work
with other humans. And so, you know now in the
workplace and in and in our lives, you have developed great
communication skills. Please give yourself a full
credit for that. You had to observe how do these
humans operate? How can I be effective in
communicating with them so that your needs get met.
You figured all of that out, most of it, without even
consciously making decisions about it.
You you're just like wired. You're just built for
communication and collaboration and cooperation and learning how
to work with other humans. But then as we grow into our
roles at, you know, when you become a leader, when you become
a manager, now we want to become more intentional and more
skillful in the way that you communicate.
So not just from default, but being more intentional, doing
more communication by design and with a sense of purpose so that
you are clear about what you're communicating and why.
What is the effect you want to have and how will you attempt to
do that? What's really interesting too
is, you know, you'll see this especially if you're changing
organizations. So going from a big company to a
small company, maybe going from public sector to private sector,
maybe changing industries. So, you know, part of my
background is in the legal profession.
And there are different norms, like different communication
norms, different professional, cultural norms in, you know, in
that profession compared to, for example, you know, my my brother
and sister-in-law are both teachers.
And they, you know, they work in a school, they work with little
kids. They work with the parents, the
cultural norms and the professional communication norms
in working with their students, their professional colleagues,
the parents of their students is different, right?
And so for you, you know when you're thinking about
communication, we want to consider that bigger
perspective, that context. And if you've recently changed
companies or changed industries or you know, change your work
environment, then you know like you have a tacit understanding
that this is a real thing. So that is the short of what I
wanted to share with you, just bringing some more light and
attention to the value of self-awareness, how that sets
you up to then communicate more intentionally and more
effectively. I am going to keep this episode
a little bit short so that you don't have to listen to me being
congested in your ear today. But you know, like it's such a
good reminder you are a human, you have a body, take care of
it. And when you have people on your
team, they have physical bodies too.
And when they're not feeling good, it might show up in some
interesting ways. You might have the team member
who retreats and just buckles down.
You might have the team member who loudly complaints about
their discomfort to everybody. You might have the person who
takes it out on everyone like they're not feeling good and
instead of taking care of themselves and managing it, they
just kind of lash out because that's just what works for them.
So it it starts to get really interesting when we shift the
way that we look at ourselves and the people that we work
with. As I start to wrap today, a
couple of announcements I want to share with you.
One is that I am taking new clients and if you want to talk
with me about working together, if you want that one-on-one
support and time every week to really kind of pull back out of
the weeds and take a higher level perspective on your
leadership style, your career growth, and you know kind of
what you want for your work in your life, then coaching is a
really good option for that. And the way to get started is to
book time to talk with me on a consultation.
It's free, you'll find a link on my website, kimnicholl.com, or
you can go into the show notes and I'll put a link to my
calendar there. So if you can find a time for us
to talk and I'll tell you more about how it works and learn
more about what you want to get out of it and we'll make a plan
for that. The other two things to know is
that if you happen to be in California, in the Bay Area this
coming Thursday, I will be at the California Conference for
Women. It's on Thursday, February 29th
at the Santa Clara Convention Center and I will be there.
And not only will I be there, but there will be a number of
coaches offering free career coaching, leadership coaching,
life coaching and I will be one of those coaches.
So you can not only just come say hi, but we can actually do a
little bit of free coaching during that conference.
So I know that you know, you're, you might be listening from far,
far away, but in case you happen to be attending this conference,
find me, come say hi. And then the last announcement
is that in two weeks I will be at the Transform Conference in
Las Vegas. I'll be there March 11th through
13. I haven't been to this
conference before, but I'm really excited about it because
it from what I can tell, it's going to be a lots of
conversations about how do we transform the workplace, how do
we transform the way that we support career growth and
learning and culture and the way that we work together, can we
work Better Together? And I'm really looking forward
to having a lot of conversations around that.
So come if you're coming to that then let me know cuz we should
definitely meet up. It would be so cool to meet in
person at this conference where we're learning and talking all
about the workplace. So that's coming up.
That is March 11th through 13th in Las Vegas and that that is it
for me today. I hope that you're having a
great day. Thanks 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.