As a boss or manager, you are likely moving in 200 different directions each day. In addition to guiding your team to get actual work done, you’re also responsible for mentoring and inspiring your team members as often as possible. In a perfect world, you’re able to do this daily, in reality, it hopefully happens once a week. With Minnesota’s unemployment rate hovering around three percent, it’s more critical than ever to make sure your team feels like they’re appreciated, have a career path, and are fairly compensated for being a part of your team. So what can you do to make sure your team knows how you feel about them, while driving them to be their best?
- Listen
If you’ve ever caught yourself barely listening the other person you’re in a conversation with because you’re just waiting for an opening to tell them what you want to say, you’re not alone. However, this habit will get you into trouble with your employees. If you aren’t truly listening to what your team is telling you, you can’t figure out what they’re best at, what makes them tick, and whether or not what they’re telling you is what they actually want to say. When you know what each person on your team enjoys, dreads and excels at, you can give them projects and work that build their confidence, skills and experience. Not only does this build their value within the overall organization, it makes them feel understood, appreciated and important. Some of the “best bosses” often tell their employees that they’re never too busy to listen, and understand that even if that means having a few more conversations throughout the day that might not enhance productivity, those conversations make their team feel heard, respected and less likely to leave when their competition comes calling. -Because they will call, and turnover is expensive! So if you think that listening is a skill that is overrated and not an integral part of your team management, understand that if you’re team isn’t talking to you, they’re talking to someone else.
- Advocate
When you have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on with your team as a result of listening to them, encouraging feedback, and displaying a proactive approach toward issue resolution, your team likely feels confident that they can trust you to defend their best interests. For instance, you would know how to craft a legitimate, believable reason for your team being unable to function in the worst space in the office that leadership would like you to relocate to and call “home.” You would fight for their natural light-filled office spaces that they currently have, and that’s not just because your office would also be moving to the proverbial basement, you know how and where your team works best. This advocacy thing works both ways too. Let’s say that your position within the organization is up for elimination or relocation to some far corner of the earth. Because your team knows that you’ve always worked on behalf of their best interests, they’ll likely lobby in any way they can to make sure that you’re not working in Siberia or have to start looking for a new job. When your team loves working for you, or at least likes working for you, they’ll fight on the front lines for you too.
- Bring the positive
There are days that the universe gets in your way of anything happening in the way that it should. It’s hard to keep smiling when all you want to do is scream. However, as a manager, if you give into your inclination to run screaming from the building, you’re showing your team that when they have bad days, they can behave that way too. Conversely, if you plaster on a smile and manage to stay neutral, your team will follow your lead when times get tough. Their ability to focus on the positive instead of talking about everything that is going wrong will have a favorable effect on productivity and morale. In addition, when things go wrong, your reaction will either let your team know that they can come to you with a problem and won’t pay for it with negative comments and cynicism, or feel like the last thing they want to do is come to you. Know that how you handle the problems and rainy days will directly impact how much your team trusts you to have their backs when things go wrong.
- Keep it simple
Open communication is the key to setting expectations with your team. Clear expectations make it nearly impossible to stir up drama and gossip related to performance amongst team members. When everyone knows what makes work on a project or task exceptional vs. meeting standards, there is a visible and well communicated example of what constitutes what label. Then each employee can choose what level of commitment and performance they are interested in pursuing. As a manager, your feedback about how each employee is performing is critical. Keep your feedback simple, direct and actionable. If an employee is confused about how they are performing, they will start to feel lost and likely blame their manager.
- Honesty is the best policy
If you have an employee that is up for a promotion and they aren’t going to get it, being honest will always be the best course of action. It will be the hardest option, but it will likely result in the employee respecting you more for having the difficult conversation. If it’s a budget problem, own up to it, explain it and don’t make a promise you can’t keep. For example, telling the employee that you have a budget shortfall this year and can’t give them their promotion or bonus as expected may soften the blow for this year, but raises expectations even higher for next year if you make the same unfulfilled promise. If you can’t follow through on your promise next year, through no fault of your own, it will be hard for you to recover from the distrust that accompanies the broken promise. No, your employees are not children, and they can handle disappointment, but when their compensation is affected by forces seemingly out of their control, they start to lose faith in their manager and the process it takes to get ahead.
- Steady Eddie
Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde are commonly referenced when people think about someone with a personality that is all over the place. As a manager, when you’re happy one minute and despondent or angry the next, your employees coming to you with questions or concerns might be unsure of which version of you they’re going to get. If you have a tendency to act on your emotions, no matter what they are, it could be detrimental to your team. They may stop coming to you for advice or guidance, and keep you out of the loop when it comes to certain projects or clients for fear of your reaction. Not only does this impact your ability to manage your team, you don’t really know what’s going on, and it also impacts your credibility as a leader. One exercise you can complete to determine if this is something you need to work on is to think about the best manager you’ve ever had. How much does your emotional mindfulness mimic theirs? Are you reflective like they were, or do you fly off the handle without much prompting? Can you think of a situation where you could have been more calm and rational? What can you do the next time you’re in the same scenario to improve your reaction? Assess your strengths and weaknesses in this area, and determine how you’ll choose to react the next time you’re ready to react impulsively.
- Check your ego at the door
Are you the first person to congratulate your team on a job well done? Or do you want to make sure that you get credit where credit is due? If you feel like your team’s work reflects your abilities as a manager, you’re right. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to talk about your team’s accomplishments. The right way. You make a public display when individuals and your entire team do the impossible or score a huge victory. You also pull each one of your team members aside and discuss one-on-one that you understand how they helped contribute to the success. Take this opportunity to express how happy you are with their work, that they’re a valued part of the team, and you have a real commitment to help them grow within your team and within the company. The wrong way. A person on the leadership team comes over to your team during a meeting and gives you all the credit. You take all of it. You make no mention that you “couldn’t have done it without your team,” or that the solution that was implemented wasn’t even your idea. You just stand there, bask in the glow of the praise of leadership, and move on. When your team finds out about your reaction, how grateful do you sound for their hard work, extra hours and creative thinking? How inspired do you think they will be to perform like this again? It’s easy to take all the credit, and even easier to expect that your team will always show up. But if this is how you handle praise and success, keeping the most important accolades for yourself, you will quickly whittle away at your team’s willingness to go the extra mile. If they’re never going to see any of the benefits for going above and beyond, they’ll start doing the bare minimum. Now, does this mean you have to say thank you for every little thing, no. Too much praise turns your team into an acceptance hungry mob that will look to you for constant approval. However, there’s a happy medium between hoarding all the credit that accompanies victories, and constantly praising every positive action.
Managing a team is not always easy, not always straightforward, and certainly filled with many outcomes that don’t turn out they way you anticipated. That’s the bad news. The good news? As a manager you have an opportunity to influence the trajectory of each person’s growth and career on your team. You have regular occasions to flex your mentorship muscle, and can be a person that your team members will keep in contact with long after they’ve left your management. You will make mistakes, you will have wins, and most importantly, you will learn what it takes to be a great manager of your team. If you’re willing to do the work, dig in, and take stock of what has worked and what you can do better, you’ll be the manager everyone wants to work for.