Self-Awareness

Compliments

August 30, 2016 The Mindful Manager

way to go, good job, well done, you're the man, thumbs up, you rock - a set of isolated sticky notes with positive affirmation words

“I think how you handled that situation was just perfect!”

It’s wonderful to hear how great I am. Compliments are so nice. This employee was always telling me how great that idea was or how that decision I made was the right one. He never disagreed with me or asked me questions about anything I did. When I realized that all he was giving me was positive feedback, I knew I had fallen for the seductiveness of positive feedback and compliments.

Positive feedback and compliments are seductive because there is a temptation as a manager to believe that everything I do is perfect. This can lull me into becoming a complacent manager and complacency only leads to bad outcomes. I’m human; I make mistakes. If all I hear is how great I am, I may make more mistakes instead of less because I’m not listening, not aware of bad decisions, and / or entirely missing critical data.

I’m not saying employees try to manipulate by giving me compliments. Maybe sometimes that’s true, but many times the person is just being nice. They want to hear positive feedback so they give me positive feedback. What I want is balanced feedback. I want employees to question, offer other alternatives, and yes, challenge me. I’m comfortable enough that being challenged doesn’t threaten me. It’s a good place to be.

I like compliments, however I love questions that allow me to consider things I wouldn’t otherwise. I love to see employees coming up with even better solutions or ideas than I have because they are comfortable with challenging me.

When I receive compliments at work, I very carefully consider the compliment. Sometimes, it is deserved. But other times, that compliment raises a suspicion that I might need to re-evaluate what I’ve done.

To Lead is to Let Go of Control

August 23, 2016 The Mindful Manager

What makes a good leader? I’ve given this much thought during the years I’ve been managing. I don’t believe any person in a leadership role sets out to be a bad leader – and bad leaders, unfortunately, usually think they’re good leaders.

What exactly does “leader” mean? I looked it up and one definition is “the person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country.”* It also means “a short strip of nonfunctioning material at each end of a reel of film or recording tape for connections to a spool.” *

While some may think of their current leader as bearing a great deal of resemblance to a nonfunctioning material, I’m going with the first definition of leadership and assume we’re talking about “the action of leading a group of people or an organization.” I also looked up the word management and here’s the definition I found: “the process of dealing with or controlling things or groups of people.”*

So, in looking at these definitions, I do manage people, but I also lead people. Leading is different from managing because as a leader, my intention is to inspire, motivate and provoke a desire for excellence from a large group of people, some of whom I will never meet.

You can’t control everything.

It’s true, I do manage my direct staff, and managing includes controlling things like budgets, but I can’t control everything. I have to depend on my leadership skills to inspire the organization to reach its goals and do some of the work of controlling things.

For me, a good leader understands he can’t control everything in the organization; he has to trust the people AdobeStock_100113673-3 working for him. To achieve organizational goals, a leader needs to motivate and inspire their teams. To encourage innovation, a good leader knows he has to trust the people working for him to be creative and to think of new approaches for products, issues, or problems.

In one group I led, we had software quality issues. Not minor ones either. Some of the quality issues were because management wanted to hit certain deadlines and corners were cut. In other cases, it was bad development practices. So each vice-president had a goal for their organizations to decrease the backlog of defects as a starting place for addressing product quality.

We all decided on a certain percentage to hit and then told the teams to fix all of the high priority defects to hit that percentage. Things were going great! Most every team was on track to hit that percentage. We were slapping ourselves on the back in congratulating each other in hitting our goal.

But then I met with a developer. You see, I often do skip-level meetings with staff . These skip-level meetings often begin with some discussion on how things are going and general chit chat, but sometimes someone will say something quite stunning.

This developer, after about ten minutes of the general chit chat, paused, looked me in the eye and asked, “Why is this goal in fixing defects focused only on the high priority defects? Wouldn’t a better approach be to determine where all the defects are in the code and then tackle the code that seems so problematic?”

I was stunned. I looked at her before replying because I was thinking, duh, should have thought of that! We did meet that year’s goal of fixing a percentage of high priority defects, but the next year? We did exactly as she recommended. And the team found there were a couple of areas in the code base that needed to be reworked or refactored thereby resolving most of the software quality issues.

I learned from this experience that as a leader, I shouldn’t try to control what everyone does – and I don’t want to control every single thing. That’s not my job. My job is to trust my employees to hear what I think is an issue or problem. Then I listen to what they suggest before I make decrees. The results are often far better than I expect.

*New Oxford American Dictionary

July 13, 2016 The Mindful Manager

Self-Awareness written on running track Someone once asked me what was the most important skill or quality for a manager to have. My answer: self-awareness. Many people would say self-awareness is not a skill or a quality – I think it is.

Self-awareness: Conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.*

Knowing myself, how I react to situations, what motivates me, what I want – all of these impact how I act as a manager. I learned this the hard way.

One of my managers sent me to a class on personality styles. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why he thought this important, but I’m so glad he did. We took a personality assessment before the class and the first thing the instructor did was divide the room into 4 squares or quadrants. Then he had us take a chair and sit in our quadrants. I clearly remember mine, which was driver. I was the only person in that quadrant.

We were given a situation and then asked how we would respond. When I answered, there was silence. None of them liked my answer. They thought it disregarded how they felt. Being a driver personality type, it really never occurred to me they would see my answer differently than what I intended. But they did. I started thinking, “Hey wait!; I’m the obnoxious person in the room.” I always thought someone else was the obnoxious person in the room but, nope, it was me.

That’s when I found out that driver personality types tend to run over people and usually don’t even have a clue that they’ve done so. Drivers think they are doing the right things for the team, even when it may not be the right thing for the team. Wow! Everyone isn’t like me! They have different personality styles which means they respond differently to situations than I do. Which means they might think I’m an obnoxious person. That was sobering.

Knowing my personality style helps me lead more effectively.

This made me aware that I need to know myself. I need to understand my character and my qualities, as it impacts those around me. This class helped me to understand that I have blind spots, my strengths can be my weaknesses, and that I need to understand other personality styles if I am to be good manager.

I’m still learning. I miss cues. I’m still a driver personality type. I can still be an obnoxious person. But at least I know it and work hard to put myself in someone else’s shoes, into someone else’s personality style. The bottom line is being self-aware helps me be a better leader.

* New Oxford American Dictionary