Work & Personality Style – Page 3

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

Introverted Managers Do Care

August 9, 2016 The Mindful Manager

I’m an introvert. There I’ve admitted it in public! It’s difficult and uncomfortable for me to talk to people at team gatherings or company meetings. Even just talking to folks that report to one of my managers or directors is hard.

Yet, I find that if I sit closed off in my office, which I prefer to give myself some peace and quiet, this results in people thinking I am aloof and distant and uncaring. I’m always surprised when people think these things of me because I DO care.

So the question is how, as a manager, do I show people I care? Well, here is my recipe for showing folks you do care.

Find ways to show you care.

First, I began scheduling skip-level meetings. Instead of meeting with someone on my direct staff, I meet with those that report to my managers or to one of their managers.

Now I should note, this practice does freak my employees out at first. They don’t understand why I am meeting with them. They don’t expect an upper level manager to take the time to meet with them so they don’t always know what to say or what is expected of them and initial meetings can feel awkward on both sides of the desk.

However, I find that when I continue to meet with staff members, they start talking to me. And this is where it gets good. Because when I start considering what they say and implement some of their ideas, a really cool dialog begins. After all, they are the ones doing the actual work and often have ideas that I could never have because I’m not on the front lines like they are.

I really enjoy these skip-level meetings. I find the people I meet are interesting and have good ideas. If you want to build trust with your staff, this is a great way to do it.

Once I have skip-level meetings in place, then I begin leaving my office door open. And when folks walk by, I say hi. If they linger, I invite them in. This promotes even more of that great dialog.

I also walk around the office. I stop and talk to people. This is really tough for me because I really am an introvert and meeting folks for the first time is scary. Out there on the office floor, I have to talk to people I might not know. Serious eek!

However, I find as I keep doing it, I get to know people and what they are working on. Best off all, the feedback from their managers are those employees really appreciate me taking the time to stop and talk. They feel like I care. And I do. Doing this builds connections for me too.

Introvert1

Why should I care whether they think I care? Everyone wants to feel valued and seen. By seen, I mean really seeing the people that are working for me; the people making the organization and me successful. They aren’t just replaceable widgets. They’re humans with hearts and lives and feelings. And I care about every single one of them.