Thoughts on Leadership: Support

Support:

A manager is not an island. A manager is not a super-worker who gets things done by herself/himself and saves and organization or an institution singlehandedly. A manager is a manger because of the employees she/he supports who in turn work hard and collaboratively to complete projects and drive an institution forward.

Supportive: First and foremost, a manager needs to be supportive. No matter what happens, it is the manager’s job to support his employees to get the job done, to remove obstacles, and to use her/his influence and knowhow to good use. Each and every employee needs to directly experience the supportive actions of her/his manager and not let support be just a word but action.

Inspire teamwork: Most jobs are build on teams, and most places do not know how to fully utilyze teams. As a manager, you must inspire your team, whether you lead 5 to 30 direct reports or you lead 5 to 10 managers and indirectly lead 50 plus; you must inspire your team to work together. Inspiration comes from focusing on the fundamental reasons for working, knowing that your actions will have positive and productive outcomes, clearly communicating these ideas, and recognizing a job well done to everyone involved. By doing this over and over again, your team will gain the skills needed to work together and have the trust in you to lead them.

Encouraging subordinates rather than driving them: Drive is a popular word these days. Leaders drive results, managers drive employees, companies drive for success and market share, et cetera. But there is a downside to driving your employees; you can burn them out. The best way to drive for results is to encourage them to do their job to the best of their abilities knowing that everyone will benefit and not just a few individuals. A manager can only drive employees for so long because each individual needs to be driven by their own internal drive and not by their bosses’.

Treat people the way you want to be treated: This is so simple it is laughable but there are countless books, articles, and first hand accounts about how leaders and managers do not treat their employees how they would want to be treated. Simple; treat your employees how you want to be treated. Start with respect and end with respect.

Be a good coach: Every manager is a coach, but what does that really mean? Does it mean that you rally the troops with motivational speeches or does it mean that you play a wholistic role of leader standing with your employees? Like any good coach, you help improve and acquire the skills to be successful and in essence, be a teacher. Like any good coach, you provide encouragement and inspiration when times are difficult. And like any good coach, you correct certain actions and hold your employees accountable to help them improve and not to merely discipline them. Like any good coach, you are only successful when your employees are successful by truly supporting them. .

Empower your team and don’t micro-manage: When people get stressed and the pressure builds, everyone reacts differently. Some find inner strength and do whatever is needed to succeed and help their peers and the organization while others turn inward and protect themselves. When managers feel the pressure they react like everyone else; some positively and some negatively. Micro-management helps reassure a timid manager that they are doing their job by thinking they are holding their employees accountable when in reality they are just getting in the way, causing confusion, creating consternation, and killing moral. *Are there times when a manager needs to micromanage, yes, but that should be the exception and not the status quo. Instead of micromanaging your team, empower the, give them the tools to succeed, use your influence to lead the way, and communicate your trust in their actions.

Express interest in employees’ success and well-being: As a manager it is your job to care for your employees. You have to care about their job performance, their professional development, their well-being, and depending on how much rapport you can build, their lives outside of work. Some managers do not express interest and are distant with their employees and although that is an option, it is not advisable. The best way to instill employee engagement and learn what motivates them is to get to know them (within reason).

Keep promises and commitments: This one is simple. The best way to support your employees is to keep your word and follow through on promises and commitments. If you say you are going to do something do it and deliver. There is nothing worse than a manager who holds her/his employees accountable and does not follow through with her/his own promises and commitments.  

Help your employees with career development: Getting the job done is priority; making deadlines is key; being professional is always required; and helping employees with career development has to be done. Why? Because part of why we are at work is to not just fill out reports and manage people, but to advance and develop as individuals. You should ask, where am I going to be in three years? If you have goals then each one of your employees has goals too. Always help your employees work towards advancing their career development day in and day out.

Respect people’s time. Respecting people’s time is about respect. Sometimes a project requires extra hours and that is understandable, but respecting people’s time is all about knowing that the most important priority in each person’s life is family. No matter what you do, your job supports your family and by respecting your employee’s time and not wasting it on useless tasks or projects, you are supporting them, supporting their family, and keeping morale high because of a positive work-life balance from the boss. The boss sets the tone and it is extremely important that she/he also has a work/life balance because if they don’t, time will become an unclear expectation that employees try to satisfy to no avail.

Generosity (offer enthusiastic praise): Everyday, tell your employees they are doing a good job. This might sound like ‘everyone gets a gold star’ kind of thinking, but offer praise when praise is due. Everyday someone or multiple people on your team does something that is excellent and noteworthy. By being generous helps employees feel valued and there is often nothing more valuable than praise.

Thoughts on Leadership: Drive

Drive:

Drive is how a manager gets things done. It is important that every manager knows how to drive a project to completion, how to support employees, and how to drive one’s own actions. Without adequate and natural drive, a manager will struggle in his or her daily job. Drive can also have a downside, so every manager needs to focus on the positive aspects of having well focused drive and being assertive.

Determined. Every manager needs to be determined. They need to have an internal drive to stay positive and stay on-task. As with many managers, each day is different; challenges have to be faced when they arise, projects have to be completed, and employees must be motivated and developed. Without determination a manager will just sit at his or her’s desk and do the bare minimum rather than driving himself or herself to success.

Focus on the process as much as the end result. Sometimes when managers drive a project they do whatever is needed to get the end result. Being able to deliver a project on-time is important but getting it done correctly is even more important. This does not mean that a project should be paused or stopped due to analysis paralysis but your team needs to be able to reflect on the progress of the project to ensure that outcomes are what leadership and the institution need and want. One of the largest rollout failures of the last decade, Heathcare.gov occurred very publicly and is a cautionary tale for every manager and leader.

Have a clear vision and strategy for the team. One of the worst situations for a team, a department, or an institution is to not have a clear vision and strategy. Without a vision and strategy every employee is just doing a bunch of work without a clear end game and not helping the institution improve. Truly excellent managers are able to focus on and support the overriding strategy and clearly communicate the vision to employees through words and actions.

Be purposeful. Every manager has to be purposeful in their actions and what they assign their employee to do. Much like having a clear vision and strategy, what you have your employees work on needs to be purposeful. In the same respect, what you do day in and day out needs to be purposeful and align to the mission and purpose of of your team, department, and institution.

Be resilient. This might sound odd because we all try to be resilient but this is important. No matter what happens a manager needs to get back up and try again, motivate his or her’s employees, and brush off the dust. This resilience is especially important when you are getting feedback from multiple people, multiple stakeholders, getting pushback from employees, and everything seems to be going wrong. You have to be resilient by listening to feedback that will help you improve, from leadership, peers, or employees, and move forward in a positive, unbiased, and productive manner.

Get some wins. We all need wins. As we work day in and day out struggles will arise and criticism, both constructive and unhelpful, will fly around the office. It is important as a manager to get some wins and share credit with the team because it will help with confidence, engagement, and motivation of everyone involved.

Measure well. Measure well is difficult. Officially, you have to assess your employees’ performance based on the agreed measuring tools as decided on by leadership and HR. But beyond that, there is the daily and weekly measuring that we all experience when we do our jobs, complete projects, and do our jobs. Every manager needs to be fair, open, and honest about how they measure their employees by clearly communicating expectations and constantly updating employees about their progress and helping them succeed.

Be productive and results-oriented. Much like being focused on the process as much as the end result, being productive and result-oriented is key for any manager. Managing people is about just that, people and ensuring that they are being productive, doing their jobs, and contributing to the greater institutional good. Focusing on results is important because as a manager, you do not want to waste institutional resources by your employees not focusing daily on the mission and goals of the institution.

Accountability. Everyone is accountable. In everything we do we are accountable to someone. Even if you are self-employed you are accountable to your customers to ensure that you will continue to be self-employed. As a manager, we are accountable to our boss and it is our job to hold our employees accountable for the work they do. The largest portion of a manager’s job is to help and support employees so they can do their jobs and contribute positively and productively to the mission and purpose of the institution.

Thoughts on Leadership: Attitude

Attitude:

The next area managers can focus on that can greatly affect employees is attitude. One’s attitude is communicated through words and actions and represents his or her’s present and future world view. A manager’s attitude is always with them and is not easily changed because you cannot ‘fake it ‘till you make it’ when it comes to your attitude; your true self will always come out.

Optimist: A good manager needs to be an optimist. He or she needs to always believe the job can get done and the project can be completed on-time. If everyone else is wallowing in negativity a good manager will rally his or her’s employees and see the positive side of whatever is going on. Also, a lot can be learned from sports where a good coach always drives his or her’s players to win even when it seems hopeless (a tie is also a good result in soccer).

Honesty: It is important that a manager is honest and not deceitful. In the same way that it is important to give honest feedback when communicating with employees, it is necessary to be an honest person when interacting with others and not lie or bend truths to get your way. As a manager, if you are not honest about your attitude and outlook then your employees will react in kind.

Integrity: Having integrity will go a long way with employees. If you have integrity your employees will trust you. If you have integrity, you will follow through on promises. If you have integrity, they know you will try your best to create a positive outcome for the team or department. If you have integrity, you have integrity.

Have unwavering faith in your people: Why is it important to have faith in your people? Having unwavering faith in your people combines every aspect of one’s attitude; the ability to be an optimist, being honest, having integrity, and believing in your employees. If you believe in your employees then you can collaborate with them and complete any job no matter what but if you do not have faith in them, and that doubt has been directly or indirectly communicated, then they will not be productive and possibly be actively disengaged. It is extremely difficult to solve problems or get a job done with employees that are disengaged (near impossible).

Having a good attitude goes beyond being nice, it is about who you are day in and day out. Your attitude is how you view and approach to your life, your job, your employees, and how you tackle hardships. If you have a piss poor attitude then your employees with respond in kind. If you have positive attitude that is about getting the job done and solving problems then you will get the best possible work and productivity out of your employees because you are not getting in the way of them doing their jobs because of your poor attitude and behaviors.

Thoughts on Leadership: Communication

Do leader and manager behaviors affect employees? Does the person in the corner office, or cube, impact his or her employees on a daily basis? Does the communication style and attitude of the boss help or hurt employees?

These questions are not easily answered. To help understand how manager behaviors can affect employees I reviewed a dozen articles online to find positive behaviors that affect employees and of the several dozen behaviors found, I categorized them into six groups: communication, attitude, drive, support, skills, and self-awareness.

An aside: Throughout this and other articles, I am using the term employee to designate a person that directly or indirectly reports to a manager. Before a manager does anything, he or she needs to view each and every employee as a person who has hopes, dreams, strengths, weaknesses, a life outside work, and is not just a number or someone who completes a report.

Communication:

The first area managers can focus on and exhibit positive behaviors is communication. Let it be when a manager first walks in the door, talks to employees face-to-face, or calls employees on the phone or Skype, a manager communicates with his or her employees dozens of times a day and is always on. Communication is also the first area discussed because good, clear communication is important no matter if you are the lowest level manager, a leader of many, or an uberleader of an entire organization, communication will make or break you.

Be open and authentic: What does it mean to be open and authentic; the short answer is to be yourself however you feel comfortable. People respond better to a manager who is open and authentic versus a manager who is hiding behind a veil of mystery. Do you share with your employees what you did over the weekend; the story of how you became a manager; or where you got your degree(s) from? You should share with your employees just enough to fit your comfort level while not being an open book. If you do not share anything, that can be viewed as overly guarded and can inhibit rapport building.

Responsive: Being responsive is about hearing your employees and reacting to their words. Simple enough, but how many people have stories of managers not responding to concerns, either work or non-work related? Too many. Do not let the busyness of being a manager get in the way of being responsive let it be responding to a simple work email or taking time to talk to an employee about a non-work concern, which is often the best way to build rapport.

Understanding of other’s concerns: This can be difficult for managers and is related to being responsive. Understanding of other’s concerns does not mean you have to listen to unfocused complaining all day. It means that if an employee has a concern or is emotional about something you need to hear them out within reason. This can be especially difficult if an employee is emotional because somehow the issue at-hand is important enough to them to warrant an emotional response (some managers have a difficult time reacting to employee’s emotions). As their manager, you should acknowledge their concerns and if needed, try to refocus the employee. Understanding of other’s concerns also helps you build rapport with employees because you will be viewed as a manager that takes the time to listen to your employees rather than blowing off other’s concerns.

Listen to your team: Listening to your team is related to understanding of other’s concerns and is the foundation of being a responsive manager. This might seem simple, but being a good listener is sometimes difficult for managers and for people in general. Listening to your team can be when a single employee is talking to you or when you are in front of the whole team. Being in the moment and truly listening to your employees is empowering and listening to the concerns of the people who do the job day in and day out is good for team moral and for the department and institution as a whole.  But if you brush them off or are dismissive of their ideas and concerns (without giving rational) you disenfranchise them and if this happens too often, they will become actively disengaged because their ideas go nowhere.  

Honesty: It is important when communicating to always be honest. Does this mean you should never tell a lie or you should be boy scout or girl scout? Yes, it does! Giving honest performance feedback to employees is difficult because people are not always ready for such feedback but it is important for individual growth and departmental growth. Feedback needs to be given honestly, openly, and afterwards you have to listen to their response and post-feedback concerns. You cannot just ‘tell them as it is’ without listening to them and the worst thing to do would be to not create a plan for improvement created by the employee (by consulting with the manager).

In addition to giving honest feedback, as a manager you should always be honest about possible future changes in your organization. This does not mean that you tell them about the changes in great detail because as a leader, you cannot always share such facts but you can tell them, in very general terms and using broad brushstrokes, how the organization is doing and that your team or department is going to change sometime in the future. If you do not update your employees on what might happen then in that absence of information the rumor mill will runamuck and possibly damage people’s morale, productivity, and general well-being.

Speak face-to-face (or phone): Taking the time and speaking face-to-face with in-office employees and on the phone (or Skype) with telecommuters allows managers to connect with employees and build a team or department culture of trust and openness. This does not mean you have to be friends with your employees because that should be avoided but by being mindful, in the moment, and really interacting with employees face-to-face you will build rapport and lay a foundation of goodwill and understanding.

In addition to the direct employee interactions above, being able to communicate higher level ideas in a clear and easy to understand manner is important for a manger.  

Communicate the company culture: This is difficult because a company’s culture is larger than any one individual but every manager and every employee affects the company culture. Being able to communicate the ideals and norms of a company’s culture is an important skill needed because if you are not dedicated to the mission and purpose of the organization how can your employees?

Involve people the decision making process: Why? Because your team will have many more ideas than you do when it comes to solving problems or coming up with new ideas. It is also important to include them in the decision making process for employee engagement and buy-in and when an employee idea is not acted on, the rationale needs to be provided even in the most general way.

A persuasive communicator: Being a persuasive communicator is tricky. For overly assertive managers, they feel they are always persuasive but in reality they just dominate conversations. For managers that are not as assertive, they feel that they are unable to be persuasive and do not have a sense of ownership over difficult conversations. A good manager needs to be able to influence employees depending on the situation and that is only truly possible by being open and honest, being responsive, understanding your employee’s concerns, being able to listen, and speaking to them directly after having built trust and rapport.

Nonverbal communication: Finally, a manager needs to be aware of body language and the tone of one’s voice. These two aspects of communication cannot be forgotten or discounted because a sloppy manager will not be aware of how they are coming off physically to employees. If this happens it can lead to misunderstandings not about the words communicated, but the gestures and physicality used.

Thoughts on Leadership: Reference List

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Thoughts on Leadership

In every organization, let it be large or small, periods of transition occur that are difficult for everyone involved. When this occurs, it is important for every employee to be as positive as possible. This is especially important for those who manage others, which has led me to think about the role of mid-level leadership during transitions.

For my day job, I am lucky enough to work with wonderful people, who are talented, dedicated, and friendly (the last one is not always required). My job is also the definition of a mid-level leadership position (actually, it is probably low-level) and every action and conversation I have affects others. Because I have direct and indirect influence over many people, I have thought a lot about how my behaviors, as a mid-level leader, impacts others. This led me to write a series, still in-progress, about the wonderful book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and more recently, think about my role during a period of great transition. Throughout the next few articles, I will discuss how one’s behaviors and my behaviors as a manager affects employees.

Throughout these articles, I will use the term manager versus leader most of the time because most mid-level leaders are mainly managers. Managers spend most of their time running a department and directly interact with his or her employees, while a leader, who is higher in an organization, works on strategy, influences decision makers, gets reports on how a department or departments are performing, and indirectly interacts with employees. A manager’s leadership skills are important but for a mid-level leader his or her’s management skills need to be at the forefront and leadership skills need to always be available when needed. In a good article at the Harvard Business Review, Marcus Buckingham surveyed over 80,000 managers to find out what great managers and what great leaders do to be successful. The one quality above others that great managers possess, by directly interacting with employees, is the ability to, “is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance. Managers will succeed only when they can identify and deploy the differences among people, challenging each employee to excel in his or her own way” (2005).

As far as sources for these articles, I will use information found from common web sources versus scholarly sources. The reason for using common web sources is to keep my message simple and use advice that can be considered common knowledge and taken from first hand experience. Most people in management positions will seek this type of information on how to improve their management skills rather than research based, peer reviewed articles from the halls of academia.

Thoughts on Leadership Series:

Thoughts on Leadership

Reference List

Communication & Attitude

Drive & Support

Skills & Self-Awareness

Language of Inclusion & Engagement

Reference

Buckingham, M. (2005). What great managers do. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2005/03/what-great-managers-do

Creative Pause

For the last six months, I have been writing a lot of music. I wrote a Bassoon Concerto scored for bassoon and piano that incorporated pre-existing music from A Light in the Attic Suite and the The Day After Halloween Suite with some originally composed material (hopefully to be scored for chamber orchestra later). I updated and edited my Bella Suite that I wrote in 2009 so it would be performance ready. And finally, I completed my Sanguine Symphony, a work that took well over a year to compose. With all of this music flying around in my head, I remembered that every once in while, I need a creative pause.

For me, a creative pause is a break from writing and specifically, writing music. I need to do this because if I keep on writing and transition from one music project to the next, each work will sound too similar to the previous one. This is not always bad. Every composer has a specific style; different harmonies favored, chord progressions commonly used, favorite melodic shapes, et cetera. The problem that I encounter my own writing is that without a creative pause, each subsequent work is a little less original than the previous and my confidence in my own originality falters.

So I pause. My most recent creative pause was when I participated in NaNoWriMo. During the month of November I did not compose a note and I focused on the written word. For me, writing words is extremely difficult. I have been writing music for around 26 years and am comfortable expressing myself through sound. But words are different. A story is just a collection words that everyone can read, but to be able to communicate clearly and creatively with those words is extremely difficult. I have writing all my life, but only recently do I feel I have a basic grasp of how to communicate using words.

Looking over the next few months I plan on having another creative pause as I record my Inspired by Silliness Suite, A Tiny Symphony, and rerecord A Light in the Attic Suite. The act of performing music is completely different than composing music or writing words. Performing music requires a great deal of practice, concentration, physical memory, and precision. The only way to become a better performer is to practice for weeks and months on end and to truly get a grasp of your instrument, for years! Then, when you are decent at your chosen instrument, which can include singing, you have to somehow add your own musicality and originality to a performance which is the real challenge of performance.

At the end of the day, you need to do what works for your creativity and your ability to rest and recharge your mind. For me, a creative pause allows my mind to focus on something else other than just music. For others, a creative pause might be reading instead of writing, it might be training for a marathon, writing a journal article, or purusing some other hobby. We all strive to be creative but every once in awhile, we must also let our creativity rest.