One milestone in professional development is knowing when to leave behind old ways and take the leap to adopt new approaches. Of course, no one can tell you the best time to make such changes, but you can prepare yourself by taking inventory of some of your leadership habits.
This is one of the chronic problems in today’s work place: too much to do and not enough time. Leaders may feel especially pressured by this issue with the myriad tasks and projects that fall on their plates.
Leaders, however, need to tackle this issue a little differently than those who work for you. People are relying on you and are going to interrupt your day almost always at the most inconvenient times.
There are times when you’re running fast and furious, and your team is doing a great job. But how are the people holding up under the pressure? When you see great results, you may not see fraying around the edges. If unravelling has begun, though, you need to jump in and be on top of it.
You’ll know about your lower performing employees early on. They’ll complain about the work and grumble to their co-workers about how difficult everything is. These aren’t the people to worry about because odds are you aren’t relying on them for the most important deliverables.
Time magazine recently reported on an American Psychological Association study that a third of U.S. teens haven’t read a book for pleasure in over a year. This struck me as a combination of sad and a little scary.
Reading is important for young people for so many different reasons. Aside from the obvious ones, such as building vocabulary and their own writing skills, it helps build their critical thinking and even their social skills.
The time spent reading has been replaced by time spent on social and other digital media, which doesn’t have the same impact on their intellectual development. This will become our problem as today’s teens are our future employees.
Have you ever dreaded having conversations with some of your employees? We’ve all had this experience and unless it happens frequently, you’re probably not an expert in handling these.
Challenging conversations run the gamut from delivering difficult feedback to firing someone. When you aren’t comfortable conveying a difficult message, it’s likely that your delivery of the message will reflect that discomfort.
Sometimes when you’re managing people it can seem like you’re speaking two different languages. One of my clients, Marcus*, experienced a classic example of this. His employee, Cyndy*, was working on a client-intense project and basically abandoned the rest of her work while this was occurring.
Cyndy felt that while she was tied up with this client, how could Marcus possibly expect her to do more? Marcus felt that he had made it clear that although she would put most of her effort towards that one client, the rest of her work needed to be done (whether directly by her or delegated).
When you do things the same way all the time, activities become automatic. You drive the same way to work and don’t think about the route. You know what you want to order in your favorite restaurant. You have a weekend routine that’s, well, routine.
By making some small changes in what you do habitually, you awaken your brain simply because you’re thinking consciously.
Do you know people with awesome accomplishments who rarely seem satisfied with their achievements? They complete one thing and move right on to the next without pause. The expression, “stop and smell the roses” isn’t in their vocabulary.
If you’re never satisfied, you’re missing the experience of recognizing milestone moments. Successes come and go, you keep plowing away, and the memory of what was successful drifts away.
Do you tend to be optimistic or pessimistic? Plenty of each philosophy are out there, so you’re in good company either way. Taking a deeper look, though, have you thought about the benefit of having an optimistic outlook as a leader?
One of the key benefits to optimism is feeling confident that you can accomplish whatever crosses your path. If it’s something totally new, you know that you have the resources to figure out the path. You look at life from a positive perspective and it takes more than a few jabs to knock you off your game.
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
We’ve all heard this expression, but don’t necessarily see the “tough” in action. Have you noticed the difference between people who tackle something difficult and reach the end result versus those who are overwhelmed and just want to call it quits?