Have you ever worked with someone who has a constant sense of urgency? Everything is a rush and you frantically try to keep up.
Over time this can become exhausting! Not only are you perpetually in the fast lane, you also need to be telepathic to figure out the real priorities.
Although you might rarely hear your employees utter these words, if you pay attention, you’re likely to read them in their gestures, body language, and tone of voice. When people are burned out, this is often what they express nonverbally.
People who are otherwise reliable individuals start to slip. They miss deadlines. They forget about important details. They neglect delegating.
There is a broad range on the spectrum of supervision. At one extreme is the hands-off manager, a person who makes an assignment no matter how vague.
At the other extreme is the micro-manager, someone who needs to control every aspect of an assignment.
Where do you fall on this spectrum?
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, was recently interviewed at The Atlantic Festival by Lorena Powell Jobs. He shared highlights from his 15-year tenure as CEO, including some musings on his leadership philosophy.
He mentioned three key principles. First, lead with optimism. “No one wants to follow a pessimist,” he said. Second, take bold steps, not baby steps. Leaders need to be able to take risks, and you can’t take those risks if you’re taking baby steps. Third, relentlessly pursue perfection. Never accept good when you can have great.
Communication can be challenging, to say the least! When you speak face-to-face, you can see body language, gestures, and hear intonation. If that same conversation is on the phone, you essentially miss the body language and gestures. If that message is conveyed by email, you lose the intonation as well; and if text, it can be even more obscure.
Many people shoot off an email without regard to how the recipient is going to receive or interpret the message. For example, one person I work with reads whatever is visible on the screen of her phone. Her staff knows that everything important needs to be in the first few lines.
You never know what baggage people bring to work every day. No matter how well things seem to be going, you can bet that something is lurking in the background. You just don’t know what it is.
Some people are great at compartmentalizing and can have productive days even if something personally challenging is happening concurrently. Others will sit at their desks and stare into space, completely unaware of anything going on around them.
September has a “back to school” allure, even if you haven’t been a student for years. Not only are we reminded of it by omnipresent advertisements of school supplies and the like, but feelings are conjured from our own memories.
This is always a good time for a fresh start on whatever needs rebooting. Are there goals that have languished? A new project that was backburnered? A special initiative that will energize your team?
Too many people are afraid to make mistakes. They take the road well-traveled and try to stay under the radar. “Good is good enough”, because if they go out of their comfort zone they may make mistakes.
Simply put, they play it safe.
Change is almost always received with at least a little resistance. When someone says “we’ve always done it this way” it’s a signal that you’ll need to do more work than just the change itself. You’ll need to “sell” your people on why this specific change.
When planning for change, then, you should plan for the change itself in addition to internal persuasion time. Yes, this takes more time, and yes, you need to do this.
You can be thorough, methodical, systematic – whichever word you choose – but if you overdo it, it may hurt you. Of course, you need to be disciplined to obtain the necessary information to make a decision, but often the incremental time analyzing isn’t going to give you that much more information.
+ Through over-analysis, you may miss the point, as aptly described by the cliché of not seeing the forest through the trees.