Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

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Five Daily Habits for Good Management

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Five Daily Habits for Good Management
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Is your company or team making steady and continuous improvements? Or do you feel like you are throwing darts that keep missing the target?

When you’ve spent serious money on strategies and plans to raise team or company performance and these initiatives don’t stick, it’s time to look in the mirror.

You aren’t alone.

The reported failure of large-scale change programs is approximately 70% (McKinsey and Company). It can be that you or an advisor have selected a program that does not address well the needs of the plant, function, or business. But more often than not, the failure lies with the people – not the program.

If your enterprise isn’t making daily strides, check your personal daily management habits. Because more often than not, this is what is holding things back.

Where are you when you review the following 5 points?

The 5-Point List of Daily Good Management Habits

1. Are you teaching people how to solve problems?

If you are telling others what to do, rather than teaching them how to think so that they can perform on their own, then you are wasting everyone’s time, energy, and money. Do you find yourself consistently providing answers for others, rather than helping them to work out the critical thinking necessary to develop excellent decision-making and autonomy? Shift your mindset and your behavior to empower your team to grow and perform at higher levels for you.

2. Are you creating a physically and emotionally safe environment for people to dialogue with one another?

Let’s face it – it’s probably not your product that is the slowdown problem. It’s the way your people work together. Rate healthy communication and conflict management in your enterprise on a scale of 1-5. Let’s say that 1 indicates silos, a reticence to work things out, chronic unresolved conflict resulting in poor performance. And 5 indicates the high ability to work things out, solve problems together, and a great team and company spirit. Where are you? Less than a 5 means you have a problem area that will slow down your performance targets.

3. Are you celebrating mistakes as points of learning?

If your company culture punishes mistakes, you are stifling creative thinking and innovative results. Learn to differentiate between repetitive blunders that cost the enterprise time and money, and new mistakes made on the trail to your new or improved product or service. Celebrate the latter, recognizing that without striking out to try new things, you will always get the same results you have gotten.

4. Are you focusing on results?

Make sure your action plans, meetings, and regular follow-up reports on these are examining results, pinpointing areas of low performance, and course-correcting. Too often, the status quo within a company creates complacency and a lack of follow-through. Make sure that decisions are made on next steps, and an accountability mechanism is put in place so that momentum is not lost.

5. Are you giving regular feedback and coaching to others?

You’ve placed great confidence in your team, and in the spirit of empowerment, you have allowed them to get out there and make change. But how in touch with them are you as they do this? Don’t mistake abdication for empowerment. Regular coaching and feedback are necessary to nurture your people. Focus on the charge you have given them, supporting them with what they need in order to succeed. Remember to include what they feel is important to their personal and professional development. And don’t avoid the tough stuff. People, first. Results follow.

Are you doing all these things well, but still not getting the results you seek?

Your program’s action plan may be costing you big money. More on this next week.

Three Ways to Assess Your Personal Effectiveness

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Three Ways to Assess Your Personal Effectiveness
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How effective are you?

Things are going well, but you sometimes wonder if you could step up your game – but where to start?

There are three quick ways you can find out.

I recently worked with an executive we will call Sam, who shared that she felt things were going fine. She suspected, however, that she could do better.

“I don’t have anything specific I can put my finger on,” Sam said. “But I’ve been sitting in this chair a long time, and carry out my responsibilities easily. I’m just wondering if I am contributing my best if things run so smoothly.”

“You are wise to check in on this,” I answered.  “Too many executives don’t pause to ask themselves that question. One can easily fall into complacency – and this leads to a rut from which it is difficult to climb. But you are avoiding such a scenario altogether by asking yourself the question, ‘Am I contributing my best?’”

Sam shifted in her chair. “If I’m really honest, I also feel like I’m not growing and learning right now, so that I push the edges of what’s possible for me as a leader. It’s not that I want to change positions or anything like that – it’s just that I wonder if I could be even more effective right where I am. You know – personal growth.”

“Again, great reflection, Sam.” I said. “And there’s much we can do in this arena. But a great place to start is to take a quick assessment of how you are doing. This requires that you be candid with yourself as you go through some careful questioning. And then, if you want a full picture – to see if others have the same perception of your leadership as you do, you will include a few others in this same process.”

“That’s a little daunting,” Sam answered. “But you are probably going to tell me that it is valuable, or you wouldn’t have suggested it.”

“Yes,” I replied. “When we take a careful look at ourselves and assess how we are doing, we are seeing from our lens only. Getting feedback from others helps us to understand how others see us in these same areas. There are often surprises.”

Sam sat back. “You know, I really get that. We have someone here who feels he is a confident and decisive person. But many of us have said that he has a blind spot – that he is actually a poor listener and doesn’t include others in important decisions.”

“Now you are getting it!” I said.

Sam and I worked on some quick questions and process to include others in her mini-assessment. After doing this, she reported some great discoveries that served as the basis for her personal development plan going forward.

How are you doing?

Here are some questions to help you begin your assessment.

Following these questions, I’ve outlined the three ways you can use these. And whether you choose to self-assess, or to include others, it is important to appreciate candor and openness as part of the process, remembering that any feedback you get is valuable to your growth and to your future.

Questions for the Assessment Process

  1. Who am I as leader when I am at my best?
  2. What keeps me from being at my best as a leader?
  3. What do I need more or less of to be at my best as leader?
  4. What do I consider my top strengths?
  5. How do I use these to benefit my work? My team and colleagues? The company?
  6. Where do I see growth opportunities to use more of these strengths in my work?
  7. In what area(s) do I feel there is more personal growth opportunity for me?
  8. How would this enhance my work results? My leadership? How would this benefit my team, colleagues, and the company?
  9. Where in my work do I feel I could be even more effective? Where in my leadership could I do the same?
  10. If I were to work on one thing to be more effective, what would it be? How would this benefit my team? My colleagues? The company?

3 Ways to Assess Your Personal Effectiveness

1. Perform a self-assessment.

Take some time away from the office to sit in a quiet, reflective space. Journal out your answers. Handwriting instead of typing connects the head and heart and will produce deeper, richer results.

2. Have a heart-to-heart discussion with your leader.

Ask her if she will sit with you and answer some questions that will help you to become more effective. Ask her for details or scenarios when you aren’t sure about her answers, or when something isn’t clear to you. It’s important for you to have a clear visual as to when and how you come across in a certain way, or how your results show, so that you can be more aware and manage yourself more effectively.

3. Perform a mini-360° assessment.

Select from those colleagues and reports with whom you work most closely (you may even include a key customer!).

Follow the same process as you do with your leader in #2 above. Select a handful carefully – perhaps 3-5. Be courageous by including those for whom you feel less affinity, or those you fear might be harsh in their feedback. Remember that if one person provides you feedback that is unlike that from the others and does not seem true, you can choose to discount it, or to see this as a growth opportunity to forge a better, closer relationship with that person to test it out.

Once you have gathered your feedback, you will have a rich source of information from which to draw for your personal leadership growth.

Is Your Team Costing the Company Money?

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Is Your Team Costing the Company Money?
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Three Trust Indicators

You can talk all you want about time management tactics, learning how to facilitate critical conversations, and mastering conflict resolution.

But unless your team enjoys a high level of trust among its team members, none of these wonderful skills will help your team’s performance.

In fact, your team may be costing your company a lot of money.

Signs of an Unhealthy Trust Quotient

Here are some signs your team may have an unhealthy (and therefore costly) trust quotient.

  • Everything takes longer and seems harder for team members.
  • People don’t do their best work.
  • They easily become disengaged and withdrawn.
  • Their confidence in themselves and others on the team diminishes.
  • They have feelings of complacency or even fatigue.
  • They are not as prone to connecting with each other or sharing information.
  • Grousing about the company may be a common theme.
  • Some might even question if the enterprise is a right fit for them.

What It Is Not

These signs are not to be confused with team overload, where a company over-commits, and its results are felt throughout the organization with inappropriate workloads and deadlines. No, this is not overload.

What It Is

This is a falling away from former collaboration. It’s an unwillingness to participate by speaking up. It’s a reticence to take risks together, and an uncomfortable commitment to the status quo. You may see things like escalated emotions, turf issues, abdication of responsibility or micromanaging, and certainly some hidden agendas.

As you consider what comes with low trust, you can easily deduce what this means to the company.

What do you do when you detect signs that your team needs to build more trust?

You need to determine the source of this lack of trust so that you can rectify it.

According to researchers Dennis Reina, PhD; Michelle Reina, PhD, and David Hudnut, MIA, renewing trust can result in greater accountability, effectiveness, innovation, respect, performance, profitability (need I go on?). The researchers have developed a Team Trust Scale that measures three areas: trust of character, trust of capability, and trust of communication.

How does your team rate?

I have taken the researchers’ indices of a high level of trust in these areas and paraphrased statements with which you and your team members can rate yourselves.

Using a scale of 1-5, with 5 being highest. How do you rate?

Trust of Character

  • I manage expectations
  • I establish boundaries
  • I delegate appropriately
  • I encourage mutually-serving intentions
  • I keep agreements
  • I am consistent

Trust of Capability

  • I acknowledge people’s abilities and skills
  • I allow people to make decisions
  • I involve others and seek their input
  • I help people learn skills

Trust of Communication:

  • I share information
  • I tell the truth
  • I admit mistakes
  • I give and receive constructive feedback
  • I maintain confidentiality
  • I speak with good purpose

How did you do? And where do you need to shore up first, in order to make biggest impact in up-leveling team trust?

Four Types of Leadership Behaviors You Can’t Do Without

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Four Types of Leadership Behaviors You Can’t Do Without
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How many leadership behaviors have you read about? Ten? Twenty? Another number?

Pretty mind-boggling, isn’t it? And if you are like many, such a sea of varying information can cause you to simply put the latest article aside and go back to doing things the way you know how.

In the world of leadership development, schools of thought are just as varied, and this means that I, as executive coach, can choose to use an assessment that evaluates 10 areas, or 26 areas.

So, now what?

If you are seeking to fast-track your leadership in this new year, I advise that you focus on enhancing just a small subset of four leadership behaviors.

Just four areas.

New research reveals that these four types of leadership behaviors account for 89% of leadership effectiveness, especially for front-line leaders. (Source: McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index https://www.mckinsey.com/)

McKinsey & Company surveyed 81 organizations, diverse in industry and geography (agriculture, consulting, energy, government, insurance, mining, and real estate in North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe).

The results showed the following four areas of leadership to be most important, explaining 89% of the variance between strong and weak organizations in terms of leadership effectiveness.

  1. Supporting others.
  2. Solving problems effectively.
  3. Operating to follow through for results.
  4. Seeking different perspectives.

What does this mean for you?

Well, what it doesn’t mean is that you just need these four and then you can sit back and relax. But what it does mean is that, as you review your leadership commission and where to start, it may well be with these four.

Rating yourself on a scale of 1-5, how do you feel you measure up?

I’ve included some reflective questions to help you begin your assessment:

Supporting others.

Do you operate with authenticity, and show a sincere interest in those around you? Do you seek to inspire and build trust? Are you adopting the approach “tough on issues, tender on people”?

Solving problems effectively.

Are you thoughtful as you analyze and consider best options for action? Do you seek to be proactive in identifying and anticipating challenges, and to come up with solutions, rather than to react too quickly without the information you need, risking a poor decision?

Operating to follow through for results.

Do you marry vision and supporting strategy to action? Have you mastered the behaviors required to meet your goals and objectives, and can you manage people, products, and process effectively so that outcomes are a reflection of your best work?

Seeking different perspectives.

As esoteric as it sounds, do you “seek first to understand, then to be understood?” (Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People). Do you ask your team members to contribute ideas for performance improvement? Are you keeping the pulse on changes in the environment that are likely to influence your company and your work?

Developing any one of these four is a game-changer, and I will tell you frankly that you probably won’t do this alone. Why? It is one thing to be self-aware about the changes one needs to make, and it’s quite another to be able to effectuate those shifts and make them part of who you truly are. You will need to tap into some kind of expert support to step into more of this potential.

This said, the first step to change is to identify the needed change. So, where will you start? What will give you the greatest ROI in your own leadership?

And secondly, who might help you get there?