The Management Centre
yvette@managementcentre.co.uk
yvette@managementcentre.co.uk
Self-reflection is a big part of that journey. It means being able to honestly review and refine your own actions. With that in mind, let’s take five minutes to reflect, find out how we’re doing as managers and how we can improve. Ask yourself:
Healthy, effective and consistent feedback can transform teams for the better. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to model this for your team and to establish, nurture and enrich your feedback culture.
This can be more challenging than it seems. Especially when it’s not unusual to have negative connotations around feedback. Some people experience feedback purely as an excuse for colleagues to ‘blame and shame.’ In this way it has zero constructive purpose. Others view it as a waste of time, a tick-box exercise that gets in the way of their endless To Do List. For some managers, the idea of having to give feedback on something that went wrong is terrifying. The fear of upsetting a colleague versus swallowing the mistake yourself can be consuming.
Take a step back and reflect on how you’re giving and receiving feedback in your team.
Consider how the feedback aligns with these three simple principles:
Effective feedback is
After that you can take necessary steps to change or reinforce your practices.
Remember, as a manager you always have the opportunity to set new standards. If your team is just getting together or working on a new area, you can form new processes and pay attention to the culture to support those. If your team is more established, remember that it’s OK to challenge the status quo, and try something new – especially where established norms aren’t working anymore.
Building trust isn’t just about warm platitudes or exercises on your team away day – though both those things are good!
The reality is that trust lies at the core of all effective teams, no matter what they are working on. As a manager, you want your team to know that you’ve got their back. That you don’t play favourites, and that they can be sure where they stand with you. All of those things are going to be affected by your mindset, so it’s essential to analyse this, and to commit to making some changes if you need to.
Another angle to check in from is your preferences when it comes to leadership styles. It’s important to remember that one style won’t work for every situation or person. For example, if you’re in your element when nurturing and advising, might this turn into being a backseat driver, especially if your colleagues are experienced and competent? This would erode trust very quickly. Perhaps you need to take a step back and let them take some more ownership, knowing you trust them and that your door is open if they encounter immovable obstacles.
The key to being a truly great manager is your ability to flex your style and adapt it when needed. The Intelligent Leadership Model can help with that. It is a tool to help managers recognise and practice different leadership styles. It also helps you understand how, why and when to use a different style. Developing these key management skills means you’re not just able to diagnose whether trust needs to be improved in your team, but also how to go about it.
There’s no one size fits all for delegation. Some managers have strict legal parameters around who can do what kinds of work. Others have lots of room for flexibility, where it’s expected for people to follow a varied, creative pathway of development before being promoted. In some organisations there’s an inbuilt expectation of sharing each other’s loads during busy times. Consider your role – are you delegating everything you could? Mapping out which of your tasks are uniquely yours, which could be delegated and which should be delegated is a great starting point. This tool on Delegation Circles walks you through the process.
Naturally, when you’re extremely busy it’s hard to prioritise delegating when it would be quicker to do the task yourself than explain it to someone else. But this is a false gain – it takes time away from a different task that no one else in your team can do but you. Making time to delegate things that can be handed over will serve you better in the long run. Because delegation isn’t simply about offloading work. Good delegation will help your staff grow more self-sufficient, increase team sustainability, and can even cultivate new, innovative processes. And, of course, it can prevent you from drowning!
The words “performance management” have a bad reputation. The mere mention of it usually brings up negative situations. But performance management is as much about how you handle high performers as low performers. When you’re knee deep in trying to improve the performance of a struggling team member, it can be easy to overlook your high performers and what they need. They just get on with their work and produce consistently high-quality output. They don’t need anything, right? Or might you need to honestly review whether your higher performers feel supported and appreciated? And are you addressing instances of low performance quickly enough or do these issues tend to linger and fester?
Performance management should also be pre-emptive, so you’re not just reacting to live issues. There’s lots of methods of performance management to choose from, and you might already have something in place formally or informally. One of the most effective is one-to-ones. Regular one-to-ones provide space to zoom out from the current task list and have an extended development conversation with your colleague. You can discuss what their big wins and challenges have been, what they’re keen to learn, and more. If you haven’t reviewed this in a while, take some time to consider how regularly you should be having them with your line reports.
In a tight knit team where everyone gets on really well, you might struggle with the lines blurring between personal and professional – you may even be managing your friends. Even in instances where you have to address poor performance, remember that it’s never personal – it’s about supporting them to develop.
Great managers come in many different shapes and sizes. But they all have one thing in common – the ability to reflect and refine their practices. Try blocking out 15-30 minutes monthly to reflect on how you’re doing in your management role using the questions above. If you’d like to develop your management skills further, take a look at what the Emerging Managers Programme can offer. It’s already helped over 30,000 managers thrive from across the charity, public, arts, higher-education and non-profit sectors.
Vanessa specialises in management development, personal effectiveness and project management. Vanessa spent years working in the creative and non-profit sector – often concurrently as part of a portfolio career....
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