For many Americans career progression is as important to them as the air they breathe. When we’re at a point in our careers where we’re looking for the next best thing or a new challenge often times it means taking into consideration a management role. To be successful in management, or leadership for that matter, it requires a completely different set of skills which are typically very different than the skills which were needed to be successful in a staff level role. When we are a staff employee, meaning we don’t have any direct reports, our focus is to ensure we do the best individual job possible. Regardless if we’re a part of a team or not, when we’re a staff employee we really have one main concern – make sure our butts are protected by doing a great job. Being in a management role is very different. While it’s important the manager does a good job, she is also responsible for a number of direct reports and therefore is responsible for their contributions as well. The transition to management can either be a dream come true or a living nightmare. Regardless of which camp you may be in it’s important to consider two things before you make the decision to throw your hat in the ring for the next management opportunity:
What the statistic above from HBR and Gallup tells us is that it’s incredibly tough to make a good decision on who will be successful in a leadership role. While the decision to hire or promote someone into a management role ultimate rests with the company, what happens thereafter is largely attributed to the individual in the role. Let’s make no mistake about it, a move from staff level to management can be an incredibly rewarding opportunity but to be successful in the new venture you need to know beforehand if you’ve got the foundation for what it takes to be successful leading others. Before you consider a career in management think about how you deal with these five foundational leadership questions: 1.Do You Genuinely Care About Other People? I’m going to take a hard stance here and simply say if you don’t care about others and aren’t willing to put others before yourself you’ll never be truly successful in leadership. I choose the word ‘never’ because you may see some success early on however in the long run a lack of genuine care for the people will always bring about challenges which are near impossible to overcome. The best leaders out there, regardless of their titles or the size of the company they work for, view leadership as an act of service and truly care about the wellbeing of their employees. “Leaders eat last.” – Simon Sinek 2.How will you handle ‘The Technician Syndrome’? This is particularly important for people in a technical capacity to consider. The word ‘technician’ refers to a person who is in an individual contributor role focusing on hands-on work. When you make a transition into management you are stepping away from some or most of your daily technical hands on duties. There are some exceptions to this, for example if you work for a start-up or small company and are a ‘working executive’, however most of the time management roles focus their time and energy on their people and a strategy for getting work done. People who have technical backgrounds tend to struggle with this change as often times their original passion which has guided them to this point in their career was focused on being hands-on in their role, creating, building or testing things. (a Mechanical Engineer that designs new products) 3.Are You An Influencer or a Dictator? What is your natural working style when you are in situations where you are working with others? Do you have a tendency to listen, support and coach or are you the type that would rather just tell people what to do? Successful leaders do more listening than they do talking. They understand the importance of giving their people an opportunity to contribute ideas, take risks, do things their own way, etc. Managers that don’t do this have a hard time motivating their employees as they view their employees as workers who are to be told what to do, when to do and how to do their work. 4.Can You Delegate? Can you give someone else an opportunity to take on a project or work? Are you able to allow someone else the chance to take the spot light and recognition? Do you trust others to get the job done? These are all important questions which tie into delegation. Successful leaders delegate frequently because they know firsthand that it isn’t wise or feasible for them to do everything. Delegation also has a unique outcome which communicates trust and ownership to your employees whereas not delegating sends the exact opposite signal. 5.Are You Willing to be a Shrink? It’s not the prettiest part of the job but a consideration nonetheless. A very real part of management is dealing with people problems, like a shrink would, and working constantly in conflict resolution. This aspect of the job often sends people screaming for the hills as dealing with people problems can be challenging and often viewed as a waste of time in the corporate world. Successful leaders view the people interaction part of the job as an opportunity for improving themselves and their employees while further developing a deeper relationship. They look forward to the moments to learn from, listen, coach and guide their employees. They do this because they genuinely care about the welfare of their employees both at work and home. If you’re considering going into management take the time to think about how you show up with these five foundational leadership questions. What’s important to consider is that if you don’t have these intangible skills now can you develop them over time? The answer is most definitely yes, it’ll just take time, patience and a willingness to always be learning.
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My Misery Thanks To Poor Leadership5/20/2016 Ever been in a situation where you witnessed something go from bad to worse and all you could do was stand and watch? Maybe it was bad enough where you had to avert your eyes, turn away and pretend like it wasn’t happening. Watching from a far you might have even said to yourself in the moment, “what are they doing?!” followed by a couple choice expletives.
If you’ve experienced this before then you know EXACTLY how I felt this past weekend watching my Cincinnati Bengals lose the first round wildcard playoff game on Saturday against our arch rivals the Pittsburgh Steelers. Bear with me here as I am going to do my best not to drone on and on about the awful showing my team put up the other evening as there’s actually a great learning lesson that came from it which is incredibly applicable to our professional lives. Applicable indeed, especially if you are in a leadership position or hope to be in a leadership role at some point in the near future. Poor leadership impacts everyone around it, everyone being you, me, the company, the customer, in this case the fans, etc. In business this typically shows up in the form of poor communication, discipline issues, bad decision making, people working in silos, losing one’s ‘cool’ and under performing in key situations. As for myself, I’ve done a couple of these in my leadership tenure and learned a lot from it so I can share first hand that these are some of the biggest leadership killers out there. Ironically, those characteristics of poor business leadership I just shared are also the things we witnessed in Saturdays NFL playoff game when the Bengals single handedly gave away their win to the Pittsburgh Steelers. First, let me say that if you’re reading this and you happen to be a Steelers fan…congrats on the win, well played. You all deserve to keep your season alive. Now that I feel better about myself for playing nice and being a good loser I’ll continue my rant on Cincinnati’s poor leadership. Before we move into the meat of things, it’s important I set the stage with some background info in the event you’re not up to date on your Cincinnati Bengals trivia. Heading into Saturdays game against the Steelers, my Bengals came to the table with some stats which certainly point in the direction of this game being incredibly important. Here’s the bottom line on the boys in orange and black:
Needless to say, it’s tough being a fan of Cincinnati at the moment. Regardless of your thoughts and feelings on the NFL, the stats above tell a very clear and frustrating story. It seems as if the executive team and owners of the Bengals franchise overlook these statistics of poor leadership performance, while as a fan looking from the outside in its plain as day to see the issues and how to resolve it. The Cincinnati Bengals (like many businesses we’ve all worked at) struggle to realize that their inability to be successful is a direct result of their leadership. A lack of good leadership makes it difficult for even the best and brightest talent to perform at a high level. Back to Saturday’s game. Cincinnati’s loss will go down in the books as a complete and utter meltdown. Let’s examine the last two minutes of the game so we know what happened and why the Bengals lost:
The last two minutes of that game came down to a team being able to perform under pressure (Steelers) and a team imploding from their own lack of discipline and selfishness. (Bengals) Since the game, commentators have cited the players as the issue as the reason why the Bengals lost. I happen to have a different perspective. When teams win or businesses succeed, the best leaders are always quick to give praise to their team indicating the group effort and high performance as the reason for the success. However when good leaders are faced with unfortunate circumstances rather than cast that blame on the team they shoulder responsibility for themselves. That’s what good leaders do…they give praise for a job well done and take blame when things go bad. When it comes down to it leading is more than just a title and a seat up on top. To be good in leadership you first have to care about those around you, then build a platform for people to be wildly successful. Excuses, mediocrity, bad attitudes, a lack of accountability, what have you, have no place in this world for those who want to be successful. To be great you must think and act for others first, yourself always second. While I never would wish bad things to happen to another individual, such as Marvin Lewis the Head Coach of the Bengals, my hope is that ownership wakes up before the beginning of next season and makes some changes. Without those changes we’ll continue to be a mediocre team falling short of what could be a great program for years to come. As they say, “There’s always next year”. Last week I had the chance to reconnect with a former colleague and friend to get caught up on life over a brilliant sushi buffet. Heading into the meal, little did I know that our soon to be conversation would forever change my perspective on leadership. For the purposes of this article we’ll refer to my friend as King Salad. (weird to say this but he’s got impeccably styled hair [aka salad], and if you’ve seen a picture of me you’ll know why I’m saying this as I’m a bit lacking in this department)
Eventually conversation with King Salad drifted into the inevitable “how’s work coming along this year so far”. King Salad’s first comment both surprised me and caught my attention as he said, “I’m focusing my energy in 2016 on ‘Managerial Courage’. Not to say that I wasn’t interested in the conversation prior, certainly not the case, but without knowing it he had just triggered something in me which made me ultra-alert and increasingly interested to learn more about his perspective of Managerial Courage. As I sat on the edge of the booth listening to King Salad share with me why he was focusing on Managerial Courage a thought jolted my brain which hit me like a lightning bolt. King Salad never saw any of this but he was probably wondering why I was so enthusiastically engaged in the conversation, no longer even eating. What was the lightning bolt that stopped me from eating my precious sushi? I realized something that I had never thought of before: Managerial Courage is the linchpin, the cornerstone, the apex for all things related to leading successfully. It was so clear in that moment! In the absence of Managerial Courage all other leadership qualities and characteristics suffer as without Managerial Courage we can only hope to be mediocre at best when it relates to leading and influencing others. What is Managerial Courage anyways? Simply put – it’s doing the right things as a leader, especially during tough times. Seems simple, yet it’s devilishly difficult to act on consistently. A deeper look into Managerial Courage and we find that it can be further described as a set of actions and beliefs a leader possesses which define who they are and how they go about leading and inspiring others. These actions and beliefs include:
The more I thought about it the more I realized that all this time I’ve missed the bigger picture as it relates to successfully leading others. I even laughed at myself because the notion of Managerial Courage has been in front of me for years yet I had failed to connect the dots leading to my current awareness on the matter. I always knew to lead successfully you had to care about those you supported as well as come to grips with the fact that the decisions you make won’t always be the right ones. I knew leading was an art, not something to be achieved at a moment in time, but something to work towards continuously throughout an entire career as a student of the game. What I didn’t realize until this past week was that the genesis of leadership, the very foundation that exceptional leadership stands on, comes from Managerial Courage. It takes great tenacity, strength, fortitude, mental determination and care to be a leader and do so successfully. You can’t fake leadership, you can’t say one thing then act another. People see right through that. Sure, anyone can be a leader, but those who do it successfully stand head and shoulders above their counterparts. It’s worth mentioning that few people fall into the category of great leaders which is why the concept of Managerial Courage is so important. Courage is the very essence of what leadership is all about. I am beholden to my friend King Salad for the awareness he brought to me over our sushi meal, it was an invaluable learning opportunity one which I’m thrilled to share and pass on. What does Managerial Courage mean to you? 5 Steps to Dealing with a Bully Customer5/20/2016 Let’s face it, customers (or clients) are what keep us in business. Without the customer there would be no business, no management, no worker bee, no complimentary coffee that tastes like gym socks in the office kitchen and certainly no revenue.
Customers at the end of the day are the end all be all. Without a willing customer to buy your product or service you will simply cease to exist. The customer and the business are not mutually exclusive, they rely on one another to exist, yet the reality is that often times the one who holds the most influence in the relationship is the customer. Influence, or power for that matter, has a strange way of changing how people act at times, creating monsters out of women and men. When customers become tough to deal with many times what we see on the outside isn’t the full picture, to get to the bottom of it we need to dive deeper into the issue to truly understand that persons irritation or frustrations. Which reminds me of an old story from another lifetime back when I was in high school. I was a server at a small pizza restaurant in the town I grew up in. I loved the job because I got to eat pizza all day long and interact with some really cool people, our customers. Let’s call it like it is, everyone’s happy when they’re getting pizza, so needless to say I really loved this job. One day a customer came in to pick up a pizza to-go. I had served this customer many times before and what happened that day was the same as every other time we would interacted with this gentleman. He came in and immediately started frothing at the mouth about how his last purchase with our restaurant was awful as he yelled about how it was never on time and ‘the pizza sauce sucked’. "There are never enough pepperoni's on the pizza", he would say. In typical fashion he would then ask to speak with the manager and demand a discount, which most of the time we gave him. It was like groundhogs day, same thing every time with little deviation. I always laughed to myself because he just kept coming back for more like some evil self-inflicted punishment. I remember thinking to myself, "If our service and food was really that bad, why did he keep coming back?" One day our manager finally had enough and confronted the man. I’d love to say it was me but I was a pimply faced 16 year old and certainly not gutsy enough to speak back to a customer and risk losing my pizza privileges, or job for that matter. The restaurant manager interrupted the man’s banter, took him a side and asked, “Sir, why do you continue to give us your business if you dislike our food so much. You seem awfully upset and often treat my employees rather poor. Is everything okay?” As I ease dropped in on the conversation I was shocked at the response from the customer. “I’m sorry Tim. (our manager’s name) I was fired from my job a couple months ago, as a result I lost my house so I’m living out of my car and pizza is the cheapest, easiest thing for me to eat. Please let your staff know how much I appreciate them as they are always nice to me, even though I’m not a very pleasant person myself.” WOW! My mouth dropped to the floor. None of us knew why this person was always such an irritable grump, we just knew that when he came in the door he was always angry and seemed to enjoy taking it out on the servers. Our manager decided to give him the pizza he ordered for free and invited him back the following day so that the man could watch our team go through the process of making pizzas. The manager wanted him to see that the food was good quality and we cared about our customers. He also threw in a free lunch for the guy, more than I would of done, certainly. Best part of the story was after the customers ‘field trip’ to our restaurant ended that following day our manager offered him a job delivering pizzas so he could earn some money until he was able to get back on his feet. I learned an incredibly valuable lesson that day which taught me to take the time to confront tough situations rather than let those situations own me in the process. As a result I’m a firm believer that you attract more bees with honey than you do with sledgehammers. Once we understand what is driving a customer to act in a certain way we can then respond with a solution that hopefully changes the course of the relationship moving forward. These 5 steps are a great way to get to the bottom of your customers frustrations so you can then start focusing on turning around the relationship:
“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.” - Wayne Dyer Adversity comes in all shapes and sizes in the workplace. No matter how hard you may try it is darn near impossible to escape adversity in the workplace as it’s not ‘if’ but ‘when’. Adversity comes in the form of dealing with a bad boss, company politics, a negative coworker, challenging deadlines or having a work load on your plate enough for three people. While these are only but a few of the typical challenges we face at work they all have tendency to lead to one area
employees being unhappy at work.Apparently there’s a lot of unhappy people at work because recent stats show that employees average job tenure is 4.4 years, with Millennials being half that. With people jumping ship so quickly in their career it makes you wonder if they ever really think about their decisions before they make them and what the impact will be down the road. Which reminds me of my own story dealing with this exact issue. Three years into my career I managed to hit a major roadblock. The company I worked for had hired me before I even graduated college and trained me from the ground up. As a result I was fortunate enough to get promoted and find myself in a management role very early in my career, which above everything, taught me a lot about myself and working with others. As time went on I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated at work as expectations seemed to be mounting by the minute and my performance was beginning to suffer. Sunday evenings were the worst as I would slip into a mild depression about the thought of having to start a whole week of work all over again. After several months of feeling bad for myself I decided to peek my head out into the job market and see what else was out there – perhaps a greener pasture was waiting for me. I interviewed with several companies over the course of a month or two but in the end decided to stay with my current employer to ‘stick it out’. The reason I decided to stay was because I felt like if I were to leave at that point I wouldn’t be able to say “I gave it everything I could, it just wasn’t the right opportunity for me.” The reality of my situation was that I was spending more time focused on my frustrations rather than focusing on how I could kick ass and take names, figuratively speaking. What I didn’t know then but certainly know now is that the decision to ‘stick it out’ with my then current employer would prove to be a crucial decision in my career and personal life moving forward. What I learned from this decision:
As we deal with adversity and challenge in the work place how often are we really doing our best to improve the situation before we decide to move on from it. Just as important, do we take into consideration the things we’re missing out on by making a decision, especially one as important as a new career. While not all challenges and work place adversities can be bested it’s important we’re honest with ourselves on where the source of our frustration comes from so that we can truly understand how to combat it. If we don’t, we run the risk of having those same issues at our next place of employment which could then begin a nasty habit that follows us for a life time. “Life is a storm…You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout 'Do your worst, for I will do mine!' " – Alexandre Dumas About the AuthorTravis Smith is the founder and managing director of Square-1 Engineering, a medical device consulting firm, providing end to end engineering and compliance services. He successfully served the life sciences marketplace in SoCal for over 15 years and has been recognized as a ‘40 Under 40’ honoree by the Greater Irvine Chamber of Commerce as a top leader in Orange County, CA. Categories
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