manager

Why my fear of roller coasters does not keep me out of amusement parks

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Helix - Liseberg - Gothenburg — *Helix – Liseberg – Gothenburg*

They scare the living daylight out of me those roller coasters.

Intellectually I understand that they are safe, probably safer that taking a taxi to the airport, statistically… but still. It’s always been like that, so maybe in a previous life I was traumatised by a roller coaster gone wild. Anyway that is not the point of this final blog post of the year. The reason I mention it is because paradoxically this year I have seen more incredible roller coasters and heard more delighted shrieks from thrilled crowds than at any time previously in my life. More on that in just a minute.

Yes I am in a reflective mood.

You see, technically, this week is just like all the other weeks, but somehow in our mind it’s quite special. It marks an ending and a new beginning and we all get in this mood of yearly review and even more importantly setting new bold goals for the coming year.

All my lovely blogging colleagues are probably bombarding you with: The ten best books you should have read, the eight new trends that you must understand or (flavour of the year) the twelve point action plan that will make this your best year ever!

So why the roller coasters?

Well believe it or not, this was the year that I got to spend considerable time in amusements parks!

Seriously!

As always I have been doing work with my loyal gang of regular hotel clients, but I also got to spend time at Efteling in Holland introducing the Service Profit Chain for IAAPA. In Copenhagen, we introduced a new approach to leadership development at Tivoli gardens and I had the honour for 16 weeks to take a group of seriously enthusiastic managers from Liseberg in Gothenburg through the GROW leadership program.

So what am I learning?

I think my key takeaway this year has been confirmation that at the end of the day, being a great manager is deceptively simple on the surface, and incredibly hard to do well in practice. It’s like juggling. You see the guy rotating 5 oranges in the air and you think: “That’s neat. I can do that.” You pick up the oranges and you understand that there is a gap between knowing and doing.

The 5 oranges of management that you need to juggle have been elegantly formulated by the Gallup organisation based on their extensive research of hundreds of business and managers.

Great managers have these talents/skills/abilities:

They motivate every single employee to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.
They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
They create a culture of clear accountability.
They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.
They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.

That’s it! But again this is just more information, and I am sure you don’t need more information.

What you need is probably execution, the HOW part.

So that brings me to next year. Early 2017, we will be launched the Team Leader’s Toolbox – a training program aimed at helping busy mangers learn quickly how they juggle their ‘oranges’.

We have been exploring this theme of Leadership and Management over the year on the blog as well and if you missed some of the posts you can download a compilation in the form of ebook HERE.

Thank you for reading my blog. If there is anything you would like to see more (or less) of next year, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I love hearing from my readers.

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This post is one of a series where we are exploring the notion of leadership and how this is different from management. Our starting point is the Service Profit Chain and the understating that the management part of our job will only take us so far. If we really want to create an organisation that is capable of delivering outstanding customer experiences, we need to develop an organisation that delivers outstanding employee experiences – and that requires leadership. You can check out other articles of the series below:

Progress drives engagement – So how do you focus on progress?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Progress

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high quality product or service, everyday progress, even a small win, can make all difference in how they feel and perform.

The Progress Principle

This quote which makes so much sense to me brings us to another aspect of not just why we need to focus on developing the people around us, but also how we can do it.

Focus on progress

In order to progress, we need a baseline to progress from. Once we have a baseline, we can start thinking about what we need to learn or practice in order to get better.

For learning actually to happen, there must be a gap between your current capability and the results that you desire.

So in order for our people actually to learn they need to:

Have an awareness of the gap
Be willing to declare their incompetence (I don’t know how to do that.)
Commit to learning

(I have written about this in a previous post some time ago.)

So if I sneak into your business and tap any one of your team members on the shoulder and ask them: “What are you working on at the moment in order to get better?”, or I ask them: “In what ways does your boss feel you have made progress last month?”, do they know?

Or is progress something that is randomly observed and then celebrated: “Oh look isn’t this nice!”?

Focusing on progress is an important part of your leadership role. And your most important tool for this is not a dashboard in excel but conversations, one-on-one conversations (According to Gallup research, team members who have no or very few one-to-one sessions with their direct supervisor are 67% more likely to be disengaged at work. I mention this just in case you have the notion that one-on-one is a waste of time and it is easier to tell them all at once.)

If you happen to be a manager of managers, this is even more import – you are the role model. If you are not having one-to-one conversations (about progress) with your direct reports, there is little chance that they are having them with their team members. In fact, if you are not talking to them about how they are progressing with their approach to manage progress with their team, I am pretty sure it is not happening at all.

How to structure an engaging conversation

What would be a good way to structure these conversations?

Establish the gap. Once we have a gap, we can establish a goal. Moving toward our goal is what progress would look like. Then we can have a chat about so what is going on now compared to that goal. Once we agree on how what is going on is different from the goal, then we can talk about what options there could be in order to make progress towards the goal. Finally, we pick an action and commit to doing that.

The following conversation will be a follow up / feedback on how this is going. If you are familiar with coaching, you will have recognised that what I have described here as a framework is in fact the GROW coaching model – you can check it out in more details HERE.

In any case, in my upcoming course The Team Leaders’ Toolbox, we will be exploring this model more in details. If you would like to be notified when we launch that, sign up with the link below!

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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Do you understand the stages that your team goes through?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Team

Last week, we took a deeper dive into understanding how the mental states of each team member has an influence on the whole team – and that the team leader probably has more influence on this than anybody else. If you did not read that post, you might want to start there first.

The mental state that team members are in also produces a certain collective behaviour, especially as there are states that are typical for each stage of the life cycle of a team.

When we put a bunch of people together in a team, they typically go though certain stages. This was first described by Psychologist Bruce Tuckman who came up with the memorable phrase “forming, storming, norming, and performing” in his 1965 article, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.”

team-phases-pic-001

So this is not new. On the contrary, it is well established framework and many of you have probably heard the expression “forming, storming, norming and performing” before. The words that describe the basic stages that small groups experience. In theory, this is a linear process that starts with forming and then goes step by step through all four stages. But the challenge in this is that most teams do not naturally follow this path – they need some help or else they get stuck.

What stage is your team at?

So what is important is for the team leader to recognise the stages as they unfold in the team and to act skilfully in helping the team through each stage. Part of this team leader’s awareness also means understanding that the team is basically an unstable system, and that from time to time it will regress from the current stage and take a step or even two steps back to previous stages. And it requires skillful action on the part of the team leader to get the team back on track.

Less experienced team leaders often have an aversion to conflict. They feel it is all important that we all get along and have a nice time. So when the initial phase, the forming stage, is coming to an end and the first signs of friction become apparent, the typical reaction is to reorganise the team in order to stop the conflict from escalating. The deep fear is that this could get really ugly.

The quick fix is to shuffle positions or tasks, maybe even transferring one or more team members away from the team to other teams or whatever. The shuffle causes the team process to reset and a new period of forming starts. And it creates the illusion that the conflict or problem is solved.

During the forming stage, everyone is doing their best to fit in and not rock the boat too much. They are also trying their best to adapt to everyone else. But after a while, the friction invariably starts again. It happens because after a while, each of the team members have had enough, they are tired of not voicing their need and constantly trying to bend over backwards to keep everyone happy and they start to voice their dissatisfaction.

Conflict is just a symptom.

Friction is not a bad thing as such; it is just a symptom that we need to align whatever we are doing better with each other.

The way we do that is that we start a number of conversations about how the team is functioning and what we need to do in order for everything to work better for all. This may mean some heated meetings and possible disharmony, but eventually the skillful team leader will help the team come to an understanding that enables them to move forward – typically by establishing some rules of engagement or a team manifesto. As they do, the team moves out of the storming into the norming stage and after a while it becomes (high) performing.

You need to work on the fluffy stuff.

As the team leader, it is important for you to understand that it is hard to get to any level of (high) performance without investing time and energy in what is often seen as the fluffy stuff. You need to have the necessary conversations; conversations that aim on developing better relations and not just on task accomplishments. Handling this in a helpful way that keeps everyone on the bus and heading in the same direction is not something we are born with – it is learned skill.

In my next online training, the Team Leader’s Toolbox, I will go into much more detail on how to actually do this in practical terms. Because it is not rocket science, it just requires you to be aware of some basic principles about human behaviour and the importance of relationships.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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How you can help you team manage their states

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Manage your states

Last week, we looked at how teams are organic systems and as such by definition unstable (If you did not see that post, it might be helpful to read that first HERE).

The lack of stability shows up as a result of the shifting states of each team member, and that in return obviously has repercussion on the state of the whole team.

So what do we mean by states?

States are temporary conditions that constantly transitioning into new states. You are tired, refreshed, lethargic, energetic. Those are all different forms of physical states. Or you are happy, sad, exuberant, angry or whatever. These are emotional states. The two play an ever ongoing interdependent dance with each other. When I have slept well, I feel happier than when I just had two hours restless sleep on a plane.

The state that we are in at any given time influences our performance quite dramatically. Just think of yourself and what a difference it makes to your own performance when you are feeling energetic and happy – or the opposite.

But it is more complex than that. Humans are a social species and we influence on each other. There have been made all sorts of experiments to prove this. You take a deeply depressed person and ask them so sit in a train compartment with 6-8 other people for 15-20 minutes. Just sitting there, not saying a word. And then you interview the other passengers about how they feel afterwards and you can register a clear dominance of more negative, pessimistic state in everyone in that compartment. Alternatively, you ask a guy who just won the lottery, became father for the first time or some other major happy events to also make a journey in a train compartment. Again, just sitting there, not saying a word. When you interview the other passengers, you will find a significant level of positive states and optimism in the whole group.

The rule of thumb here is that the person in the group with the strongest emotion tends to affect the rest of the group positively or negatively as the case may be.

Think about that the next time you turn up for work in a bad mood and with the attitude that it only concerns yourself and they should just get on with their work. You have just lowered the productivity level in your team by anything from 10% to 50% depending on how foul your mood happens to be.

So the first lesson here is that I need to manage my own states. That is a whole subject in itself and I will dedicate a full module to that in my upcoming Team Leaders’ Toolbox training.

For now, let’s just assume that you already understand that and are fully aware of how to manage your own states and what the consequences are for your surroundings when you don’t.

Next, we need to look at, that apart from your basics state, you can also be more or less helpfully in affecting your team members states – both positively and negatively.

What causes us to shift or change our state?

At a very basic level, it is about stimulus and response. Something happens and you react (as per reflex) or you respond. When we respond, there is the notion that we actually make a conscious choice. People who are good at managing their states respond.

Many of your team members will just react. And their reactions follow a very simple pattern.

When something happens that is within the range of what they expected, there is no reaction. Their state is unchanged. When something happens that is better than they had expected, they have a positive reaction and that shifts their emotional state to a more positive mood (and of course that has repercussion on their physical energy levels as well). But if something happens that is worse than they expected, they will react negatively and experience a shift in state to something that is more negative with a corresponding drop in physical energy levels as well.

This pattern has an added complication. Our brain is not very good at differentiating between what is actually going on and what we think is going on, or maybe will be going on in the future. So when we have a feeling that this is going to be great – or terrible, we react accordingly even if whatever it is has not yet occurred.

Shift your focus and you shift your state

That is why paying attention to what we are focusing on is another important part of managing our states. When I focus on what I want, what I would like to create, I have positive thoughts/emotions. When I focus on what I don’t want or what I would like to avoid, I have negative thoughts/emotions.

In the same category but slightly different is the sensation of lack of control. Most of us go into seriously negative states when we feel that we have no control of what is currently happening or about to happen. We have this to different degrees. Some people handle a lack of control better than others. But take away all control from someone and you basically have a torture situation.

A good dentist understands this, and explains very carefully what she is going to do next, etc. In that way, she is actively managing your experience and trying to avoid you going into unnecessarily negative states (Because it is bad for business, you won’t come back, and you will tell your friends bad things about the experience).

Also in this category is any notion of fear. You do not want any of your team members to experience any form of fear. Because it obviously triggers very unhelpful mental and physical states. This sounds so obvious, but think of your own career, how many times a week you had that feeling of fear in your belly? How often was it caused by someone in a senior position, their behaviour or words? Causing any form of anxiety in your team is very unhelpful.

So in summary, you can help you team members manage their states by:

Skilfully managing your own states
Avoiding unpleasant surprises whenever you can (Being clear about what is going to happen and what your expectations are)
Being clear about what needs to be done, but leaving the control of how to do it up to them.
Helping them stay focused on what we are trying to create or achieve as opposed to focusing on what is not working or that we want to avoid

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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You won’t get results by pussyfooting around the issues!

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Ed Catmull called Creativity Inc. Now you may not be familiar with the name Ed Catmull, but if I tell you that he was one of the three original founders of Pixar film then you’ll probably have an idea of who I’m talking about.

In the book is a chapter where Catmull describes the process behind making a successful animation movie. Catmull writes “Early on all our movies suck!”. This makes sense when you think about it. But when we see that fabulous animation, we often forget how that represents three years of hard work from an awful lot of people. And of course that rough idea was not born a box office hit. It was worked, reworked and polished endlessly until it became that work of art.

One thing is being a lone genius, a Picasso or a Rodin – tirelessly and self critically continuing until you get it right. But how does that work when you are 60, 70 or even 200+ people?

According to Catmull, one of the secrets to Pixar’s success is that they have this culture of candour. A feedback culture that is open, straightforward and honest – and maybe most importantly, never compromising.

So once a month, the management team sit down with the team working on a given animation project for the monthly review. Imagine this is meeting #24 i.e. 24 months into the project. Probably still another 12 or 18 months to go. The team that has been working on the project has been working long and hard on it, and they are probably relatively proud of what they have come to see as their baby.

“Success Is Going from Failure to Failure Without Losing Your Enthusiasm” – Sir Winston Churchill

But there is still work to do. So the challenge for the management team is, to give the ‘creatives’ the necessary feedback without them losing motivation and enthusiasm. So each management team member voices their opinion but in a very precise format. They explain what they feel worked well for them and they state very clearly what did not work well for them. “If the scene at 37 minutes, was supposed to make me laugh, I didn’t find it funny.” The management team makes a point of not suggesting what needs to be fixed or what they felt was wrong. They only communicate very clearly: Is this working for me or is it not working for me?

And so it goes on and on, iteration after iteration, and gradually the rough sketches and crazy ideas are honed into one smooth and fabulous animation movie. Management gives straightforward no nonsense feedback – but the project managers are always left with their ownership for the project intact. They must come up with a new solution or improvement.

It’s not personal, it’s a challenge

Note also that this type of feedback is not personal. This is not feedback that says you are a bad animator. It just says we need to try something different. It’s a challenge, not a criticism.

But now think of your own team and how you are conducting team reviews, feedback sessions, evaluations of past performance? Do you have a culture of straight talk?

Do you as the boss fall into the trap of telling them what was wrong and what they need to do in order to fix it?

No feedback, no progress.

Feedback is crucial to our progress, without it we would not see improvements in anything we do. But the wrong kind of feedback, the criticisms, the ironic comments, sarcasm and lukewarm endorsements, just kills motivation and engagement.

What is needed is a culture of candour.

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the tenth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Take charge of your energy levels!

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

In our ongoing summer series on how to best support the first time mangers, we now need to look at one of the big challenges – lack of time.

Landing that first managerial job is, for most new mangers, exciting and challenging: so much to do!

…and then the realisation: so little time to do it in.

The natural reaction is to just put in more hours. Crank up the work volume. And often it works for a while but then we run out of steam. Then in our pursuit to squeeze more productivity out of the hours available, we start researching time management tricks and tips – maybe we invest in a super To-do app for our phone or a fancy leather bound paper organisers.

But regardless, chasing more time quickly becomes exhausting.

There has got to be a better way.

There is.

But it is not about managing your time, but about managing your energy instead. When we are energised, we fly through the day – stuff seems to get done almost by itself – on the other hand, on the days when we are drained, even the simplest task seems to occupy the whole morning for us.

Where does our energy come from?

To some, it’s just a question of getting enough sleep and the right amount of caffeine in the morning – but it is actually more complex than that.

In the book “The Power of full engagement”, Tony Swartz explains that we draw our energy from four sources:

Body, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual.

Ideally, we need to manage them all to ‘Full’ in order to function at our best.

Body: physical energy

The basics are well known to most. You need your sleep and you need to eat in a sensible way. If you do not know what that means, there are lots of resources on the web to guide you – Google is a good place to start.

So assuming that you have the basics under control, you also need to manage your body energy over the day. This is less well known. You body is not a machine – if you don’t give it time to replenish and recover over the day, you wear it down in such a way that your productivity drops of dramatically as you move through the day. Ever notice a different in energy levels during the first hours of the morning and your 3pm drowsiness?

Every 90 min or so we need a break – a 15 min switch of, close your eyes, daydream or even better, take a brisk walk, whatever you can do to give your system a break from what you are doing.

If you apply these breaks every 90 min or so, you will experience that you can sustain the same high levels of physical energy throughout the day – afternoons become just as productive as mornings and thus make up for the time you ‘wasted’ taking these 15 min breaks.

Emotions: the quality of our energy

Maintaining a positive state of mind requires a conscious effort. The more pressure we face and the more fight-flight reactions we have during a day, the more we tend to slip into negative emotions. Being in a negative frame of mind reduces our effectiveness quite dramatically; we see problems where we need to see solutions and possibilities. And the negative impact is not limited to ourselves – negative emotions are contagious – they spread to our surroundings and make everyone else less effective as well. Apart from the fact that it ruins their day….

The two fastest ways to make a quick emotional reset when we sense that we are slipping into a negative state is to take a deep breath and exhale slowly – when we exhale slowly, we provide instant stress relief.

Secondly, we can shift our focus. Next time you are in a negative mood, notice where your focus is. You will be focusing on something that you don’t like or don’t want. When we do that, we trigger a negative emotional response. If we shift our focus to what we do want, what we could create, what would be a possibility then we also trigger a more positive emotional response – try it – it works wonders.

Negative emotions are like Tamagotchis, they need to be fed in order to persist. We can all experience burst of anger or frustration during a hectic day – that is unavoidable. Emotional bursts last on an average 90 sec if you just leave them to lose their steam. Only if you feed them with more negative thoughts do they survive for longer – Don’t feed them, shift your focus.

The Mind: Focus Energy

The fastest way to dilute your mental resources and energy is to shift tasks rapidly. In your brain, there is no such thing as multitasking, what we sometimes refer to as multitasking is just that we are asking our brains to perform several tasks at the same time by rapidly switching from one to the other – when we do that the loss in productivity is dramatic. Typically, you add an extra 25% time to tasks when you switch attention. So answering phone calls, replying to email, etc. while trying to finish that monthly report is a very bad idea.

Chunk and batch process your tasks in categories. Emails in one time slot, phone calls in another.

Big Rocks First

The number one productivity enhancer that everyone who implements it says changes their life dramatically is what Steven Covey called Big Rocks First: Start your day by tackling one big important project that you need to get done. (Decide the night before what it is going to be) Do it first, before the emails, and the 15 yellow post-it notes with things to do and people to call on them. Practice every day for a week and notice how much more you get done. It is amazing!

The Human Spirit: Energy of Meaning and Purpose.

How does it feel energy wise to work on something that in your view is meaningless? It’s a drag – yes?

On the other hand, how does it feel to work on something that you personally feel is ultra important and very meaningful? Now you are maybe thinking, but hey that’s not work, that’s called a hobby… Exactly. When something is meaningful to us – when we can see the purpose, it is so much more fun to do that we would even consider doing to for free.

So how do we tap into that energy?

We do so by becoming more aware about what is important to us. What we value in life. Becoming more aware of in what situation we have had this ‘flow’ experience and then asking ourselves so how can I organise myself in such a way that I get to do more of that.

Sometimes we are just in a situation that we will need to create our own meaning in order to survive. At the age of 21, I landed a job as a lift operator in a very posh Parisian hotel. Now that is not the most inspiring of jobs. So in order to preserve my sanity, I started to think what would it take to become the best lift operator in Paris? How do you run your lift in such a way that people (i.e my superiors) notice? That became my meaningful project every day and three months later, I was promoted to a new position in the hotel.

So in conclusion – and I do realise it is a bit of a cliché – but it really does apply here -Don’t try to work harder – you will just kill yourself – work smarter.

Take charge of your energy levels!

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This is the ninth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

Conversations, not small talk

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Before you plunge into this, take a moment – and think about leaders that you have admired in your life. This could be a teacher, a scout leader, a sports coach or a boss. Go on – do it now.

When you think of a leader in your life that you have admired, does a specific conversation come to mind?

I think most of us can remember at least one (maybe even several) conversations that we have had with a great ‘boss’. A conversation that somehow shifted something in our thinking, understanding or behaviour.

Great conversations have a powerful impact.

But great conversations are also time consuming and for exactly that reason – they are also often the most neglected part of your leadership toolkit. We don’t seem to find the time.

That is a shame because when we neglect our conversations, we miss out on one of the most effective leadership instruments at our disposal.

Now, conversations are not just conversations, they come in many forms, some are constructive/destructive, important/irrelevant or inspiring/draining etc.

So as a first time leader, the first step is to become more aware of our conversations and in that process look at:

The quality
The participants
The frequency

What is a Quality Conversation?

Most conversations can be categorized as anything from weak at one end of the spectrum to strong at the other end.

A strong conversation has three key ingredients:

Advancement of an agenda
Shared learning
A strengthening of the relationship

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the weak conversations. At best they lead nowhere. And at worst, they produce confusion and distrust.

A high-quality conversation typically has three stages:

The initiator of the conversation sets up her agenda with an honest feeling or sincere expression of need. This signals to the other participant(s) in the conversation the importance of the agenda. At the same time, it can also a request for help and an invitation to contribution.

Strong conversations often follow a natural path of divergences / convergence that goes something like this:

In the first phase, you establish rapport and set the scene.

You ‘frame’ the situation, explain your view and if possible, illustrate what you mean.

The second phase, you explore, primarily using questions. You are probing in an effort to uncover and surface the real assumptions behind the issue as well as to make sure that we have as many facts as possible on the table.

Once we have a common understanding of what is going on, we can move to a third phase where we examine alternative ideas and solutions. This is a phase where we can try and stretch our thinking and not fall into the trap of grabbing the first solution that surfaces.

Finally, we need to make choices and decide what actions to take. This is a critical phase because often we assume that everybody is in agreement about what it is we need to do and everybody sees everything the same way and therefore there’s no need to going to details about this. (and time is running so we all nod and grab our stuff and rush of to the next thing on our agenda.)

But more often than not, this is not the case. We all hear what we would like to hear and we can all fall into the trap of going with half baked inferences and assumptions.

So in the final phase of a great conversation, we agree on explicit action steps: Who does what and when.

In order to move elegantly through this diamond, it is helpful to learn certain communicative dance steps. We call them advocacy and inquiry. We can get back to them in a future post.

Who are you talking to?

The next thing I would like you to consider is who are you actually having conversations with?

Take a moment and think about the week that has passed. Who did you talk to beyond just “So how are you?” or “Did you watch football yesterday?” etc.,

What quality conversations have you had and with whom?

And maybe even more importantly, who did you not have conversations with?

Why do you think you did not have conversations with exactly those people? Often our most immediate answer to that is “No time” or “They weren’t available.” or something else in that category. But often these are just excuses.

When we explore this question deeper, we often realise that there are some people we have a tendency to avoid having real conversations with. There can be many reasons for this, from simply we just don’t really enjoy those people, or that those conversations always end up negatively, or that we know that we have disagreements that we don’t want to resurface.

But also, be aware if there are people that you’re not having conversations with because you are assuming that it’s not necessary. “They know where to find me, they are capable and will tell me if they need me.” etc. That may be true but my suggestion is to test your own assumption on this. You might be surprised.

Whatever the reason is for avoidance, it should be a big red flag waving in front of you telling you something needs sorting out.

Because having or not having conversations and with whom is part of your behaviour pattern – see my previous post and it sends strong implicit signals about what you are interested in/ focused on.

How often are you having quality conversations?

The next thing to consider when you look at the people that you are responsible for is to evaluate the frequency with which you have powerful conversations with them.

Look at the list of the people on your team and think through how often do you actually sit down with them and have a powerful conversation?

Are you happy with this frequency? What do you think would happen if you increased the frequency for all or some of them?

If you think back to the first post in this series on Action, Behaviours and Conversations, we looked at the concept of powerful and powerless. That applies here as well. Powerless leaders have weak wichy washy conversations – powerful leaders have strong engaging conversations.

Generally, there is a huge need for more real conversations out there, not less. Quality conversations are the glue of our relationships, they are highly motivating – and they generate trust.

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This is the eighth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

Behaviour

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Behaviour

Last week, we looked at the first of three essential tools that are at your disposal as a first time manager. We looked at how action and non action ends up defining you as either powerful (in the positive constructive sense) or powerless.

Now it’s time to look at the next key instrument – your behaviour.

When I work with young managers who are in their first leadership position, I always give them a brief talk about being ‘on stage’.

And goes something like this:

The moment you become a leader of any kind, you are on stage 24/7 – what I mean by that is that everything you say and do is registered, compared and interpreted by your followers.

The way you get out of your car on the car park in the morning, how you walk across the parking lot, what you say as you come in through the door, who you talk to first and who you don’t talk to … on and on it goes throughout the day.

It’s as if you have a GoPro camera mounted on a rod on your back and it is registering your every move.

Each person on your team makes their own video – each from their perspective and as they are not ‘inside you head’ at any given moment, they don’t have enough information to understand what is going on – so they fill in the blanks as best they can.

They interpret what they observe and from that they make their own assumptions and with that a story.

As you got out of your car, you had a deep frown on you brow (you were thinking about your 5 year old and her bad cough in the night) but your followers may say to themselves: “Oh she is still pissed off about that incident yesterday” – even though the last thing you said as you left the day before was: “ Ok – let’s forget about this and move on”.

It is not what you say that counts, but your behaviour, and as each of your followers has only part of the story, they compare notes at the water cooler, over lunch or whatever and see if they can make up a complete story between them. A story that helps them predict the future. Because essentially that is what they are trying to do.

Don’t believe me? Well just think of the ways you observe your own boss…

You are the role model.

If you have had the experience of bringing up children, I am sure you will recall a time when you overheard your 3 or 4 year old suddenly trot out a sentence to her favourite doll or best friend and you realised that it was a word perfect recording of something you had said to your child in another situation.

If you have, you have probably also had the two following reactions. First, you find it hilariously funny, then you have this chilling realisation that this is what you sound like to your 4 year old… and you are possibly less thrilled.

As a parent, you are the role model as you are the role model when you are the leader. What you do gets registered and copied.

So as a leader, you need to be aware that every little thing you do gets interpreted and that there is never a period where you can claim a time out. At any given moment 24/7, you are communicating and there is no “off” button.

The only way you diminish their need for interpretation and story making is to be very aware of your behaviour and very clear and transparent in your communication. (We will look at the verbal communication part next week) You will need to leave as little as possible to their interpretations and imagination.

So how do you do that?

It’s all about being clear and consistent.

Some leaders try the joke about don’t do as I do, just do as I say. It may be funny but it does not work.

It very simple: What you focus on is what is important in their eyes – what you are not focused on is judged to be of less importance.

And your behaviour, not your words, shows them what is really important.

So what are you paying attention too? Whom do you speak to? What questions are you asking? What do you follow up? What do you ignore?

It is all observed and registered.

I was once coaching a reception manger from a large hotel and she told me that she has trouble getting her team to understand that they must take their lunch break, in peace, and in the canteen – because it was important that they get the break and anyway it is not appropriate to snack at their desks.

But no matter what, she would keep catching them taking their plate into their desk and having it next to their computer. So she wanted me to help her work out what sort of punishment would work to make them stop. Instead, I asked her: “So where do you have your lunch?” she said :“Well you see, I don’t really have lunch – I just bring some fruits, nuts or a carrot and have them during the day – you see, I am too busy most days…”

No matter what she says, it will always be overruled by her own behaviour. And nothing will change until the day she changes her behaviour.

So what are you paying attention to?

Whom do you speak to?

What questions are you asking?

What do you follow up? What do you ignore?

How do you come in to work in the morning?

Whatever is important to you is important to them – and from their perspective, if you, their busy boss, pay attention to something, it must be because it is important – that is the cue that they take from you.

Oh and never forget as Steven Covey said: You can’t talk your way out of something you behave yourself into – you have to behave yourself out of it.

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This is the seventh article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out