Ever wonder what keeps managers up at night? (Hint: It’s not too much coffee or binge-watching the latest hit series.) No, it's something far more persistent—and, dare I say, occasionally more terrifying. Let’s pull back the curtain on the true monsters under the managerial bed.
1. Attending Too Many Mediocre Meetings
Most of us work in highly interdependent workplaces where we all must rely on each other on complex projects with lots of moving pieces. With more and more people working interdependently, there are more and more meetings.
A well-run meeting can be good for:
At its best, email is great for:
• Communicating remotely information that everybody needs to know.
But so much of email is unnecessary, duplicative, and/or sloppy. The pernicious thing about all that email is that mixed in with all the bad email is important information, and we want to assume that, because we sent it, the recipient had read and understood it. Even worse than a message never sent is a message sent but never received but assuming it was. Ouch!
3. Touching Base, Checking In, and Shooting the Breeze
These are questions managers most commonly ask their direct reports, yet they tell you very little about what’s really going on. They are gestures, mostly. You might as well say, “Tell me you are fine.” “Tell me everything is going fine.” “Tell me everything is on track.” “Tell me there are no problems I should know about.”
The worst thing about managing by “touching base” is that it makes you feel like you are staying on top of things, but it takes a lot more than rhetorical questions to really stay on top.
The right questions are: “What did you do? How did you do it? What steps did you take? What step are you on right now? Questions like that can’t be asked and answered in a meaningful way if the conversation happens just in passing.
So what’s a manager to do?
What do the very best managers do? The managers whose employees consistently deliver the highest productivity and quality, with high retention of the high performer and high turnover among the low performers, with the best business outcomes and high engagement/morale and team spirit, whose direct reports are most likely to describe the manager as “one of the best manager I’ve ever had.”
What is the common denominator among those managers? An abiding commitment to the fundamentals—relentless high quality communication. Consistently engaging every direct report in an ongoing, structured, content-rich one-on-one meetings about the work that person does and the internal and external customers they serve. Things go much better when managers consistently make expectations clear and provide candid feedback for each individual every step of the way. Use team meeting only for what team meetings are good for—and make the most of them.
When managers build and maintain high-quality one-on-one dialogues with their direct reports, they almost always increase performance and engagement and achieve significant measurable improvements in business outcomes.
To your greater success and well-being,
Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT
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