“What we really need around here is some accountability.”
Have you ever heard these words? Maybe you’ve spoken them yourself.
If so, you were probably really, really right! But the challenge is that no one wants to be singled out as the one responsible for dropping the ball.
Who’s job is accountability anyways?
I had two separate experiences with leading change recently that demonstrate one critical aspect that is often the difference between success and failure. Let me share the two scenarios – see if you can guess what it is. Of course, I’ll share it as well.
Scenario #1: Recently I was with an executive team delivering one of our most popular Leadership-in-a-Box programs Leading Change. At the end of each “LB” program, we have the participants complete a worksheet applying the concepts they just learned and then share it with a peer to get feedback.
Something happened at work that set off your alarm bells. Maybe you’re a nurse and the physician ordered a drug you believe may trigger an allergic reaction from the patient. Maybe your employee showed up late for the third time this month – and this time it caused you to miss an important deadline. Or maybe another department set up a new process that inadvertently doubled the reporting requirements from your team – which you’re not staffed to accommodate.
What happened wasn’t your decision – otherwise you’d just fix it. You’re not the person in charge. Someone ought to say something, right? And if so, that someone is probably you.
I’m told that one quote preachers try to live by is, “If it’s foggy in the pulpit, it’s cloudy in the pew.” In other words, as the leader and communicator, if you’re unclear about any part of your message, it’s a sure bet everyone else is as well.
You don’t have to be a preacher to risk setting unclear expectations. If you’re responsible for performance outcomes of any kind, unclear expectations could be your biggest kryptonite. In fact, if the expectations you set are unclear, you force members of your team to work as much as three times as hard.
Have you ever received the good fortune of being promoted to the new leader of your team, only to find that life got complicated and edgy the moment you started? All of a sudden, your peers knew you as “boss” and not just their buddy. There’s a vast difference between the two.
What did you do in that situation? What should you do? Many leaders of former peers struggle at first. Some even go so far as to request a demotion in order to return to the way things were. There has to be a better way.
If you find yourself leading former peers, here are some steps you can take.
One of the most distasteful activities leaders face is giving negative feedback. The reason? When done well, it can still ruffle feathers. When done poorly, it’s a disaster. No one likes engaging in activities that often aren’t appreciated.
Giving great feedback isn’t easy. It’s tricky, it’s not much fun and to top it off, none of us were born knowing how to give great feedback. We have to learn how over time – often the hard way.
If you’ve struggled with giving feedback before, here are some tricks to get you pointed in the right direction quickly.
There’s incredible power in language. Words don’t merely convey ideas, they can change the course of history.
The words you use as a leader matter too. Here are some simple but powerful phrases that set great leaders apart from the rest.
Is complexity leaving your organization behind?
That’s a question we considered at a workshop I attended recently. Author Mark Miller and a team of facilitators walked a large group through the content of his new book Chess Not Checkers. The boardgame imagery? It’s symbolic for what happens as organizations grow. In the early stages of most small organizations or teams, the rules are simplistic and team members may play interchangeable roles much like the game pieces in a checkers game. But as growth occurs, complexity kicks in. Roles require specialists to address additional complications. The playing field starts to resemble a game of chess, rather than checkers. If we’re not careful, we’ll fall behind.
“I’ve got a guy.”
That was one of the key messages of a sales training event I visited recently. The new sales consultants were supposed to realize they didn’t need to know everything about the services they were providing – they had plenty of other “experts” to support various parts of the deal. It’s a lot easier to sell when you don’t have to know everything yourself.
Which leads me to ask the question: whose “guy” (or gal) are you? And do they know it?
Here’s why it matters:
If you’ve been responsible for delivering business results for any length of time, you’ve probably hit a wall once or twice with people. Someone’s feelings got hurt, another manager is difficult to work with, company politics create unseen landmines, some colleagues disagrees with you and a couple may be out to get you. As often as not, we may be the problem. Additionally, we humans are the ones causing the accidents, forgetting key dates or deliverables, creating ambiguity, making mistakes and communicating poorly. Getting results are tough enough as it is, before we introduce people into the mix!
Automation has added enormous business efficiency over the years and will continue. But it’s important to keep in mind that whatever business we’re in, we’re ultimately in the people business. Since we can’t eliminate the human element (besides, would we really want to?), we’ll have to figure out how to capitalize on it.
This post is excerpted from Nathan’s book Ignite Your Leadership Expertise.
What if I told you you don’t need to have a solution for every single problem that comes your way in order to be a competent and mature leader? That’s exactly what I’m about to propose. Hopefully it’s as refreshing to you as it is to me. And the best part about it is that it can dramatically improve your leadership influence as well. What’s the alternative to responding with advice? Asking great questions.
Feedback is everywhere. We get feedback from our bosses in our performance reviews. We ask our customers for their feedback on our service. We collect engagement feedback from our employees. We send a work project around the team for peer feedback before submitting our deliverables.
In all of these cases, the difference between good feedback and poor feedback can easily be the difference between success and failure. The implications can affect our organization’s market share, our revenues, our project quality or our ability to be promoted.
Great feedback is crucial. But it’s not always easy to come by. So how do we get the feedback we need – either individually or corporately? Let’s take a closer look at seven feedback tips.
