Let’s face it. It’s tough to know exactly what to say these days.
Nothing seems to be that certain.
As a Middle Manager trying to lead your team, one day you’re directed to go right and when that doesn’t work, you’re directed to go left.
And when your leadership changes directions, yet again…
Filling in the blanks on why things are changing yet again can be frustrating, stressful, and sometimes maddening. Yet, a leader’s role is to ask more of your team, build influence with them and your peers, manage up, and lead change.
And how do you do that? COMMUNICATION!
Reality is created in conversation with others.
And if you’re like me when I was a freshly minted Middle Manager, I thought reality was what I created in my own mind. I was wrong. In fact, when I slip up and do it today, I am still wrong.
If you’d like to avoid that learning curve and do things differently, consider this:
1. Manage Up: You can’t create rapport and demonstrate your value by just sharing a laundry list of what you accomplished last week during your 1:1 meetings. Instead, create a dialog that engages your supervisor.
2. Build Influence with Your Team: Your title may give you authority, but it doesn’t give you influence. Achieving the engagement and responsiveness of your team requires you to build connections and conversations to build trust and understand their point of view.
3. Being a More Effective Communicator: The quality of your leadership is always judged by the quality of your communications: your written and verbal communication skills, showing your authenticity and vulnerability, knowing how to ask questions, and creating trust.
4. Improving Team Accountability: It’s safe to say that the pressure is on right now – for everyone. To get accountability from your team, you need to be viewed as a “good boss” versus a “cool boss”. How do you motivate your team, demand more credibility, and increase their performance? Yep, you guessed it: COMMUNICATIONS!
5. Leading Change: We all need to know how to lead a change initiative today. It takes much more than merely announcing the change and kicking off the project. You really have to lean in and learn how it impacts your team, and how they feel about it, and COMMUNICATE to help them embrace and integrate the change.
If you have 90 minutes free in the last two weeks of September, I can help boost your communication skills. Check out the Mid-year Manager Momentum Boost!
SIGN UP NOW! Here’s a link to the Mid-year Manager Momentum Boost: https://www.sayredarling.com/program
QUESTIONS? Here's a link to my calendar for a 15-minute consultation: https://calendly.com/sayre-1darling/30min
Comentarios