How to Become a Great Manager

You. Hello and welcome to this webinar. My name is Brian Walsh and our the webinar today is how to transform yourself, your career and your team. I'm excited you're here. I'm excited to be sharing this material with you. What you're going to learn today is going to help you no matter where you're at in your career. If you're a manager, if you're considering a move into management or you oversee managers, there's something in here for you. So let's dive in. To become a great manager, you're going to need progress and persistence. Progress, because managers never know all they need to know. It is a position where you're in a constant state of learning and growing, which is wonderful, but managers have to feel like they're moving forward. And persistence because managers have the potential to make significant impacts and have big rewards. But it doesn't come quickly. It takes patience and it takes weathering lots of trials. So by the end of this training, here's what you're going to learn. How to make a customized development plan so you can take action and achieve your career goals and make progress. Then you're going to learn how to stay motivated day in, day out, no matter what happens at work. That's persistence. And then as a bonus, we're going to talk about how you can use these same ideas to improve recruitment, increase retention and build high performing teams. There's no sales pitch to this, but if you stayed until the end, I'm going to give you a link so you can sign up for my weekly email. It's called Simple Sundays. And also get the slide deck of the slides we're going to be going through today. So why this webinar and why do the work that I do? Well, I see a problem. Management is about helping other people and helping the organization succeed. It should be a noble profession, but instead I see it being maligned and under supported. Our managers are overwhelmed. Research shows they have more work than than they can do. They're responsible for leading a team, delivering on company initiatives, managing people, navigating change, and often doing all this while still carrying individual task responsibilities. In fact, if you ask a manager what are your top priorities, they're going to list all those things and probably more. And then you say well, which one's most important? And they say, well, all of them. No wonder they don't feel successful. These are ambitious people, yet they don't know how they can advance in their career. Managers are under supported many times. They're not given Training, or if they are, it's generic and superficial, so they don't get a chance to apply it and learn it. Sometimes it makes matters worse when they get this training because later on they make a mistake and everybody looks at them and says, you should have known better. You got training. But managers are learning a whole new set of skills on the job in real time, in a very public forum. It's a lot of pressure, and they don't have a rich network or peer support group. When they move from an individual contributor role, they lose a lot of those peers. Many times their mentors are unavailable or have moved on. Some organizations, the managers are in a bit of competition with each other, and regardless, those relationships take time, which we've already identified managers are in short supply of. As a result, managers don't feel successful, they feel unfulfilled, and they don't love their jobs. Managers have the biggest impact on how people feel at work, so it's no surprise if they don't love their job. We're struggling in organizations with low engagement, high turnover, and low productivity, and all those things just make the manager's job worse. According to Harvard Business review, over 53% of managers feel burned out. Right now, it's estimated one of every two employees is watching or actively looking for another job. And we know turnover is costly. So when that employee leaves, depending on what their position is, it's going to be 40 to 80% of their salary to replace them. But the cost to replace a manager is 200%. That alone should justify some proactive investment. But even if managers aren't leaving, it doesn't mean they're fully engaged in the harness. In fact, only 35% of managers are engaged, which has its own set of costs. I've hired hundreds of people, and I can tell you candidates respond to the hiring manager. Great managers attract great candidates, and unengaged managers are ineffective recruiters. But what about innovation? Managers are the ones that know at a ground level what's working and what's not. And when they're not engaged, they're not offering that information up. They're keeping it to themselves. And businesses are losing out on opportunities to improve operations and their processes. When a company wants to grow or navigate change, managers are at the center of those processes. But when a manager is disengaged, they're unlikely to go the extra mile at a time when their company needs them the most. When work isn't rewarded and fulfilling, it has all the social implications as well, which we're not even talking about loneliness, decreased mental health, stress, burnout, and physical health. So if we could fix work, I think we could fix a lot of things. And managers are the key. That's why I focus my work there. And I've been there. I know what it's like to be the person who's unfulfilled, unhappy, overwhelmed. It affected my relationships, it affected my career, it impacted my marriage and my family. Sunday afternoon, unfailingly, I would start getting in a bad mood. I'd just get grumpy. No one wanted to be around me and I knew something needed to change. I decided I'd make one one change. I decided I'm going to cook a family meal on Sunday evenings. Now when I made that decision, it was purely a selfish decision. I I like nice meals. I liked sitting down as a family. So I said we're going to have a family meal and on Sundays I'd have that meal to look forward to. And you know what? My mood started changing. I stopped being in such a bad mood on Sundays. And ironically, Monday mornings got better too. Even though nothing changed at work, just personally, I started getting more creative. I started writing. And long story short, ultimately that one decision led to a complete change in what I'm doing today. So one step, one small action can change everything. That's why I'm excited to share this webinar with you. Today you have the opportunity to make one small decision that can change your trajectory. Now I've built a complete methodology based on this premise that making small changes consistently over time can lead to big impacts. I call it the Shift Focus Management Methodology. And we're not going to go through all this today. Too much to cover in one session like this. We'll cover a few topics, but I just want to give you the overview so you have a little context. So the methodology is about leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization. And it starts with manager motivation, starts with the individual and cultivating that intrinsic motivation versus relying solely on external motivation. Then we move to Management Mastery, which is about creating and executing a self directed plan for success as a manager. Then we talk about leading your team. And collaborative acceleration is how to create a culture of continuous improvement. So the manager is driving improvement and change in their department. If you have somebody that's moving, moving forward in their own career, constantly making improvements in the organization, you're going to have growth. And so we talk about gearing for growth and using a modular management method to recruit, retain and support growing teams. Then we talk about how to lead the organization in driving innovation and supporting innovation at all levels. And that's what aspirational experimentation is about. And then salient systems is really codifying your leadership and expanding your impact through systems. We underpin all that with strategic purpose, which is clarifying your purpose and vision as you progress in each one of these levels. So we're going to dive into a couple of these areas and give you some tools today that you can use to level up. My question for you right now is, what do you want in your career? What's the first thing you'd say? Take a. Take a guess. Some people are going to say they want a raise or they want a promotion. Maybe you want more freedom and autonomy. Some people just want to be good at what they're doing. So whatever it is for you, whatever you want, advancement, autonomy, mastery, it's going to require you to make progress in your existing role. And it is critical that we feel like we're making progress. It's one of the things, though, that can be very elusive, especially for managers. If you've ever felt stagnant or stuck, stuck, you know how it feels. It's not good. It saps your motivation. It makes you question what you're doing. Think back earlier in your career, and often. When we started our career, we had really clear milestones, and we would hit those regularly, maybe even really quickly. And so we would feel good about our progress. It was rewarding, it was motivating. So you've probably experienced both sides of being stuck and stagnant and also when you were driving forward and making progress. So if progress is important, how do we achieve it? I want to share a quick story about when I was a boy flying up the highway with my dad. We have a. We had a small plane and I'm. I live in Alaska. We were flying up the highway from the States, and we're up over the Canadian Rockies. And my dad decides he's going to take a nap. He turns over control of the plane to me. Now, that wasn't unusual. I. I knew how to fly the plane, like the basics. But he gave me a few pointers on navigation, like where we were in the map, and some controls to watch. But he also made some assumptions, like I'd keep heading the plane north. And he showed me where we were on the map, but he didn't really give me the technique that allows you to plot your progress versus your time. So he went and took a nap for about 20 or 30 minutes, woke up, and when he came to, I showed him what I thought where we were. And he looked around and he said, we're completely going the wrong direction. I had not, I'd gotten us lost. I had not made progress. So I was capable. But there were things that were assumed, things that, you know, I didn't know the right technique and so I got lost. And this highlights an important principle that we can apply to career development. When you make the implied explicit and the hidden visible, the elusive becomes achievable. When you make the implied explicit and the hidden visible, the elusive becomes achievable. So we're going to use that principle today to create a development plan that you can use in your career to do just that, make progress. So we're going to deconstruct your, your current role into four areas for development, four domains and I call these risers. So the, the acronym stands for Relationships and influence, Skills and experience, Results and systems. Risers. Now in diverse jobs or complex jobs like management, we don't move ahead in our career in this linear fashion. Progress is much more circular. We, we kind of spiral around these domains, build a relationship, we learn a skill that helps improve our results. Now we can see that we need a few other skills or we need to build a stronger relationship with somebody else. We need to learn a new system and on we go. I call it spiral development. And as we spiral around these, we move up. So RISERS is an acronym, but it also helps us to rise and so it might help you remember the acronym. Now when I'm working with clients, we actually lay this all out in a proprietary tool I call the spiral development matrix. It becomes like a map for the employee and they can use that then to create their own self directed development plan. But today you don't need a full map. You only need to identify the risers for where you are at today. So I want you to consider yourself like an explorer. Like you're Lewis and Clark sitting on a plane and you're looking out and you can see a valley ahead of you and you can see a river and a forest and a swamp and you can see a hill a little bit beyond that. And you know if once you get to the next hill, you'll be able to see further, but you can plot out your path through that valley. Today, This is what it will look like. And this is a template. You don't need a formal template. You can sketch this out on a piece of paper. You can use digital notes just with some headings and bullet points. If you've got some post it notes, you can use that but what we're going to do is for each of these four domains, you're going to identify one to three elements that you need to master as part of your current role. So let's start with relationships and influence. What relationships do you need to be successful in your role? Right now write down one or two. First ones that come to mind for your stage of the career. Might be if you're early in your career, maybe it's your boss and your employees. If you're mid stage, you might say, well, I need some peer rel. More peer relationships. And if you're looking to get a promotion, maybe you need to develop a relationship with somebody that's in the position you're trying to get to. Sometimes we have a relationship with somebody and it's we need to improve the quality of that relationship. So maybe there's a relationship that you need to give more attention to or other relationships you want to build or foster. We say relationships and influence because sometimes it's not necessarily a relationship but it's some influence that you need to have. Like maybe there's a vendor where you want to get better service from or a professor you're looking to get students referred to from. So it can be can also be situational. So that's relationships and influence. One to three items is all you need there for all these. Second domain is skills and experience. So what are some key skills you need to develop at this stage in your role? You can start with just some generic ones like maybe it's communication or project management or emotional intelligence. If you can be more specific, that's great. Like it might be how to give direct feedback to employees that you manage when they need to improve their performance. So what skills one to three do you want to learn that could help you in your role? Sometimes it's not a skill but an experience we need to have. For instance, you might need the experience of taking a client all through the entire life cycle or the experience of hiring somebody or mentoring someone. And that's really what's necessary for you to progress in your role. So it could be a direct skill or it could be an experience you need to seek out and gain. One to three. Next is results. What results are you responsible for at this stage in your career? Ideally you identify the areas areas and the metrics that you're using. Now this is a great area to have a follow up discussion with your boss right out in three areas of responsibility, the measurements of success and then show that to your boss and see if they agree get their Input. But for today, right, One, two or three things that you know, these are the results I'm responsible for. Last one is systems. Systems can be technical systems, like administrative, administering your HR system. It can also be people and process systems, like a customer service process. Or it could be a personal system, like a personal productivity system. Those are the risers, those are the four domains. And what you just did is started creating your own matrix. That's the map. Now what you're going to do is create your development plan for each one of those domains. You're going to select one element and only one, and you're going to create a goal related to that element. Now for that goal, you can use the Smart framework, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound, or you can write a goal. If there's a better way. You enjoy writing goals, that works for you, that's, that's fine. But you're only going to write one goal per domain. And it's okay to make that goal small and tangible because once you complete it, you'll set another. So pick your element, write your goal, and then what is one thing? Ask yourself what is one thing you can do today, tomorrow, this week to make progress on that goal? One action you can take. And what's going to happen is you're going to continue iterating and advancing. And as you advance, as you complete a goal and set another one, you're going to be able to see further and you're going to realize there's additional elements you can add to these domains and you're going to keep moving forward and you're going to be able to look back and see how far you've come and notice that you are progressing. You get that positive feedback loop. That's how you make progress. Now it's not like this solves everything. There are still going to be a lot of setbacks, a lot of trials. There's going to be days when you wonder, is this worth it? Think company is going to do things that make you mad, that make you question yourself, or make you question them. And you're going to, you're going to ask yourself, why should I keep doing this? Being a manager, doing anything that is important is tough. And to be great at something, it takes persistence because especially in management, you don't see the impact right away, but it's there. And you will get validation, but only if you stick with it. Now all those stats that I mentioned at the beginning, all those things that, and the costs, it's not like companies aren't concerned. It's not like companies don't know there's a problem. They. They do. And so there's lots of things that other people try to do to improve your job satisfaction. They offer a lot of external rewards. Raises, promotions, time off. They do that because they know you're important and they want you to be happy. And there's nothing wrong with that. Those are good. But there's a risk. The risk is we become enslaved to the external rewards, like the term golden handcuffs. And if those become the only thing that can motivate us, then when they fail motivating us, we flounder. We end up just going through the motions, unhappy and unfulfilled. So when we, when I coach managers, part of what we do is we spend a little time reflecting. And that's a critical part of growing, because personal reflections promote purposeful actions. Personal reflections promote purposeful actions. See, like you, I want my life to be meaningful and purposeful. I don't want to just go through the motions. I don't want to just do what other people think I should do or think is right for me. Tell you a quick story about a vacation I took years ago. When my kids were small, my wife and I got this really good airfare deal and went over to Amsterdam for a week. And we landed and hit the ground running. We started doing museums and tours and, you know, visiting the sites of Amsterdam. And I had a. Several days of packed agendas. And we're in the middle of Amsterdam Central Station, decide to get a cup of coffee, and I go up and order the coffee. I order a decaf coffee, and the barista says, we have to do a pore over for that. It'll be about four minutes. I said, that's okay. Don't worry about it. I'll stick a regular, regular coffee. And she said, you don't have four minutes. And I looked at my wife and I kind of chuckled, like on vacation. Of course I have four minutes. So Barista went off to make the coffee, and I turned to my wife and I said, isn't it ironic that here we are, we're on vacation and no kids all the time, and we're, we're feeling stressed and driven by an agenda and, and too busy to just take a few minutes. She said, yeah, I, you know, I, I was thinking the same thing. And, you know, I, I'm not that worried about whether we hit all the sites or see all the museums. And I said, yeah, me either. I said, what would be, what would be a great vacation? For you, like, how do you want to remember this when it's done? And she said, I, I just want to spend some time, you and I together, hanging out, enjoying Amsterdam, relaxing a little bit and really taking in what, what the culture here is like and spending time together. I said, yeah, that, that sounds great to me. Why don't we change our plan? And each day we'll just go and go out to lunch and we'll plan to have a long lunch on a street in Amsterdam, one of the things we enjoyed. And we'll do the rest around, you know, we'll fill in our day with whatever we, we feel like doing, whatever we can do on that time. And she said, yeah, that, that sounds good to me. Long lunch. And barista came four minutes later, handed me the coffee and we went on our day. And to this day, that's what we remember about that trip. Sitting out on Amsterdam streets, having a long lunch, enjoying the, the day. Because personal reflections promote purposeful actions. No one could have done that for us. And it didn't take long. In fact, it took four minutes. So do you have four minutes? I'm going to give you a framework you can use, a simple way so you can shift your focus from an external motivation, which is what should I do? What, what do people want from me? What what's expected to an internal one, which is, this is who I am, this is what I want. And it's only going to take you four minutes. I call it the AAA Motivated mindset. AAA Affirmation, Aspiration, Action. I want you to start by just taking a moment to reflect right now, in the moment, where are you at? How, how are you feeling about things? What has happened today or this week that's been on your mind? Maybe it's a current situation or recent experience. Could be positive, could be negative. It was a decision that you made. I want you to identify one insight or lesson from that experience doesn't need to be revolutionary or profound, just one thing that you'll take away, one insight that you have and you're going to reflect and then take that insight and you're going to transform it into a, a positive present tense statement. That's an affirmation, something that reflects a quality you want to reinforce when you reflect. Like, what did that, what, what did that situation or what you reflected on reveal about your abilities or your strength or something that's core to you. Then I just want you to state it in a, in a format, something like this. I mean, there's a lot of ways you can create an affirmation. But an easy format is just I am and that positive quality who and a positive outcome. So I'm an easygoing person who enjoys spending time with people. I am a confident public speaker who delivers value. That's your affirmation. Now your aspiration is future oriented. It's a hope or a desire. So think about what's a vision for the day or the week or maybe the situation. Something that could be personally motivating to you and you're going to state it as if it has happened. So this format usually looks like I am or I have helped or I have and then that future state desire but expressed as if it has happened. So in the middle of that vacation with my wife I would have said I have enjoyed a memorial memorable and refreshing vacation with my wife. Affirmation, aspiration. Now your action is what are you going to do today or this week? To move forward on that again doesn't have to be profound. It could be I'm going to read a an HBR article. I'm going to watch a TED Talk. I'm going to leave today by 5pm and leave my laptop at work. I'm going to turn off notifications, my phone, whatever. Make it specific to your situation and something that's going to make your life just a little bit better and decide how you're going to hold yourself accountable. Write it down, put it in a calendar four minutes. You can use this to start your day. You can use it when things are getting tough or you just need to to reenter yourself and get a motivated mindset on something that's to you because when you're intrinsically motivated it gives you confidence, gives you clarity to keep moving forward. Now. So that's your AAA motivated mindset. Now want to talk a little bit about how you can use these principles, things like the development plan, intrinsic motivation and progress to transform your recruiting practice and improve retention as you build your team. In any position we know there's there's a learning curve. You got to figure out what's needed to do the job and then you get good at it and then you want to do something more. I call this the three P's of progression. So the three P's are practice, perform and pioneer. Practice is just understanding what do I need to do to do this job, what do I need to learn to understand what's required of this role. The perform stage is getting good at your role and then pioneer stage is doing something special, making your mark. So most of our time in Our in our jobs and our roles is in the perform stage. And most job descriptions speak to the perform stage. But when we're hiring, you don't want to hire someone who can just jump into the perform stage. You want to hire somebody that has longevity. So not somebody's going to come in, master the job and then get bored and move on quickly. And that's not what people really want. They want to, they want to grow, they want to become better. And so when they apply for a job or they're looking at a promotion, they want that opportunity to know they're going to become something more than where they're at today. So, so we're hiring into the practice stage, but people also want to know that they're going to be successful. Nobody wants to come into a job thinking they're going to be set up for failure. So the next time that you have a position you're going to fill, you can use this, the risers, to create a map for the practice stage. For that position. Map out the four domains, relationships and influence, skills and experience, results and systems that somebody's going to need to learn about once they get hired. And that becomes your onboarding process. That is how you're going to support them through the practice stage. Once you map that out, once you become clear on what you're going to provide on the job, you're then going to be able to better understand what are the essential elements a candidate must have versus what they're going to get when they get the job. And you can now write your job ads to those qualities and identify things that are universal across all your employees, that make employees successful in your environment, it's going to allow you to have a wider, more diverse candidate pool. It's going to allow you to hire a better candidate. Now when you get that better candidate, somebody that you are ready to start moving into the job offer process with and actually start recruiting them, this becomes the process for how they become successful. And you can show them that you can explain the self directed aspect of it so that they have autonomy over their career direction, but they also know they're going to have support. You set the expectation right away that they have responsibility for their career development. And I'm telling you that's what high performers want. They want opportunity and the chance to be successful. And if they've got two offers, all things being equal, they're going to accept yours because of you providing this map for them. Now on the other end, we can use this model to improve retention with experienced staff Like I said, most time is spent at the perform stage. And what can happen is we all get complacent. See, when somebody has mastered the perform stage, they're good at their role, they're handling things well, they've got a good handle on work, life balance, they're navigating issues as they arise crises, they smooth out the crises. Everyone's happy, company is happy, boss is happy. If, if we're in that position, we're happy, we're doing a good job, everybody's happy until we're not. Something happens, maybe we start getting bored. We don't want to say anything because everybody seems happy, but we start looking around at other opportunities or we start feeling like maybe we're taken for granted. And once you start looking, maybe you do an interview, all of a sudden you have a job offer, they're gone. When you lose someone that's mastered the perform stage, it is the biggest blow to the company. You're losing institutional knowledge, you're losing all the relationships in the fabric of social connections that they've built. You're losing the capacity which is significant. And the cost of replacement is way on the upper end of those scales that I showed you. Plus you're going to introduce a lot of risk when you bring somebody in new in at that position. So I've identified the pioneer stage so that you can help retain those people through that time. So where you do something special, you make your mark. Now for some that might be the path to promotion. The pioneer stage is what gets them ready for the next role and helps them decide where they want to go. For others it might be just the chance to contribute at a higher level or make an impact, maybe do a special project, but it's a different conversation. It's going to be more personalized because you're having career conversations about what they want and understanding what is important to them. But the tool looks the same. What you're going to do is co develop a map of the pioneer stage for them. What risers do they need to progress in their role. Now over time this will become more standardized. If you do this a lot, but if you're just starting out, you can do the same, same process, map out what is needed and help help them come up with those elements as well. And then use the same self directed approach, Allow them to set goals and you support them along the way. Now you're having conversations with them about what's next. Nobody's getting complacent just because things are going smooth and you're Being specific about the elements they need for them to achieve their goals. They're not hidden, they're visible, they're not implied, they're explicit. And progress isn't elusive, it's achievable. So you provide a map. Let the employee pick their route, you support them. And I guarantee that dynamic will improve engagement and it will improve retention with your top performers. All right, so we've covered how to make a personal development plan, something that you can take action on and make progress. We've introduced the AAA framework to maintain a motivated mindset. No matter what happens, you can use that so you can persevere through the tough times. And we've talked about how to use these ideas to improve recruitment, increase retention, which is foundation to building high performing teams. Now, I shared at the beginning that small changes done consistently over time yield big results. So today, just pick one thing, go back to that development plan you sketched out. Pick one thing and get started. Because when you take action and you take ownership and you start moving forward, it's energizing. It'll energize you, but people will notice it too. They're going to want to support you. They're going to want to be part of your success. I have spent hundreds of hours coaching clients and this is what we talk about. What do you want and how are you going to get there? I recently, just last month, did a seminar with a group of 12 managers on this exact material. And they unlocked insights about themselves and their ambitions. It opened up ideas about their working relationships and how they could better support their employees. And right in the seminar, they were already sharing ideas about how they could improve the organization. When you're working on things that are important to you, you get more confident, you get more determined, you overcome setbacks, you stay empowered and positive. The world needs more great managers. I'm trying to facilitate that. I work with managers because I know they have a ripple effect. We've experienced and seen what bad managers do, but we also know the benefits of a great manager. That impact they have is felt by the employees, by the company, but also beyond the work environment. Managers have a ripple effect that ripples out to friends, to family and the community. It's these things that I talk about. They've worked in my own life and I know how I feel when I'm moving forward on things that are important to me and I'm making progress. And I want the same for you. To tell you a little bit about me. I'm a certified executive coach. I help organizations develop managers and build best in class management cultures. I came from a background in IT consulting. I spent 25 years at a professional services firm, helped build that from 25 employees to over 200. I started out as a developer. I've done every role in the project, leading projects, leading being a technical lead, but also designed and implemented a recruiting program, led that for 20 years, led HR, led branch offices, served on the board of Directors of lead boards. I bring all of that into my work today, helping managers be great. And so if you have if you have questions, you can send me an email here. If if you're on LinkedIn, let's connect there and follow along on the journey. And if you want to talk about working together, you can go to my website and there's a link to book a call. As promised, I'm going to make a copy of these slides available to you. You simply sign up for my Simple Sunday's email at this link here and I'll send you a PDF copy of the slides. The email is a weekly email. I don't send out spam. You can unsubscribe anytime, but it's content and how you can be a great manager and keep moving your career forward. Thank you so much for attending and I look forward to celebrating your success.