It can feel like a trap. Someone asks you a direct question about confidential information. Maybe it’s a personnel matter. A sensitive business negotiation or a product launch. In all these scenarios, there are sound ethical reasons for the information to remain secure. If you tell the person what you know, you violate confidentiality. But if you lie to them, you violate their trust.

Confidentiality Conundrums

Are you tempted to share private information because it feels like a shortcut to building intimacy and connection? Ultimately, this doesn’t work because every time you violate confidentiality, you tell the person you’re talking to that they can’t trust you with critical information. Your word is only as good as the next person who you want to like you.

Another challenge of confidential information is that it creates uncertainty. That uncertainty can erode your team’s morale and productivity if you don’t address it. So how can you resolve these conflicts, maintain your team’s morale, and your leadership credibility?

What to Say to Address Confidential Information with Candor and Care

The best way to handle confidential information is with all the clarity you can bring to the conversation.

Be upfront about what you can and cannot talk about. Reaffirm your commitment to the other person or people who asked you about it and look for ways to support them or help them with what they need. Make the connection that your discretion now means they can count on you in the future.

Here are some specific phrases you can use to build trust with a combination of appropriate discretion and honesty.

1) “I protect sensitive information. You can count on me to…”

The best time to address confidential information is before you have any. Tell your team exactly what to expect and why you will handle those matters that way. For example, you might say something like:

“There will be times when you or someone else in the company has a personal or performance issue that is confidential. I will not discuss those situations with the team or anyone else. Your privacy is important and you can count on me to respect it.”

2) “I understand this can feel frustrating (or that you’re curious)…”

We’ve had team members get upset with us when we wouldn’t discuss a colleague’s performance issue or sudden absence from the team. The uncertainty created by their absence was unnerving and people naturally looked for answers. You can address this concern and curiosity directly. Again, this is best to do before the situation arises. For example:

“I understand it can feel frustrating when someone isn’t here and it’s natural to want more information. And, in those moments, I will continue to respect your privacy. You can count on me to do that.”

3) “I’m sorry, but I’m not able to talk about that.”

There will be times when you have to answer a question directly. A statement like this combines caring and candor. You honor your commitment to not discuss the confidential information while also maintaining your integrity with the person who asked.

4) “You can trust that if you’re ever in a similar situation, I won’t talk about it then, either.”

When someone continues to ask you to disclose confidential information, this phrase can help them understand why you will not discuss the issue. It builds trust, even if they feel frustrated at the moment.

5) “Here’s what I can tell you…”

In the absence of information, people often fill in the blanks with all sorts of stories and error-filled conclusions. The antidote to uncertainty is clarity. Be clear about everything you can discuss. For example:

“I can’t discuss that, but I can tell you that if there were ever an issue with your performance, you would hear it directly from me right away. You don’t have to worry about surprises.”

6) “Let’s schedule time to talk about this on [date].”

If the information might become public at a later date, you could say, “That’s something I can’t talk about right now, but let’s come back to it next Friday and I’ll keep you updated with everything I can.”

7) “How else can I help you? Are there other questions I can answer for you?”

Build trust and maintain your connection to team members by continuing to give them all the support they need, apart from the confidential information. This makes it clear you’re not hiding or shirking. You are practicing integrity.

8) “There’s nothing else I can say about this. We need to move on.”

There will be times you face a persistent person who doesn’t hear the more tactful no and continues to press for information. After reinforcing your commitment to protect sensitive information, you may need to be assertive and close the conversation.

Your Turn

With each of these strategies, remain professional, courteous, and firm. The goal is to clarify that while you cannot discuss the confidential information, you are still approachable and want to engage in other productive conversations. This approach builds trust and respect because your team and colleagues know they can count on you to honor your commitment.

We’d love to hear from you. What’s one of your favorite ways to maintain your integrity while building trust when someone asks you about confidential information?

You might also like:

• Unleash Your Inner Softie: How to Get Better at Being Vulnerable and Build Trust
• How Do I Build Trust With My Team (Video)
• How To Change Your Mind and Not Lose Their Trust and Support

The post Confidential Information – What to Say When You Can’t Say Anything appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Is your holiday season a time of celebration? Of bustling end-of-year stress to meet business goals? A time of nostalgia and reflecting on what you appreciate most? Of remembering the traditions, stories, and people you have come before you? A time to connect with friends and family? Or, as it is for some, perhaps a time of feeling low and lost? The holidays are all these and more—and within these varied experiences, the holidays are also a guide to navigating change.

7 Lessons from the Holidays to Help with Navigating Change

1. Harness the Power of Tradition

Lighting candles, sharing meals, giving gifts, hanging stockings, spinning dreidels, fireworks, lanterns, prayers, markets, pageants, poppers, deep cleaning, ritual bathing, putting out shoes, and prayer. These are just a few ways people use rituals and traditions during the holidays.

Tradition and ritual play a powerful role in human experience. These moments call us back to our values and what matters most. When you’re navigating change, traditions can help your team maintain their connection with one another and their values.

These don’t have to be big or expensive. My (David’s) team would celebrate the start of a new year with a small gift of a nice pen that was a symbol of what we would create together. People would cherish those pens, not for the resale value, but for what they represented.

When I (Karin) was at Verizon, I would bring my team to my home for a fancy dinner that I cooked and then sometimes we would do something fun after (like go to a show). A few times I enough leadership books for everyone, wrapped them, and then each person could pick a new one or “steal” one from someone else and they explained why that book was interesting to them. Then people swapped them around throughout the year and we chatted about them in our meetings. More than a decade later people still talk about those times at my home.

What traditions can you establish with your team to build connection and reinforce what matters most?

2. Evolve Your Traditions

As important and meaningful as traditions can be, you can also get stuck and stressed out trying to maintain a practice that no longer makes sense. (There’s no point serving a traditional holiday roast to a family of vegetarians and pescatarians.)

An important part of navigating change is periodically looking at your routine practices and asking if they still serve their purpose.

(Our Own the U.G.L.Y. questions are a great way to engage your team in this conversation and learn what you can set aside as you move into the future.)

3. Welcome Everyone’s Ideas

Holidays are special (and sometimes stressful) because everyone has different ways to celebrate. When you’re a team leader, listening to everyone’s ideas makes your team stronger. Just as holidays worldwide celebrate a tapestry of traditions, diverse perspectives, experiences, and voices make your team more resilient as you navigate change.

Embrace the varied cultural practices that enrich the season; similarly, leverage the diverse viewpoints within your organization. By fostering open dialogue and valuing different perspectives, you’re not just encouraging innovation, but you’re also actively adapting to change.

4. Tap into the Power of Stories

What’s your favorite holiday story? Is it a story of redemption and overcoming our worst nature? Generosity, love, and true wealth? The return of light after darkness? Divine intervention? Perhaps a picked-upon reindeer finding his way?

Holidays inevitably include the telling of stories because these tales pass on important lessons and history. As a leader, you can use stories to inspire your team, connect activities to purpose, reinforce values, and help your team make sense of the change they are experiencing.

5. Reflect and Look Ahead

The end-of-year holidays often prompt reflection on the past and setting intentions for the future. This reflective practice is invaluable for you as you lead your team through change.

Take time together to reflect on what has worked, learn from your experiences, and set clear goals. Engaging your team in this reflection process helps get everyone aligned—both for lessons learned and future goals.

6. Celebrate and Appreciate

Ideally, the holidays give us a moment to pause and appreciate one another, whether through shared celebration or giving gifts.

That spirit of celebration and appreciation is vital as you’re navigating change. What is going well? What milestones have you achieved? What effort can you celebrate—even if you haven’t reached the finish line?

Pausing to acknowledge what people have accomplished and the work they’ve put in will help energize your team to keep going.

When was the last time you truly stopped, looked at your team and offered them a deep, sincere, thank you for their work?

7. Cultivate Hope

Particularly in the northern hemisphere, the end-of-year holidays are about hope. Hope for peace, hope for a new year, hope for renewal, the promise that despite the current darkness, light will return.

As a leader, you are in the hope business. Hope is at the core of your work.

Leadership is the belief that if we work together, we can have a better tomorrow. Together we can do more, be more, and add more value to the world.

That’s a big deal. It might be the biggest deal of all.

And some of the time, your team will be stressed and discouraged. Your job is to help them find the hope.

Without hope, you’re done. When your team has hope, they have a chance.

Happy Holidays

Holidays are such a vital part of what it means to be human. On your journey to be a more human-centered leader who excels at navigating change, these principles of tradition, evolution, inclusion, storytelling, reflection, planning, celebration, and hope are as human as you can get. We hope you find inspiration in them for the year ahead.

Happy Holidays and all the best from the entire Let’s Grow Leaders team!

The post Navigating Change: How the Holidays Can Help You Be a Better Leader appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

You’re a young leader with responsibility for a small team and you want more responsibility. And there’s nothing more frustrating than being told, “Not now. Give it time. You’re not ready yet.” (And if you manage a young leader, please don’t use those despair-inducing words.)

There are several areas of your leadership and work where you can invest to give yourself the best chance at that bigger responsibility: your knowledge and wisdom, the results you achieve now, relationships you build, and opportunities to speak up.

Knowledge and Wisdom as a Young Leader

We rarely know as much as we think we do. One of your most important tasks as a young leader is to learn everything you can about the business and yourself.

1. Get to Know Your Business

How does your business make money? How does your organization make a difference to your customers, clients, or constituents? As you learn the answers to these questions, focus on how the work your team does makes a difference. What are the vital outcomes? Not just the process you follow or the output you have to produce. Look beyond that—why are you doing what you do? What’s the end goal—the reason for the work?

These questions help you think strategically. You’re not just doing what you’re told—you’re doing what matters most for the business and your customer. The ability to think strategically is one of the most important abilities you’ll need to cultivate if you want more senior levels of responsibility.

2. Ask “Why?” with Respect

There will be times as a young leader where you don’t know how an assignment relates to the big picture. You might be tempted to just ask your manager, “Why do we have to do this?” Hopefully, your manager takes the question the way you mean it and gives you the context. But many people interpret “why” questions as challenging or argumentative. To avoid this unhelpful misunderstanding, try this instead: “I want to ensure we’re fulfilling all the objectives here. Can you help me understand the big picture goal here?”

3. Understand what Matters Around Here—especially for the role you want

You just earned an advanced degree – congratulations. That was a lot of work! But it doesn’t automatically mean you should get a promotion. Unless you’re in a business where that credential automatically comes with more responsibility. Sure, an advanced degree might be a requirement, but it’s not the only thing you need.

We’ve seen many a young leader achieve a degree or other visible certification and immediately seek promotion, only to get frustrated when it doesn’t happen. Often, they hadn’t paid attention to the organizations values and what behaviors and outcomes matter most.

What matters most in your organization? Are there trusted relationships you need to build? A consistent track record of results you need to show? Do you need to demonstrate a particular kind of knowledge or ability? Be sure you know what matters most – and how you can invest in those areas.

4. Ask for What You Want and Listen for What You Need

Are you a young leader who’s concerned about whether or not to let your manager know that you want more responsibility? Assuming that your team is doing well and you’re achieving the results you are responsible for, we would encourage you to ask.

You can use our Development Discussion Planner to prepare for the conversation. Take time to think about your current role and the role you want. Let your manager know you want to have the conversation and give them the planner you completed.

Show up the conversation with genuine curiosity. What do they see or know that you don’t? Are there additional skills or experiences they recommend you gain? Listen carefully and take notes. Then, as you work together, you can both look for opportunities to learn those skills or get the experience.

5. Learn If You Want to Manage

While you may be hungry for a promotion, take an honest look at your management and leadership responsibilities. Do you enjoy them? Do you like helping a team of people achieve more together than you, or they, could do individually? If so, you’ll be able to deal with the challenges that happen with every management and leadership position.

And if you don’t enjoy this work, that’s important to know. If you don’t enjoy leading a team, why would you want to do more of that? It only gets more challenging. If leading and management aren’t for you, there’s no shame in that—and it’s good to know now. Find a role more suited to the work you enjoy.

Results Focus for a Young Leader

To distinguish yourself and be ready for more responsibility, take responsibility for the outcomes that matters most.

6. Be Good at Your Work

One of the most common frustrating conversations with a young leader is when they want a promotion, but they’re not getting results now.

What results are you responsible for? Are you achieving them?

No excuses. If your answer starts, “I would, but…” then please don’t go ask for a promotion. Your first qualification is being good at what you do now.

Focus on your team’s current responsibilities. How can you help your team excel at doing that? If there are problems with vendors, challenges with another department, equipment, or other reasons for subpar performance, how can you solve them?

If you want more responsibility in the future, take responsibility now for the challenges in front of you. The skills you build to solve these problems will help when you face thornier problems.

7. Take Responsibility for Outcomes

One of the best opportunities to distinguish yourself as a young leader is to own the outcomes. You’ve learned why your work matters. Now, look at whether your team’s output is having the desired outcome. If not, how can you help make that happen?

A common problem for young leaders is that they’ll “do the work” or follow the process, but stop there. If “I did what they asked” doesn’t achieve the needed outcomes, you have an opportunity to lead.

You don’t have to solve it all yourself. Include your team. Clarify the goals and have an honest discussion about what it will take to get there. Once again, you’re honing the same leadership skills you’ll at higher levels.

8. Make Mistakes, Once

You should be making some mistakes. You can’t possibly know everything and part of your eventual knowledge you’ll gain from experience. And experience is a fancy word for “hmm, that didn’t work – what can I learn from that?”

There’s nothing wrong with making a mistake if you are trying to do the right thing. The key is to make the mistake only once. Learn from it, incorporate that knowledge, and open the door to the next level of learning.

9. Master Management and Communication Fundamentals

Start with these Six Core Competencies You Can’t Lead Without. Build your muscle memory now and everything gets easier.

Show up to your work with confidence and humility. Focus on results and relationships. Help your team know the habits that lead to success, practice consistent communication, check for understanding, and schedule the finish. These core leadership and management skills will scale with you and prepare you for future roles.

Conversely, if you get more responsibility, but lack these skills, you have farther to fall and less time to learn. Master them now and you’ll have them when you need them.

Relationships Focus for a Young Leader

Investing in relationships inside and outside your organization will help you in many ways.

10. Prioritize Peers

One challenge you can face as a young leader who is hungry for success and promotion is resentment from your peers. In addition to building relationships and supporting their success, be aware of some of the common mistakes that can sabotage your collaboration.

Be aware of unbridled tenacity, over-advocating for your team, and not sharing what you know. Help your peers succeed as you invest in your career and you’ll be there together—or they’ll trust you more when you get that next promotion.

11. Build Your Network

When you invest in more relationships, you’ll have more opportunities, solutions, and wisdom. It’s helpful to build relationships inside and outside your organization.

Internally, look for those sponsors and mentors, but also pay attention to how you and peers can support one another. You can be an encourager to someone who is a technical advisor to you. Or you can be an advocate for someone who challenges your thinking.

12. Practice Constructive Conflict

Building effective relationships at work doesn’t mean you roll over and agree with anything or anyone. Mastering productive conflict will help you be a more effective young leader and qualify you for future roles. Productive conflict are the discussions where you help a group of people improve their thinking, make better decisions, and collaborate.

Here are twelve phrases from our book Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict (HarperCollins May 2024) that will help you navigate any challenging conversation.

13. Build Leaders on Your Team

The most effective leaders constantly invest in others and build more leaders. One way to be ready for a promotion when it comes is to have someone who can immediately lead your team. Building leaders on your current team makes you more promotable.

14. Get Consistent Feedback

One easy way to distinguish yourself is to ask for, and act on, feedback from your peers, your manager, and your team. You can do this once or twice a year to choose one specific area where you want to grow. Use our Do It Yourself 360 process to have these conversations and get the feedback to help you be your best.

People will notice your follow-through when you build a reputation as someone who seeks, and implements, advice.

Speaking Up as a Young Leader

Whether it’s proposing a new solution to a vexing problem or raising your hand to volunteer, choose yourself and exercise your voice.

15. Share Ideas and Solutions

What are the problems and pain points that keep your manager or their boss up at night? Can you make a meaningful suggestion that has a chance to solve the problem? Or maybe it will spark someone else’s thinking and together you come up with a new answer.

Use our I.D.E.A. Model to vet your ideas and give them the best chance to be heard and get traction. They won’t always choose your idea. But you’ll establish yourself as a critical thinking and someone who cares.

16. Get Good at Accountability

One of the most promotion-worthy skills you can build as a young leader is comfort with accountability conversations. Build on a foundation of character, trustworthiness, and your skill at doing your current work with the ability to give and receive feedback.

Our I.N.S.P.I.R.E. Method is a practical way to navigate your performance feedback conversations.

17. Attend and Speak at Conferences

Conferences are one of the fastest ways to challenge your assumptions, broaden your perspective, and understand your work in a larger context. You’ll meet people with similar challenges, but different solutions. Or different approaches you can use. In addition, conferences give you a chance to build your network and better understand your industry.

Another opportunity conferences give you is to speak. Offer to share what you know. You’ll get experience speaking, presenting, and meet people. And when people start to say nice things about your thoughts and presentation, you can take those back to work and they positively reflect on your organization.

When Positions aren’t Available

If you work in a smaller business, a flat organization, or a large, very stable, slow-growing business, you might be ready for more responsibility, but openings are rare.

In these circumstances, you have a couple of choices. One option, if your team is humming along and able to do its work well without you, is to look for different assignments that expand your skills and understanding. It might not be more responsibility, but a different responsibility. The new challenge can be refreshing and continue your growth.

And, of course, you may need to look outside your current organization if you are ready, but unwilling to wait for an opening to come along. In this case, be sure to secure your next job before quitting this one.

Your Turn

When you’re a young leader who’s hungry for a promotion, take the time to invest in your understanding, focus on results and relationships, and speak up consistently. You’ll establish yourself as a caring, committed, strategic leader. Do these consistently and you’ll be on short lists for new roles.

We’d love to hear from you. What advice do you have for a young leader who’s hungry for success? Or, if you are a young leader, what have you found helpful?

You Might Want to Check Out These:

• How To Get Your Boss to Appreciate and Recognize Your Genius
• How to Not Screw Up Your Brand Even When You’ve Been Screwed Over
• Drive Your Career Success with Ed Evarts (podcast)
• How to Be Less Negative—and Still Be Yourself

The post Fuel Your Career: 17 Critical Skills When You’re a Young Leader Hungry for Success appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

If you want to increase productivity at work, maintain a relentless focus on what matters most in four areas. First, ensure your team understands their big strategic priorities – the outcomes that matter most for the organization. Next, get clear about the specific initiatives and projects that support the strategic priorities. Follow up with an ongoing review of the specific, observable activities that will make those initiatives happen. And finally, build a foundation for success by helping your team understand and master the daily habits that create results. 

When There’s Just Not Enough Time: Beyond Time Management

“I just don’t have time. There is so much to do that some days I just want to give up!” – Halisee, Software Engineer

Halisee called us looking for help with the overwhelm.  Between her own important tasks, the needs of her team members, and her supervisor’s expectations, she’d been working 60-hour weeks, and she felt sick and strung out.

“My calendar is wall-to-wall meetings, often with two or three appointments competing for the same window of time. And it’s only gotten worse now that I’m working from home. We have MORE meetings, not less!”

Have you been there? If you’re like many leaders we work with, you face an unending stream of information, problems to solve, decisions to make, fires to put out, interruptions from email, texts, phone calls, messaging apps — and that’s not to mention the strategic projects you want to work on to build a better future. It can seem like you’ll never get ahead. Productive leaders focus their time and energy on the activities that produce results and build relationships despite the crush of activity – or perhaps it’s not “despite” the demands for their attention, but because they embrace the challenge.

To Increase Productivity at Work, Embrace Your Limits

There will always be more you could do than you possibly can do. To stop feeling overwhelmed, start by accepting that frustrating fact. We call this approach to time “infinite need, finite me.” At any moment in time, there are literally thousands of things you could do, but you get to do only one. That’s it. One. Before you can focus your time and energy on results, reach an understanding with yourself that you can do only one thing at any given moment.

Don’t talk yourself into thinking you can really make a difference on that muted conference call while you also try to help the employee who needs real advice—all while responding to a text escalation on your phone. You won’t give any of those situations the attention they deserve.

Of course, you understand these limitations intellectually, but when you truly internalize and make peace with the fact that there’s always another thing, it frees you from the overwhelm. You can’t do it all and you never will. So, stop trying. This is the freedom to focus on what matters most.

To Lead Highly Productive Teams: Cultivate an M.I.T. Mindset

As you free yourself from the demands of doing everything, the natural next question is, where will you focus? One hallmark of productive leaders is that they focus on what matters most. We call this commitment to do what matters most “Mind the M.I.T.” – that is, Mind the Most Important Thing.

Infinite need, finite me. Mind the M.I.T.

There are four levels of M.I.T. to consider:

1. M.I.T.s (Strategic Outcomes)
2. Initiatives
3. Activities
4. Habits

1. M.I.T. Strategic Outcomes

When you look up and view the horizon, where are you going? What is the most important outcome your organization or team will achieve in the coming years? Typically, you’ll have no more than three answers to that question. These are the big objectives with time frames measured in years. If you’re leading a team within an organization, your strategic M.I.T.s often come straight from the organization’s strategic plan. Strategic M.I.T.s are the North Star that helps you navigate the complexities of day-to-day business.

2. M.I.T. Initiatives

Every strategic objective will have one more initiative or project that helps the organization achieve that strategic M.I.T. There may be several of these initiatives and projects for every strategic objective. These initiatives are usually shorter-term and there is a moment when it will be completed.

For example, if your company wants to improve customer retention, there may be several initiatives including implementing a new customer management software, improving customer support quality, and a “plus one” strategy to deliver an unexpected bonus service or product to existing customers. Each of these initiatives is time-bound – it has an end date. Once the new software is implemented, everyone is trained, and it becomes the default way of doing business, it no longer requires focus as an intiative.

Your strategic outcomes might take a year or two to achieve. The initiatives that support them will often have timeframes of a few weeks to several months.

Productive leaders maintain a relentless focus on the initiatives and projects that are their responsibility, ensuring that they make regular progress toward them. If you have a clear project plan, you may clearly know your short-term objectives. If not, to identify your short-term M.I.T., choose a unit of time and ask, “In this week/month/quarter, what is the most important thing we can do to move us closer to our Strategic M.I.T.?”

3. M.I.T. Activities

Activities are the one-time actions you or your team must take in order to move initiatives forward. These are often specific steps in a project plan.

Back to the customer retention example. One of the initiatives is to implement new software. So you may have several activities related to this initiative:

• Schedule training for your team
• Demonstrate and model the new software during three team meetings
• Schedule observations to support your team in working through questions, bugs, and how-tos.
• Acknowledge early adopters and celebrate their results

All these activities will help your team successfully implement the new software. And, they are one-time activities. You don’t need to schedule training repeatedly, but you do need to make sure you get that done sometime in the next month.

What are the M.I.T. activities that you are your team are responsible for in the next 4-6 weeks?

4. M.I.T. Habits

At the heart of productive leaders and their teams is a clear focus on the day-to-day observable habits that directly lead to results. These are three or four specific, visible actions that repeat weekly, daily, or even many times each day. When you establish a consistent cadence of these 3 to 4 critical habits, you build a foundation for success. Then you can incorporate the one-off M.I.T. Activities without losing focus on the core behaviors that allow your team to be great.

What are the three or four observable habits that get you where you need to go? They may repeat weekly, daily, or even many times each day, but a clear understanding of the day-to-day behaviors that drive success is critical.

M.I.T. Mindset Example

To get a sense of how the M.I.T. Mindset works in practice, let’s look at another example outside of work. Let’s say you want to improve your connection with your mother. Your strategic outcome is a “more connected relationship with Mom.”

Moving down to the foundational fourth level of M.I.T. Habits, you might determine that calling your mom is a weekly success habit. So you schedule that weekly call. When confronted with a busy weekend, you ensure that you find time for that call because it’s an M.I.T. habit.

Then you move to level two and choose some initiatives. For example, you might choose to: schedule a vacation trip with Mom, celebrate her birthday with the extended family, and work with her to create a family history book that will be a gift for the holidays.

Each of these initiatives will have specific activities that go with it (as well as a clear finish line by when you want to complete it). For example, “Call your brother and sister to schedule time for the birthday celebration.” Or, “Get everyone on a call to choose the dates and destination for the vacation.” And “talk with Mom about various eras of family history.” This final activity you might be able to combine with your weekly habit of a phone call. There would be several more activities for each of these initiatives, but these get you started.

The habits are your foundation. The activities make the initiatives happen. And the initiatives lead to your strategic MITs.

Your Turn To Increase Productivity at Work

Managers who’ve been through our leadership training tell us this shift in focus and prioritization of behaviors has changed the game for them and significantly upped their productivity at work. The M.I.T. becomes part of their daily vocabulary. Consistent reinforcement like “Our M.I.T. this quarter is …” or “What’s your M.I.T. today?” keeps everyone focused on what matters most.

We’re curious. When you think of improving productivity at work, what’s your M.I.T.? What are the most important behaviors that will help you get there? What daily behaviors will help your team be more productive?

See Also:

• Mind the M.I.T. is One of the 6 Leadership Competencies You Can’t Lead Without
• Get Your Team Back on Track: Leading Through Distractions
• 5 Ways Leaders Can Focus When Everything Is Important
• 4 Questions to Ask Yourself and Your Team to Stay Focused on the Most Important Thing
• Download a FREE first chapter of Winning Well here.

The post Productivity at Work: How to Lead Highly Productive Teams appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

The post Micro-Motivation: A Powerful Technique to Inspire Your Team appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Your team won’t become a high-functioning powerhouse after one offsite. You can’t be a trusted, influential leader after one week on the job. There are no leadership hacks or shortcuts that will transform your organization or results. But there is a way to do all these things that’s available to you and every leader: the power of small habits.

A Riddle and a Dream

Let’s kick things off with a quick riddle: What tips the scales at over a hundred million tons, floats, and can inspire daydreams or cause destruction?

Keep thinking about it as we travel back to 1845.

In the mid-19th century, no suspension bridge designed for trains existed. The idea was deemed far too risky, and most engineers wrote it off as an unsafe proposal. Fast forward ten years, the world was introduced to its first railway suspension bridge, connecting the US and Canada over the Niagara River. The story of this engineering marvel begins with a simple picnic and a letter.

While Canadian entrepreneur William Merritt was enjoying a picnic with his wife, they received a letter from their children touring Europe. In this letter, the kids described an impressive suspension bridge they’d seen in Switzerland. This sparked a dream in Merritt – he envisioned a similar bridge across the Niagara River, capable of facilitating rail travel and enhancing trade with the rapidly growing US network.

Merritt obtained the government’s permission, formed a company, and hired the right talent – in this case, Charles Elliot Jr., a dynamic engineer with a knack for promotion.

A Small Solution to a Big Problem

The initial challenge was how to get a line across the gorge. The simplest approach, one Leonardo da Vinci had suggested centuries earlier, was to use a kite. Elliot saw an opportunity for publicity and staged a competition: a $5 prize to the boy who could first fly a kite across the Niagara Gorge.

The winner, a young boy named Homan Walsh, succeeded on his second attempt. Elliot tied a thicker string to the kite string and pulled it across the gorge. Gradually, thicker ropes were tied and pulled across until eventually, a cable could be drawn across the river. This was the starting point of the bridge that took another seven years and a different engineer to complete.

Monumental projects often start with a simple act. An inconsequential kite string laid the foundation for a groundbreaking bridge. When you’re overwhelmed with massive projects, look for your “kite string”—the smallest action that gets the ball rolling.

A Small Answer to a Big Riddle

This brings me back to the riddle. What weighs over a hundred million tons and can both float and stir up a multitude of emotions?

Clouds.

Clouds are millions of small, almost negligible droplets. Despite their massive cumulative weight, these droplets are less dense than the air around them, which allows them to float. What an incredible metaphor for the power of small activity to make a big difference.

Vincent van Gogh once said, “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” He probably wasn’t contemplating clouds, avalanches, or railway bridges, but his words ring true for leadership. Small habits, repeated consistently, bring transformative results.

The Leadership Power of Small Habits

Whether it’s a small act of defiance against an unjust system, a brief moment to reinforce a value, or a celebration of progress, each seemingly insignificant step contributes to a larger outcome over time.

In nearly every core leadership development program we lead, we start with six foundational skills you can build on for greater influence and transformational results:

• Show up with confidence and humility
• Focus on results and relationships
• Mind the M.I.T. (know what matters most and the specific initiatives, activities, and small habits that lead to success)
• Communicate Consistently (Communicate key messages at least five times, in five different ways)
• Check for Understanding (Ensure communication happened)
• Schedule the Finish (Discuss priorities and create mutually agreed moments for completion)

These activities are critical examples of small habits with a big payoff. Checking for understanding avoids misunderstandings and wasted time. Scheduling the finish increases accountability and energizes your team. Consistent 5 x 5 communication keeps everyone aligned and aware of what matters most.

But maintaining this consistency is easier said than done. Some days you’re in a hurry. Tired. Feel overwhelmed. And it’s easy to forget to check for understanding, schedule the finish, repeat your team’s purpose, or follow up when someone doesn’t follow through.

And for that one day, it may not make a big difference. That’s the problem with small habits – missing it once doesn’t feel consequential. But miss the habit too often and soon you have a problem.

One skipped “check for understanding” leads to days or weeks of wasted time and frustration. Forget to “schedule the finish” and you waste time you don’t have chasing down projects and frustrating team members who are working on other time-sensitive tasks.

What’s Your Small?

It’s easy to get discouraged when the big wins seem far away. Your struggle today may not feel all that glamorous but know that every small step matters, especially when it’s a step you’ve taken before.

Each moment of encouragement, each clarification of purpose, goals, and success habits, each kind word, every moment of accountability or clarification with your team has an accumulative effect. Like threads in a towel, each small action weaves into a larger tapestry of leadership, influence, and meaningful outcomes.

So, what’s your kite string? Where can you get small today?

Where can you take that micro step that will make a macro difference?

Small habits are mighty, and incremental changes lead to monumental outcomes.

The post How Leaders Use Small Habits for Big Results appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

When it comes to business metrics, there’s a secret that top-performing leaders understand, but might not tell you aloud:

“Your customer doesn’t care about your internal scorecard.”

Top-performing leaders pick a few meaningful business metrics that encourage the right behaviors and achieve the results that truly matter to their customers. In contrast, managers who haven’t learned this secret focus on the numbers and frantically swivel their team’s focus back and forth between twenty-seven different measurements – most of which don’t directly affect results. Not to mention that no one can concentrate on twenty-seven metrics at a time.

How NOT to Use Business Metrics

I (Karin) saw the downward spiral a barrage of business metrics can cause when visiting with a manager who we’ll call “Sarah.”

I watched Sarah’s entire body tense up each time the hourly stack rankings buzzed in on her phone.

Sarah didn’t have to say a word. I knew that look from the inside out. As a Verizon contact center director, I’d been on the frantic receiving end of such beeps for many years. Hourly results coming in 15 times a day—quality, efficiency, sales. When they were good, I could breathe and go on with my day. But sometimes, that stack rank was an hourly reminder of all the work I, and my team, had to do.

As my blast from the past continued, I remembered the additional stress, when those hourly stack ranks, were followed up by a call from my boss “Have you seen the numbers?”

Sarah interrupted my painful flashback. “I’m sorry, Karin, but I’ve got to huddle the team. We’ve got to get to 94 by the end of the day.”

“What are you planning as your key message?” I asked. Sarah looked at me as if I was crazy. “Ninety-four,” she said. When I met with Sarah’s team later in the day for a focus group and asked what success looked like, they told her, “Ninety-four.”

Well, at least they were consistent.

Sarah’s focus on the number ramped up pressure and stress. It created more busyness and activity. But that focus on business metrics alone wouldn’t help her team succeed.

Messing Up Measurement

Here’s an example to help explain. Imagine for a moment that you go to the doctor and she tells you that you have high blood pressure. The doctor prescribes medication, a change in diet, and more exercise. Assuming you are motivated to get healthy, what would you do when you left the doctor’s office?

You might go to a pharmacy, fill your prescription, and head home. Once you get there, you might evaluate what food you have on hand and make a shopping list that includes whole grains, lean meats, and vegetables. You might take a walk and start an exercise plan that includes some yoga and stress reduction.

And yes, you’d probably measure your blood pressure once a day.

Eat well, exercise, and take your medicine. Keep up those behaviors consistently, and your blood pressure would likely improve.

Now, imagine instead that you leave the doctor’s office and go to a drugstore, pick up a blood pressure cuff, then head home and start taking your blood pressure every fifteen minutes – after all, this is important! It’s literally a life or death situation and you need to fix this. Every fifteen minutes you see that your blood pressure is still high.

Now you’re more stressed.

So now you start checking your blood pressure every ten minutes, only to see your blood pressure rise even higher. And you’re not doing any of the meaningful activities that would help improve your health.

We don’t know any healthy people who have ever done this with their blood pressure, but when it comes to leading business teams, we see managers do it all the time.

How to Make Business Metrics Meaningful

Your blood pressure reading is important. And your business metrics matter – a balanced scorecard, with well-selected key performance indicators, will reinforce your strategy and align actions with goals.

But managers who obsess about the numbers make a critical mistake: they focus on the score because they mistake the number for what it represents.

Your blood pressure readout is not your blood pressure. The score is a set of numbers that tells you what’s happening in your body. It’s an indicator of health, it’s not health itself.

If you’re in law enforcement, the crime rate is an indicator of public safety, it’s not public safety itself. If you’re in sales, your average sale per customer is an indicator of your relationship with your customers, it’s not the relationship itself. And, if you’re in customer service, your service ratings are indicators, they’re not the customer experience itself.

Whatever measurements you use in your business, it’s vital to remember that measurements aren’t what you do; measurement represents what you do.

This understanding translates into how you communicate with your team. Managers who don’t understand the difference between a score and what it represents will beat people up with the number. They say things like “we’re at 42, we’re at 42, get it to 39!”

Instead, a manager who understands the difference will look at that number and use it as an indication of what activities, behaviors, and habits need their focus. When your blood pressure is high, you take your medicine, exercise, and change your diet.

When one of your team’s most important measurements isn’t where you want it, where do you need to focus?

Four Ways to Use Data Well

There are four ways you can use data effectively:

1. Know what matters.

Your scores don’t really matter. They are there to help you and your supervisors make decisions, but the scores . . . don’t . . . matter. (And some important elements of your work can’t be measured easily.) What is truly significant? There is one way to find out. Ask: What does your customer or client most care about?

Your customer doesn’t care what grade your team received on your internal scorecard. No one outside your team or your manager cares where you are in a ranking, how close you are to your goal, or what grade you got.

Customers care about their results. For example:

• How long do they have to wait, and can they get their issues resolved to their satisfaction?
• Does your product work and meet their need the way they expect?
• Are they able to do what they expect when they use your service?
• Do they feel good about it?
• Does it help them?

Your team exists to produce those results. The results—what you do for your customers or clients—that’s what matters. Focus on what matters most, and we guarantee your score (the ones that matter) will improve.

2. Know the key behaviors that produce real results.

If you wanted to lower your blood pressure, you would know your key behaviors: take your medicine, eat well, and exercise. Similarly, there are core sets of behaviors that allow your team to achieve results and sustain them over time.

If you’re a convenience store retail manager, your key behaviors might include:

• Keep products stocked.
• Make sure the store is clean and neat.
• Don’t let customers wait in a line longer than three people.

If you’re a customer-service call-center supervisor, your key behaviors might include:

• Huddle with your team each day to connect and communicate.
• Listen to calls and provide balanced performance feedback.
• Get involved to help resolve the toughest customer concerns.

If you’re a nonprofit fund-raising director, your key behaviors might include:

• Build relationships with donors.
• Ask them to support the cause.
• Thank them in varied and meaningful ways.

Whatever your business, there are always key habits that build your meaningful results. Do you know yours? This is a critical step; you can’t improve your measurements if you don’t know what drives your success.

3. Emphasize key habits (not the score).

Like a drummer in a band, you keep the beat for the team. Everyone can play their parts when you keep time and anchor them in what really matters.

To keep the beat for your team, consistently communicate the key behaviors and activities. “This is how we succeed: We do A, B, and C.” All your communication—in team meetings, in one-on-ones, in email—will emphasize these core practices.

When you do discuss metrics, put them in terms of the key behaviors. For example, “When we do A, B, and C every day, we’ll maintain 80 percent-plus repeat visits.”

4. Check the score at appropriate intervals.

How often should you check your metrics? The answer is: as often as necessary to keep you on track and no more than that.

In other words, it depends on what you’re doing. To manage high blood pressure, a daily reading might be adequate. If you’re driving a convertible sports car down the highway, you’ll need to glance at the speedometer every so often to make sure you don’t get a ticket.

For your business, a good guideline is to think about how long it will take you to see results when you implement a change. If you make a change today, will you see results in a day? A week? A month? Six months?

Different businesses have different time frames. Generally, you want to check your business metrics often enough to confirm positive results or to catch problems when something changes, but no more than that. Otherwise, you’re wasting time and attention you could use to get the results that matter to your customers, clients, and constituents.

Your Turn

We’d love to hear from you. What are the most meaningful business metrics you use? How do you keep yourself and your team focused on the habits and activities that matter most?

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Horrible meetings are a cliché of the business world and with good reason. Too many meetings are a waste of time and don’t accomplish anything. Minutes creep along while the meeting leader fritters away everyone’s time, people have meaningless conversations that don’t solve problems, and everyone is frustrated that they could be doing something more productive with their time. If the meeting happens online, people multitask (or wish they could).

When you don’t run meetings well, not only do your results suffer, so does your credibility.

But bad meetings, while a cliché, aren’t inevitable. In fact, we maintain that people don’t hate meetings. They hate bad meetings – those soul-sucking wastes of time. There are six ways you can ensure your meetings are effective and energizing:

1. Don’t Waste Their Time
2. Know Your Outcomes
3. Get the Right People in the “Room”
4. Clarify Intent
5. Clarify Who Owns the Decision
6. Turn Meetings into Results

Six Advanced Techniques to Lead Meetings That Get Results and People Want to Attend

1. Don’t Waste Their Time

Let’s begin with one of the biggest reasons people hate meetings. They abuse our most precious resource: time.

Effective leaders treat everyone’s time as a precious resource. Starting and ending on time is a basic meeting skill – when you carelessly let meetings run long or start late, or have a meeting you never should have called, you disrespect your people.

The advanced technique to avoid wasting people’s time is to hold meetings only when they are the most valuable use of all the attendees’ time. If there is something employees could do that is more valuable, that contributes more directly to the team and to the results you’re trying to accomplish, why on earth would you want them in your meeting where they are less productive?

2. Know Your Outcomes (Relationships and Results)

So how do you make sure a meeting is a good use of time?

Start with purpose. What outcome will this meeting achieve? How will it help the people who attend to achieve results and build relationships?

Outcome: Results

Your meetings should also move the mission of your group, team, and organization forward. In short, meetings should produce action. You got together to solve a problem, make a decision, or share information, and when the meeting ends, it’s time to do something. If your meetings don’t result in clear action, you’ve wasted your time.

Outcome: Relationships

Business results often take center stage, but relationships are also a critical outcome of effective meetings – especially for teams who work virtually or in a hybrid environment.

Teams require trust, and that’s built only through time spent together, solving problems, making decisions, and learning how everyone operates, sees the world, and shares information. In addition to the connections built through working together and solving problems, you can also include periodic conversations that build relationships, such as:

• Cultural conversations to problem solve or celebrate: for example, “What’s really getting in the way of people using our new system?” or, “What have you seen another member do well over the last month?”
• Elephant-in-the-room conversations: for example, “What are the conversations we’re not having that we should be having?”
• Mutual-help conversations: for example, “Let’s talk about how we’re working with other departments. What’s working well? Where do we have challenges?” Give people a chance to share and help one another.

These conversations can happen quickly and be a rich source of positive relationships and results as your people learn to trust each other and help one another.

Effective teams meet frequently. You want to be certain the meetings you hold are effective and that they are the best use of every attendee’s time. This will happen when you focus every meeting to build relationships and achieve results. If your meeting isn’t going to build relationships and advance the mission of the organization, don’t have the meeting.

3. Get the Right People In the “Room”

Who should attend a meeting?

You want the smallest number of stakeholders that will allow you to make the best decision. Think about the number of people in your meeting as a continuum. On one end, you could hold the meeting with just yourself. It might look funny, but you could sit there by yourself, examine what you know, make a decision, and then share the decision with everyone else.

On the other end of the continuum, you could have everyone—every single person in the organization—attend a meeting. If you have a 50-person organization, all 50 of them would attend, and that would be unwieldy, but if you work in a 10,000-person organization, it would be impossible.

So, the question is, what is the smallest number of people who can attend but still provide you with good, diverse, and informed input from those who have a stake in the decision?

Where most leaders go wrong is that they invite too many people who have the same perspective and fail to invite key representatives with different vantage points who might help them make a better decision if they had input – particularly people affected by the decision.

Remember, the goal of most meetings is to take action. When you take people away from their normal work, you do it so that all of you together can make a better decision than you would have done on your own. You’ll waste everyone’s time if you don’t invite the necessary people to the meeting.

4. Clarify the Intent

What kind of meeting are you leading?

There are several types of meetings, but we’re going to focus on the two most common ones.

The first type is the informational meeting.

These are short meetings to exchange information. The key to an informational meeting is that there is an exchange of information (not just information going in one direction).

It’s not you pulling people together because it’s more convenient for you.

Remember, the meeting needs to be the most valuable use of their time as well. This can happen if there is an honest exchange, an opportunity to ask questions, and interaction around the information being shared, and the meeting is brief.

The second type of meeting exists to make decisions and act.

Most of your meetings should fall into this category. They can be anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours long and feature a specific decision to make or a problem to solve (a problem is just a specific kind of decision).

The key to making meetings work for you and your team is to be very clear about what kind of meeting you’ve called. When you mix up an information exchange with decision-making, it frustrates everyone.

If you want to solve a specific problem, don’t allow a team member to turn the meeting into a briefing on her latest project unless it specifically helps the group solve the problem at hand. Stay focused on the specific objectives for the meeting you’re leading.

5. Clarify Who Owns the Decision

“This is so stupid—you asked for my opinion and then ignored it. I don’t know why I even bother! From now on, I’m just going to shut my mouth and do my work.”

If you’ve heard this or said it yourself, you’ve experienced a lack of clarity around decision ownership.

People hate feeling ignored. Unfortunately, when you ask for input and appear to ignore it, employees feel frustrated, devalued, and powerless. In contrast, when you are clear about who owns the decision and how it will be made, people will readily contribute and are far more likely to own the outcome.

This isn’t difficult to do because there are only four ways to make a decision:

1. A single person makes the decision.

Typically, this would be the manager or someone she appoints. In this style of decision-making, you might ask your team for input and let them know that after hearing everyone’s perspective, you will make the decision.

2. A group makes the decision through a vote.

This might be a 50-percent-plus-one majority or a two-thirds majority, but in any case, it’s a decision by vote. With this option, you ask everyone to contribute input, and they know that the decision will be made by a vote at a specific time.

3. A team makes the decision through consensus.

Consensus is often misunderstood. Consensus decision-making means that the group continues discussion until everyone can live with a decision. It does not mean everyone got his or her first choice, but that everyone can live with the final decision. Consensus decision-making can take more time and often increases everyone’s ownership of the final decision.

4. Let fate decide.

Though it’s rarely used in business settings, you can flip a coin, roll the dice, or draw from a hat. When time is of the essence, the stakes are low, and pro-con lists are evenly matched, it’s often good to just pick an option and go. For example, if you have 45 minutes for a team lunch, it doesn’t make any sense to spend 30 minutes discussing options. Narrow it down to a few places, flip a coin, and go.

Each way of deciding has advantages, but what’s most important is to be very clear about who owns the decision.

The person who said, “You asked for my opinion and then ignored it. I don’t know why I even bother!” was under the impression that the team would decide by vote or consensus when in reality it was the leader’s decision. This type of confusion wastes tons of precious time and energy.

Instead, before the discussion begins, state how the decision will be made.

Be specific. For example, you might begin a decision-making session by saying, “Okay, I’d like to spend the next 40 minutes getting everyone’s input, and then I’ll make the decision.” Or, you might describe the decision to be made and say, “We’re not going to move forward until everyone can live with the decision.”

You might even combine methods and say, “We will discuss this decision for 30 minutes. If we can come to a consensus by then, that would be great. If not, we’ll give it another 15 minutes. After that, if we don’t have consensus, I’ll take a final round of feedback and I’ll choose, or we’ll vote.”

You’ll avoid wasted energy, energize, and empower your people to be more influential because when they know who owns the decision, they also know how to share their information. Do they need to persuade the single decision maker, a majority, or the entire team? They can choose their most relevant information and arguments.

6. Turn Meetings into Results

Does this scenario sound familiar? You went to a meeting where you had invigorating discussions, examined alternatives, and came up with a cool plan of action; everyone left the meeting feeling motivated, and then six weeks later you got back together. As everyone entered the room and took their seat, there were sideways glances.

“Did you do that thing we talked about?”

“No, how about you?”

A quick shake of the head and you realized that the great idea everyone talked about had languished.

The prior meeting, the discussions, the new meeting—all of it— were a waste because nothing happened. In fact, it’s worse than doing nothing because now you’ve created negative energy, that feeling that, “It doesn’t matter what we talk about because nothing really changes around here.”

Every meeting you hold should produce activities that move results forward, build momentum, and build morale with healthy relationships. You can achieve all this in just five minutes at the end of every meeting.

Let’s begin with mindset. We invite you to think about meetings as commitment creators. In other words, the outcome for every decision-making or problem-solving meeting you ever have is to create commitment.

You get the right people together to discuss the problem, you make a decision, and people commit to doing something. The product of a good meeting is a commitment to activity. You build this commitment with three questions to schedule the finish.

Commitment 1: Who Will Do What?

Until someone actually does something, nothing has changed from before you made the decision. Until then, it is just a nice idea.

Every task needs a specific person who is responsible to complete it. For smaller decisions, there might be only one or two answers to this question. For larger, strategic initiatives you might have an entire work plan that outlines dozens of tasks and people responsible.

Commitment 2: By When?

This one is straightforward. What is the finish line for the tasks people have agreed to complete? When these deadlines are shared and publicly available, everyone is more likely to meet them.

Commitment 3: How Will We Know?

Pablo shrugged, “Linda, I did those updates. I don’t see why you’re so upset.”

Linda’s team had decided to launch a new product that involved many moving parts. They had clearly answered the first two questions: Who does what and by when? For the most part, everyone kept to their commitments, and yet the delivery date kept slipping.

When Linda investigated, she discovered that individuals had done what they’d said they would do, but there was still something missing. Linda and other team members couldn’t always take the next step until another person had finished her piece. Pablo had finished his piece but never let anyone else know. He had moved onto other work, diligently crossing items off his to-do list while the overall project sat idle.

In big projects you may have a project manager or a project management tool to ensure that this type of next-step communication happens, but what about in your more ordinary, day-to-day meetings? Where is the accountability?

“How will we know?” is the magic question that moves your meeting from good intentions to action and results. It’s also the one that leaders most frequently ignore.

“How will we know?” closes the loop from intention to action and creates momentum without you having to spend hours every day tracking down action steps.

Here’s how it works: When someone completes a task, what do they do next?

• Will they pass the results to another person or group?
• Should they update the team and let them know?
• Will they make a presentation of his findings?
• Do they report completion in a common area or software?

The specific answers depend on the task and project. What matters is that the accountability and next step are baked into the decision. Everyone knows what they are accountable to do, the team knows if it’s been completed, and no one is left waiting around for the information she needs.

Don’t let the simplicity of these questions fool you into not using them. We’ve seen thousands of managers struggle and get frustrated because they didn’t ensure this kind of clarity at the end of every meeting. These are the most important five minutes you’ll spend to make your meetings achieve results.

Your Turn

These six strategies go beyond traditional (and true) meeting advice to have an agenda or start and end on time. Use these techniques to ensure you lead meetings that get results and people want to attend.

We’d love to hear from you – what is your number one way to ensure a meeting is productive and energizing?

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• 101 Remote Team Communication Approaches for Stronger Teams
• 6 Habits of Highly Successful Virtual and Hybrid Teams

The post Advanced Guide to Lead Meetings That Get Results and People Want to Attend appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

At the start of our work together, we’ll ask leaders and managers around the world for their most valuable leadership practice. There are several answers that consistently rise to the top, including clarity, vision, encouragement, communication, listening, empathy, and support.

These are certainly valuable. And when we ask the tens of thousands of leaders and managers we’ve worked with about the most valuable practice they’ve learned through our work together, one of the most frequent answers is to “Check for Understanding.”

Check For Understanding: Ensure that everyone in a conversation is on the same page and has a shared understanding of what they discussed to save hours, days, and weeks of headache, heartache, and frustration. (For more on the valuable communication tool: look at Check for Understanding)

But What’s the MOST Valuable Leadership Practice?

I love the “check for understanding” and I do think it’s one of the highest ROI practices you can use…

But, if I had to choose one practice that adds the most value and leverages everything else you do as a leader, I would choose a word that lacks glamor. It’s not flashy or charismatic. But it will be the deciding factor in your long-term success.

What’s the most valuable leadership practice?

Consistency.

Showing up moment by moment, day after day, project after project with the same skills, character, and commitment.

Why Consistency?

I’m training for my first ultra-marathon of about 33 miles over hilly trails.

You can’t train for a race like this in a day or a week. It takes months of consistent training including running, strength work, and stretching for your body to adapt and grow to meet the new demands.

Me consistently wondering how I’m going to finish this 17-mile training run

Your team and organization are similar. Day-to-day consistency and accountability in a few practices will do far more good than multiple pronouncements and intentions.

Just like the body adapts to physical training, your team will adapt to practicing good communication when you practice it daily, bring one another back to focus when you forget, and celebrate success.

Then do it again the next day.

The same is true for any meaningful team behavior or leadership skill. Your team needs your encouragement consistently. To hold one another accountable every day. They need clarity of outcomes and priorities all the time.

Why Consistency is Rare and Valuable

You’re probably nodding and saying “Yes, yes, consistency – I get it.”

But consistency is valuable and multiplies every other leadership practice because it is so rare. It’s easy to encourage your team when you’re excited, results are fantastic, and everyone feels good.

It’s more challenging when you’re distracted, stressed, overwhelmed, or bored. Inconsistency undermines any good intention you share or initiative you begin. But showing up consistently builds trust.

That’s why we recommend developing a habit of using one leadership skill before adding the next.

(It’s also why meaningful leadership development programs combine spaced learning over time with action learning—where participants apply what they learn.)

The Most Valuable Leadership Practice – Your Turn

Consistency isn’t flashy. There’s no hack or trick to it. But showing up repeatedly, and doing what works, will build trust, strength in your team, positive habits, and success.

So yes, commit to checking for understanding, scheduling the finish, investing in development conversations…

And commit to the most valuable leadership practice: consistency in your chosen skills. It makes all the difference.

I’d love to hear from you: How do you maintain consistency in the practices that matter most for your success?

The post How to Leverage Your Skills with the Most Valuable Leadership Practice appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Your first leadership role can be challenging when you manage a friend and people who, until yesterday, were your colleagues. When you understand the cause of these challenges, you can take the lead and create a positive experience for yourself and your friends.

1. Lead Before You’re Promoted
2. Clarify Expectations
3. Identify What Role You’re Playing Right Now
4. Be Clear, Not Perfect
5. Apologize As Needed
6. Weed Your Garden
7. Build a New Peer Group

My first chance to manage a friend didn’t go well. Joe stomped into the meeting room, slammed the door shut, and yelled at me, “How could you let this happen?”

He had just been fired by the company president.

I snapped back, “Me?? I’m not the one who didn’t show up and let the team down over and over again!”

He was angry, but I was frustrated and felt betrayed too. I’d put my credibility on the line to help him, but in the end, he’d gotten himself fired.

What made it worse: for the last year, we’d been friends.

That all changed when I was given the responsibility to lead the team.

Problems When Managing Friends

When we ask a group of new leaders about their biggest problems, this is always one of the most common.

It’s one of the most difficult challenges for most emerging leaders. We’ve even watched experienced leaders stumble when asked to address or lead a team of their peers.

In fact, it’s a Shakespearian dilemma: Prince Hal faces this challenge when he ascends to the throne and becomes King Henry V. His old drinking pals feel ignored and betrayed.

There were several problems that kept me from being an effective leader for my friend. You will likely encounter the same problems when you manage a friend.

1) Your desire to be liked and accepted

Positional leadership, even when you are an outstanding human-centered leader, means taking responsibility for decisions that not everyone agrees with. It means holding people accountable and it means that the group who you naturally want to like and accept you won’t always feel that way.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting other people to think well of you and have a desire to belong – it’s a very normal, human, and healthy value so long as it doesn’t consume you.

However, when you choose to lead, it will come into conflict with other values.

2) Your loyalty to the team and the mission

This is one of those “ANDs” that is so important–your friends may feel you’ve abandoned them, but you haven’t. You’ve added an important loyalty: to the organization, your team, and the mission.

Learning to balance both takes some work, but to your friends who don’t understand this tension, it can feel like betrayal.

3) Inconsistent behavior

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V, Prince Hal partied with the best of them–he drank with the renowned lush, Falstaff, and nothing about his behavior said “leader.” Then he took the throne and treated his friends as if they were beneath his notice. He ignored them, tried to act “noble,” and insulted them.

The problem was inconsistent behavior. The Prince wasn’t a leader when he hung out with friends. Once he became King and tried to act kingly, his friends were understandably hurt.

4) Unclear expectations

Conflicting and unclear expectations are the most common problem when you manage a friend. When you move from a peer role to a positional leadership role, some of your team may expect to get a “pass” on poor behavior, others may expect favors or special treatment, and YOU may be expecting your friends to work especially hard because of your friendship.

All of this leads to massive disappointment when you do hold team members accountable, you won’t do favors that would hurt the team, and your friends don’t show any special effort.

5) The fact that not everyone can handle it

Some people are able to manage the tension between friendship and supervisor. In my experience, however, it is the exception, not the rule.

It takes a great deal of maturity for both people to be able to do this.

How to Manage a Friend at Work: Seven Ways to Lead

My experience didn’t have to end the way it did. Early in my career, I didn’t know about the problem I’ve just described. The good news is that a few Winning Well leadership practices can help you manage the transition from peer to positional leader:

1. Lead from where you are, before you’re promoted.

Leading from where you are, without a formal title, will often lead to you being asked to fill titled leadership positions.

It also helps to ease the transition. If your friends all know you as someone who:

• Sets an example
• Practices healthy friendship (where you hold one another accountable)
• Empowers others, and
• Already balances the mission with your role on the team,

then you won’t surprise them with radically different behavior when you change positions.

However, as a team member, if you are constantly critical of other people and your supervisor, it will be difficult for you to lead friends when you have a formal leadership role.

2. Clarify expectations – yours and theirs.

This is the essential step in the transition to lead friends. Have a direct and honest conversation about the transition and your mutual expectations. In this conversation discuss these topics:

• Commitments to your team and to the organization
• Your management expectations
• Your leadership values
• Organizational mandates.
  Also:
• Ask your friends to be honest about their concerns or expectations of you.
• Discern if there are areas where they feel you are being unjust.
• Be realistic about the times you will have to make decisions that are in the team’s best interest even if it conflicts with what you personally would like.

You want to prevent surprises. Your team needs to know where you are coming from. Don’t let it be a ‘gotcha!’ moment later on.

3. Clearly identify which role you’re playing.

This is difficult for some people because it takes a greater level of maturity in your thinking and relationships, but is very helpful for avoiding misunderstandings when you manage a friend.

When you’re talking with a friend, clearly identify the role you’re in. Are you speaking as a friend or as their team leader?

For example: “As a friend, I am so sorry. That stinks! How can I help?”

“As the team leader, I can give you tomorrow to take care of your problem, and then we will need you back.”

4. Be clear, not perfect.

Be very clear about expectations, goals, and desired behaviors. You will never be perfect; so don’t try to act as if you are.

Your friends and former colleagues all know the ‘real’ you, so don’t suddenly try to act as if you’re perfect in ways they know you’re not. It’s fake and your leadership credibility will suffer.

It’s okay to be you. Take responsibility, be as clear as you can, and then:

5. Apologize as needed.

Leaders often struggle to apologize, but it’s even more pronounced when a former team member is leading the team. Don’t let your insecurity and desire to be liked keep you from owning your junk, apologizing, and moving on.

6. Weed your garden when needed.

Sometimes it just won’t work. For example:

A former friend continued to take advantage of our relationship and, despite my best efforts to clarify expectations and help him correct the behavior, nothing changed. I had to be clear about the situation: “I want the best for you and I know this is difficult, but if nothing changes this will affect your employment.” He eventually took advantage of a second friend and supervisor and got fired.

You can’t control another person. Your job is to be the best leader you can be and give everyone on the team every opportunity to succeed. When someone isn’t interested in their own success, care enough to move them off your team.

7. Build a new peer group.

Develop relationships with other leaders, find mentors, and get coaching. There is nothing like a group of people who understand the challenges you experience and can share meaningful wisdom.

You can’t get this from your team. Over time, I built my own personal Board of Directors–people outside the company who I could learn from, confide in, and be accountable to.

Your Turn – Manage a friend at work?

It can be hugely rewarding to lead colleagues and manage a friend, but it’s your responsibility as a leader to set clear expectations and act fairly. Even experienced leaders can benefit from reviewing their relationships to make sure they are healthy.

How do you maintain healthy relationships with your direct reports or your own leaders?

What other suggestions do you have for how to lead your peers? 

See Also:

7 Mistakes that Frustrate Your Co-Workers and Damage Your Brand

How to Be a More Courageous Manager

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