I bet some of the best initiatives in your business have your fingerprints all over them, don’t they? And now you want others to put their ideas forward. But why isn’t it happening how you’d hoped?
If you know anything about Steve and I, you’ll know we have tattoos on our arms reading “it’s not the knowing that’s difficult, it’s the doing” (we don’t by the way but you get the idea).
On Saturday I proved how true this is and totally failed to put a technique into practice from a book that’s been my bedside reading for months.
Whether your business is full steam ahead or you’re still grappling with local lockdowns, achieving results with people in your team is more important than ever. But that doesn’t mean it comes easily.
OK, hands up. I’m not sure the good folks of McKinsey really know we exist. So I thought I’d share what we learnt.
We’ve been trying to make sense of things (in much the way you have), so we sent a mini-survey to a group of our clients and contacts to get a pulse check on how they’re feeling right now and what challenges they think might be coming over the horizon.
Have you been climbing the walls dealing with all of the fallout from this crisis? Furlough, remote working etc; etc; …..? And finding how hard work it is? Me too. Relentless.
One of the reasons some of my relationships have gone awry and friendships have fizzled is because I wasn’t good at taking feedback or criticism. I BIG TIME didn’t know I had a choice over how I reacted.
As part of the work I do, I get a lot of opportunities to check in with business leaders. This allows me to take a ‘pulse’ on the issues of the day that are impacting them. Often becoming aware of patterns in the types of challenges we’re all facing.
We’re facing some of the biggest challenges in business and leadership for a very long time. The Covid 19 crisis is putting pressure on leaders across the spectrum, and no doubt you’re feeling that pressure too. Deciding what to do, and how to think things through effectively to make those decisions, has never been more important.
I expect you’ve been feeling the pressure to make the right decisions as events unfold in this Covid crisis. Who should we bring back from Furlough? How should we arrange the office? What business should we go after? What assumptions should we make? What does our strategy look like for the next 3 and 6 months, and beyond?
We’ve heard a lot since the pandemic started about the word recognition, it appears to be somewhat of a buzzword now, like ‘unprecedented’ or ‘pivot’. But I’m much more interested in how it’s manifesting itself on the ground so to speak – in ‘the doing’ part, not ‘the knowing’..
The UK has now been in lockdown for six weeks. That’s six weeks of only leaving the house for up to an hour a day, six weeks of supermarket fights for toilet rolls and flour, 42 days of journalists asking questions to cabinet ministers, and over 1,000 hours spent in close proximity to our nearest and dearest.
If you’ve been flat out in crisis mode or adjusting to home working with your kids running about the place, I suspect the last thing you’ve been thinking about as a leader is your own personal development.
There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen
As we continue coping with the COVID crisis and all it entails, on both a personal level and a business one, it may sometimes feel that this thing is too vast to get one’s head around.
As a manager, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just say, “this week we’re going to do X,” and it just happened? No fuss, no bother.
How’s 2020 shaping up for you? Do you know which direction you want to take the business this year? Are you making progress? Are you sure? But arguably more importantly, have you made sure your staff are part of what you’re trying to achieve?
We often find ourselves coming around to the subject of operational noise in discussions we have with senior managers. It’s the stuff that swims around in your head, the constant interruptions that prevent you taking a step back to think about the bigger picture.
I talked last month about the work that Google did around effective teams and how one of their Site Reliability Managers created a High Performing Team of his own.
What comes to mind when you think about your experiences of being part of a team? Have they been like a well-oiled machine that delivers the results, followed by high fives all round?