040: Sunday Scaries - 20 simple and meaningful actions to become a better manager

 Use this checklist as a reminder, as an accountability buddy for yourself. Hey, I'm gonna do these things this month. I'm gonna focus on it. I'm gonna try to check as many boxes as I can and watch as you start to feel more comfortable and confident doing these things and your team starts to feel more motivated and engaged, moving faster and doing better work.

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. Where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between.

Doesn't matter if you're a new manager looking for some tips. Or a seasoned manager looking up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let's go. Let's go, let's go. 

Welcome back to the show. Happy Sunday. Happy Mother's Day. For any mothers out there today, we're doing a Sunday scary, really just about a general sense of overwhelm and I know when I felt like, ah, I know I need to change a bunch of things.

I don't know where to start. I'm feeling just general purpose stuck. It's really helpful to get a very specific list of things to do. So that is why I made you this checklist. I created the Thriving Team Scorecard, a list of 20 actions that you can do in a month, ideally more than once to create more clarity in your team, to make sure you're in a habit of giving feedback, and to create an overall sense of we've got this figured out as a team, and what I'm challenging you to do for the next 20 days is to chip away at this scorecard.

And at the end of four weeks, checking in with yourself and saying, okay, do, how do I feel? Do I feel like my team is up and running a little bit more smoothly? Our expectation's clearer are people seeming a little bit more motivated because they got that feedback they needed. So before we dive in, head to liagarvin.com/scorecard to grab this checklist so you can follow along.

Got it. Okay. So we're looking at the scorecard here, and I have three sections, self team and company. And these actions apply whether you are a small business owner or a manager in the corporate world, or a manager of managers, because this list of 20 items covers off general great management skills, no matter what situation you're managing in.

Let's start with self, okay? This is the category of things that can help you feel a sense more of certainty around your managing. Um, a little bit of self-reflection. How are you continually improving your skills? So the first three things on this checklist. Reflect on a, when you experience as a manager reflect on something you could have done better or differently as a manager and ask a team member for feedback.

These things are going to give you that perspective into how are you doing? You're doing that self feedback, so you're building comfort on, okay, I can give myself feedback, I can practice these feedback skills and I can change, I can show up betterly for my team member. And the last one, asking a team member for feedback.

That can be a tough one. I understand that, that it can feel like this opens up a whole can of worms. And if you're getting stuck on that one, one tip that I have is to set the tone with a team member saying, Hey, I've been working on this thing, for example, being more direct, setting, clear expectations, and I'd love for you to give me feedback on how that's going.

When we put some constraints on feedback, it makes it way, way easier to ask for it. Okay. And as you're looking at the checklist, Start thinking about when can I do one of these things? Do I have a one-on-one coming up? You know, reflecting on that when you could do that right now. And then you wanna be checking these boxes as you go.

So the next section is team, and these are fundamentals on how we build a more cohesive team, a more motivated team, because people understand their expectations. So working through this list, we wanna make sure we're respecting working norms around email communication chats, not sending people emails on Sunday afternoon that seem time sensitive.

Next setting clear expectations. Okay, I've, I did an episode about this recently. The, the superpower of expectations. And we always wanna make sure when folks are feeling stuck when they're not moving forward, that we can set or reset or reset again, those expectations. Next, learn something new about a team member.

Ask them about themselves or their family or something they're interested in, or what hobbies they like. The more we learn about our team members, the more we show we care about them as people. As whole people who have lives outside of this job and that drives motivation, builds trust, and in turn, psychological safety.

The next few items on the checklist are about communication, sharing pass downs from your leadership team. If, if you've been getting information that hasn't quite moved down the chain, or sharing things that are top of mind for you, if you're a business owner and you're like, Hey, you know, I haven't relayed all of these things to my team.

Sharing pass downs on a regular basis helps everyone feel like they're in the loop and that you trust them with important information. We wanna deliver a piece of positive and a piece of constructive feedback using the S B I situation Behavior impact framework. Now, this is one of my favorite frameworks because it works great for both positive and constructive.

It's really simple and it's specific and actionable. Take. For example, in the meeting this morning, you brought a clear agenda and we were able to get through all the items without going over time. Okay. That might seem like a simple piece of positive feedback, but it shows a team member the behavior that you wanna see more of.

By contrast, in the meeting, we had an agenda, but unfortunately we got off track and we weren't able to get approval on the final decisions. In the future, can you kind of manage the meeting more closely? Love that. Super specific, actionable. It's obviously about that situation, not about you as a person.

It's not personal and it helps someone know how to move forward for next time. Moving down that list. We wanna thank a team member for something awesome they did. Big or small. We don't wanna wait to give recognition until there's been some huge milestone because a lot of times that might be months between pieces of thank you.

Instead, we wanna thank someone around a little thing. Thank you for helping a team member get onboarded. Thank you for staying a few minutes after that meeting to answer a few extra questions. Thank you for whatever thing that's small that mattered. We wanna be doing that regularly. This is not something you should check off once throughout the month.

I encourage you to check this box. Let's say, let's say 15 times this month. Check the thank you box 15 times and you'll start to see higher motivation on your team because people need to hear. Thank you so much more than we do it. Next one is to show up on time to your one-on-ones and do not schedule them last minute.

This is something I talk about in the episode around leading with empathy with the amazing Carrie Jacobs In Carrie's research, she found this to be the second most important factor for a team member feeling like their manager values them, that your manager showed up on time for one-on-ones and didn't reschedule.

So do it. Okay. And again, this is not something I want you to check the box of once every single one-on-one this month while you're doing this challenge. Please show up on time. Don't reschedule last minute. And if you have to reschedule, give a reason. Next. On the list, we have coaching a direct report through a challenge.

They're working through. Thinking back to our episode about coaching. We bring open-ended questions. What does that look like to you? Where are you getting stuck? What have you tried? What might you try? These are the kinds of ways we coach. We approach the conversation with curiosity. We don't assume, we already know.

We don't put what we would think in that situation on them, and last, we don't problem solve, okay? We wanna have them be the owner, the accountable person for that solution, but we wanna show that we'll be supportive in helping them find that solution. Next, we have load balancing with a team member who is feeling overwhelmed.

This is something we wanna be doing all the time because when someone communicates that they're feeling overwhelmed or looks like they're overwhelmed, we can be really tuning into maybe body language or if things are moving a little slower than they, than they have been in the past. Load balancing is essentially a risk mitigation strategy because if someone is feeling overwhelmed, there's likely to be balls that are dropping or that are about to be dropping in effective load balancing conversation.

We'll talk about the scope of a project, the timeline, and any gaps around, well, what's, what's the thing that's creating overwhelm? So potentially someone feels like they've got it under control, but the timeline is too tight. That's one. One. Solve. If they feel like the scope is unclear, that's another conversation.

And if they feel like, well, I like this, the timeline's clear, but, but there's a skill gap, then you can get them support in a different way. Next on our list is have a goal setting conversation with a team member. We wanna talk about, well, what are your career goals? Not just for the next six months, but longer term.

And oftentimes companies ask folks to do these, you know, every six months. Or potentially if you're in a smaller business, you do a performance conversation once a year. But we can be having goal setting conversations more regularly. And if you haven't had one for a while, have a conversation. Say, what are some of your goals from a personal standpoint or a professional development standpoint?

It doesn't always have to be the big macro goal around career to be meaningful and to help us get to know our team members and what's important to them. Last on this team section is bring your employees together as a team. Maybe it's a team meeting, a coffee chat, a social hour. But are we really finding times on a regular basis to get our team members talking to each other, to have opportunities for people to learn from each other, get to know each other, even if people's work doesn't overlap?

It's really, really valuable for people to be learning what each other's working on so that if there's some kind of synergy or something comes up, people have it on their radar. So I like to combine team meetings with some social things, having a little bit of business, a little bit of fun together so that people let their guard down a little bit.

But you can still make use of the time effectively. And please have an agenda for that meeting. Because when meetings run over, especially these team ones, when it feels like potentially optional when the meeting runs over week after week, people stop wanting to show up and it creates a snowball effect that people think, oh, we don't really run on time.

You know, you wanna be modeling the behaviors you want people to be honoring. So if you want meetings to end on time, you want meetings, to have agendas, you gotta have your team meeting, have an agenda and end on time. Last section is about bettering the company. Okay, so there's some concrete things we can do every month to improve the overall performance of our company.

First one is removing a step from a process that's feeling overly complicated. Okay. Simplifying the complicated streamlining process. This is all of our responsibility to help everyone operate more smoothly. This is really how we do more with less by removing steps, by simplifying, and this is gonna improve motivation on the team because nobody likes to be in a team where there's too many complicated steps for completing a task.

Okay, let's call it, nobody likes that. So when you remove steps, make things easier, that boost morale. Next, we wanna amplify a win from one of our team members and share it in a bigger forum. Maybe if you are in a bigger company that's sharing it up your executive chain. If you're a business owner, potentially it's sharing it on social or sharing it with other employees.

These kinds of things show people they matter, but we always wanna make sure we are recognizing someone in the language that works for them. So if public recognition is not the language that works for someone, we wanna know that first before we put them in the spotlight. Just check first with that person sharing, Hey, I really wanna celebrate this win.

What works for you? Are you okay if I reply all? Are you okay if I share this on social? Are you okay with X, Y, Z? So they say yes, and then you're good to go. Next, we wanna spend 20 minutes, you know, over the course of a month, a few times, ideally, on researching industry trends and sharing takeaways with our team members.

Our team members are looking to us to be thought leaders in, in our space, in the, in the subject of our company. So the more we do that, the more we show them, Hey, I have points of view. I'm eager to hear yours. I'm passing information down, and I'm thinking more strategically about our team and about our business.

Last but not least, item number 20, connect the dots between a team member's work and the priorities of the company. This is so important. Because this ignites a sense of purpose. It shows people that their job has meaning, and I am telling you, you can do this about any single role in any single company.

If you are getting stuck here, go back to the episode where I talk about the power of storytelling with brand story Coach Alex Street because he breaks down how to show people their why in any kind of job. And I believe this dot connecting this is going to help us move past quiet, quitting. This is gonna help reignite engagement.

This is one of the secrets, and if you are doing this continually, You are going to see such higher quality work from your team members because they actually care. They say, oh, it matters when I perform this task. Well, oh, my job really means something. I see it. And the more they feel seen, the better they show up.

There it is. There is our list of 20 things we can do this month and every month to create a stronger team to really flex our skills as managers to continue to improve on these things, because if we're not practicing them regularly, then we're certainly not gonna get better at it. And I invite you to take this challenge this month.

Literally start tomorrow. Grab that checklist, liagarvin.com/scorecard and complete the 20 days. And use this checklist as a reminder, as an accountability buddy for yourself. Hey, I'm gonna do these things this month. I'm gonna focus on it. I'm gonna try to check as many boxes as I can and watch. As you start to feel more comfortable and confident doing these things and your team starts to feel more motivated and engaged, moving faster and doing better work.

I am so freaking excited for you to do this challenge, and I invite you to please, please send me an email at the end of the 20 days and let me know how it went for you. Let me know the change that you saw, because together we can all make the workplace a better place for everyone if we are deliberate, intentional, and trying.

Okay? It's all about trying practicing. We're not always gonna get it right, but by showing up for our teams, that's how we get better. See you next time. That's all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.