Welcome to the new manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here, and I hope you're doing well today. I wanted to start by reminding you of how important it is to surround yourself with people who believe in you.
And I know we tend to do this through our friends and our family, but especially in the context of work, it becomes really interesting when you start to have, have people who are similar to the level of work that you're doing and they do not work in your same organization. And the reason why this is so valuable is because when you are talking about the challenges you're dealing with that work when they're not also in that same environment, they see things very differently, they see you.
Differently so they can't just agree and say yeah. So I know that that one person is so difficult or I don't know what senior leadership is doing or yeah. Things have been kind of tense at work lately. They can't get into that agreement with you. Instead. What happens is, they'll see things from a different perspective. They'll see you through a different perspective. And as a result of that conversation, you begin to get A different perspective on yourself on your options on.
Also, the things that you're doing incredibly well, I often find, it's so easy to overlook your strengths, your unique qualities and skills, especially if you're in an organization or in an environment that doesn't readily acknowledge and honor them. So if you are really good at building relationships, You're really good at empathy.
If you are really skillful in a lot of these kind of invisible abilities, and they're not necessarily quote-unquote technical, but you rely on them and you use them in an expert level to do high quality work with other humans. Sometimes we forget to see that for ourselves if we don't experience other people, recognizing that and reflecting that That back to us. And I'm sharing this all in part because I just had this amazing experience at a conference, with
other coaches. So, they are my peers were all in similar business and doing similar kinds of work, but we're not in each other's day today. And so the quality of the conversation and the things that I came away with have just been so nourishing and so expansive. And I think sometimes when we are King in an organization. We forget how to do that.
We have to be really intentional because most of the conversations that you'll have at work, well either be with other people in your workplace or it might be a very informal conversation with the people you live with. When we are either complaining about work or being frustrated with our boss or frustrated with our team or when we're feeling, you know, like a specific celebration about something. But there's a different kind of conversation, you have.
And it's important to be mindful that you can choose to put yourself in a room or choose to put yourself in a conversation. That is different than the ones that happen informally in the course of the workspace. So that's what I wanted to open with. And so today, I wanted to also talk with you about how I think about the Your communication skills that you need as a manager.
And as a leader and for a lot of us, they become you skills that we haven't needed in order to become a successful as we are right now. So for example, you might be really self-reliant and because you are self-reliant, you don't ask for help you figure it out. You're Scrappy, you take a lot of responsibility. Stability. You just get in and do it and that can be incredibly valuable, especially just as a human in the world and when we are an individual contributor, that's great.
Those qualities will really serve you there. But then what happens is, when you start to rise into higher levels of managing others and you rise into higher levels of leadership with new responsibilities, Those same exact qualities, can hold you back because you will rely
exclusively on them. And as you are managing others and as you are rising into leadership, that will require additional kinds of communication skills, like learning, how to ask for the support and the help that you need learning how to ask for resources or to make difficult decisions. Visions that maybe not everyone
will be happy with. This has also been something I can relate to very much because I feel like a lot of my early life was the, you know, kind of the internal perspective of if I can, just make everyone happy, then I can have what I want and things will work. And, you know, that the discomfort of disagreement was so great that I would go to Great Lengths to avoid any kind of disagreement. Or even the perception. Like my own. Internal belief of is this person happy or unhappy?
Are they mad, or are they okay in my personal life in my school life? And in my early professional life, I didn't even realize for so long that that was driving so much of my behavior and choices. Until then, of course, I became a manager and realized that you may need to make decisions that not everyone will be happy with or even realizing that the people that you work with are humans and sometimes they will feel angry or sad or distracted and maybe it has nothing to do
with you. Maybe it has to do with their own life or what's happening in the bigger world. And so the goal is not to make everyone happy. We start to ask different kinds of questions. What is the goal? Here, what is Our intention here? How are you going to make decisions? And that will look really different when you are a manager versus when you are an individual contributor. And this includes not just a formal manager, reporting structure, this includes
managing relationships. If you are a product manager or a Project Lead, this cludes managing up. So being able to communicate effectively and influential E2 people in higher positions of decision-making, power in your organization, learning how to communicate, effectively will look different and I think sometimes we just forget that.
We think the thing I've been doing before is the thing that will continue to work rather than thinking of it in terms of I An amazing job with these skills that I've developed. And there are now new skills that it is time for me to learn and realize that any time you are learning a new skill.
There may be some discomfort, the discomfort of doing something new and not feeling good at it, the feeling of discomfort in the uncertainty of, can I do it correctly and I Might not it might not work the way I think.
As as I'm learning this new skill, we want to be aware of the growing pains that come along as part of the ride because when we don't understand that, yes, it is time to learn some new skills and they will be uncomfortable because sometimes learning something new is uncomfortable. When we don't acknowledge that. What happens is that we avoid it. We isolate. We try to put a mask or a cover. Like I hope, I hope this works and I hope people don't, you know, notice or get upset.
And we also tend to get over responsible and overworked. So instead of learning how to communicate differently or manage our own experience of it, we kind of doubled down on the thing that we know and we grow our coping This is also how we can get a kind of scope creep, that erodes our boundaries and it can very easily create an unsustainable relationship that you have with your work where the ability to communicate requirements, boundaries requests if we're not doing
that. And then we're really kind of setting ourselves up To go into a relationship where we're just building our coping strategies, we are overworking being overly responsible, and avoiding the discomfort of communication by taking on the discomfort of an absence of work-life balance. So, when we think about why is it important to acknowledge that, as you're growing, there may be some discomfort. There may be new skills that it's time to.
And giving yourself the acknowledgement and the grace of where you are in your particular Journey. It makes all the difference in the world. So some specific communication skills that you will need to have. I talked about self-advocacy a lot self-advocacy. Is your ability to speak up on behalf of your self advocacy is speaking up on behalf of someone and there will be times that you need. To speak up and advocate for your team, or for it the client,
or for your idea. And self-advocacy is when you're speaking up for yourself, whether you're asking for a resource but also it's about your own, inner conversation with yourself. So if your internal conversation is 0, I can just make do, I don't want to bother anybody. I shouldn't need to ask for help. I should be able To figure this out on my own.
I mean, yeah. But if you are standing up for yourself and for your well-being, you might make other kinds of choices about your time about your energy about how you are choosing to be with all of the demands and requirements. So advocating for self also looks like that. It's just What you choose for yourself because you decide I want this. And every part of me is worthy of care. And so I'm going to do this because this is good for me and that's okay.
You will also need the skill of being direct and clear and kind and where I see a lot of folks get tripped up on this is they'll either be direct but they'll forget the kindness and it's not that it's From a mean place. But if you tend to be uncomfortably being direct, then you will avoid it until you kind of just have a break you get. So frustrated, you say look okay I've been trying to tell you and you haven't been getting it. So this is what I'm trying to
say. It'll come out with a lot of frustration and impatience behind it. When you're not practiced at it, or it will simply be very reactive. And you'll kind of drop the kindness part and you'll drop also, the clarity of what are you trying to affect here? What is the effect that you want here? And for a lot of us, you know, we're kind of trying to understand what is required. What is expected? When we think about being direct and clear and kind, it is such a great service.
It is the idea that I'm going to make this as easy as possible For us to communicate and to understand what is expected and required here, because I know that's what we want to do. We really want to save time, we want to save energy, we want to build trust, we want to work well together and so I'm going
to be direct. But from this place that is clear, because I've done my own thinking, first about what is it that I want to be clear about and what are the clear outcomes that I want us to create together? Weather. And I'm going to be able to deliver this from the ground of kindness. It doesn't mean the person won't be unhappy or frustrated, or they might not have their own reaction, but you can have so much more control about your side of that.
And when, you know that it becomes less scary because you start to do it more and more, you start to To do it in small ways. So that, then the bigger ways of being direct or things feel more high stakes, those start to see it feel a lot more, like I can do this because I have been practicing in these other areas. And I have to say that is one of
the skills. So the ability to be direct and clear and kind in a way that builds trust, it is one of the skills that will save you and everyone you work with So much time. Sometimes I see my clients get a little bit. Like we, they tend to think that communicating fast is. High-value like it's demonstrating being highly responsive, but what ends up happening, is it just creates this great sense of urgency. It's reactive and so it actually creates more confusion and more
back and forth. And that gets really draining for everyone and it takes a lot of time, rather than When we're able to slow down, be mindful notice, okay? What's actually happening here? What is it that I want to affect here, what will be my strategic approach here? Then our communication becomes more effective more efficient. Everything starts becoming easier. When we do some of that intentional work and how do I want to communicate this upfront?
You'll also use these same skills in giving feedback. Back, you're going to give feedback up to your manager, you're going to give feedback across to the colleagues that you work with. You may give feedback of course to the people that report directly to you in a formal way. And as you think about how can you use the skill of feedback? What are all the different ways that you can use this to help
you get more work done easier. And with just a greater A sense of like a greater sense of Harmony, like a greater sense of ease fullness, not just that, the work becomes easier, but it just feels more easeful. I know so many of my clients, say, I need to give feedback to someone and I don't know how and I feel really anxious about it. So I've been having the conversation in my mind non-stop for like a month and we avoid
the conversation. You're actually Having it over and over and over again, in your own mind. So, learn that skill because it will save you so much time and so much energy. So thinking about communication skills, realizing it's not just the what you say it's not just the words, but it's also the mindset, you're bringing to how you are going to communicate, how will you be direct and concise? Kind and clear, how will you use that to establish balance and boundaries?
How will you use that to give effective feedback to anyone, you need to give feedback to both the people that report to you. But also to working Partners in the organization, even to clients that can be one of the scariest things for folks, is to think about, how do I give feedback? Back to a client because you know there's a fear of making them angry or feeling like. Oh I can't have any boundaries with clients because their
clients. And if you work in an environment where that's the prevailing belief, then you're going to resist it, you're going to just go along and be like I guess I can't have boundaries with clients because I don't see that modeled anywhere and you will forget that you are also a brilliant person. And who can establish relationships in your own way. They might look different, they
might work better. I see this a lot actually with a lot of my clients, they work with me, they learn how to think differently about what their problems and challenges are. So then they approached the solutions from a very different angle and things start working in. These really like surprisingly beautiful ways and then what happens is, Colleagues, look at them and say wait, how did you
do that? How did you get that client to behaved so well or how did you get that person in that other department tube you so available for you like how did you create these incredible Partnerships in the organization and it comes back to do. It's the way that I communicate and is the way that I'm thinking about how I'm going to do it.
I've got a strategic thinking happening, I'm being very mindful I'm being very aware of my own boundaries and limits and needs and instead of avoiding that or just hoping that other people will see and figure it out. I've learned how to take control of that in a way that is really effective for me specifically because we're all different.
And I just want to acknowledge to that communication skills is not about kind of making you different and how you communicate We still keep your own voice and your own style, but we're able to clarify and then amplify and grow some new
skills, if that makes sense. And the reason I mentioned that and the reason why this matters when you're thinking about, how do I improve my communication skills is because it's not about mimicking, somebody else, it's not about Taking this other person that you work with who's really different from you like, so if you are an introvert, it's not about learning how to perform the behaviors of an extrovert. Okay, it really is about understanding.
What is it that makes you effective in your own specific way and leaning into that, and once you do it, just becomes everything becomes easier. So that is what I wanted to share with you is, when you're thinking about the skills for communication that got you here, realizing there will be new ones now that you're growing into leadership and into Higher levels of responsibility as a manager. And I want to invite you to come into this 12 week program.
That I'm leading, we start February 14th. So registration is open now and you want to be there if focusing on communication skills and mindset are important to you right now. And honestly, they are important to you right now. And I see that because this will set up your year to be so much better than if you continue to feel like you're in a voidance or stumbling or struggling with
this, it's a small group. We meet every week for 12 weeks, we're focusing on communication, skills, and mindset, and all these different situations and because it's live and we are all together. You get to ask me questions and learn from me directly, but you also get to learn with People who are also managing but who are not working with you. So you'll start to see your own challenges in a new light.
You'll also start to see your own genius in a new light because my guess is that there are things you're doing well that you might be overlooking and not fully appreciating. So we're going to get more clear on what your specific strengths are and then how to use those to develop. Complimentary and additional abilities and capacities. Right now we've got a product manager a project lead. We've got a senior director, a couple of new directors.
So if that sounds like you then I want you to come and join us because this is going to be incredibly helpful and the one hour that we're together, each week is going to make the rest of your week so much. And that in turn has a Compound Effect that's going to Ripple out for the rest of your year. So come bring your questions about communication and boundaries and how to be direct and how to say the uncomfortable thing, but in a kind way, bring all of that here so we can
workshop at together. So that you feel supported and more capable and prepared to then do that out in the workplace because we're also talking mindset, you will also be learning. And what are the things that keep you from going forward? When you think I know I need to have a conversation but I just don't want to. We're going to uncover for you, what? Specific level and flavor of avoidance or discomfort.
That is because you can have all the information in the world, but you won't actually apply it if you don't feel like invited into it like You can have all the information in the world but you still won't put it into practice until you understand. What is the, what is the bridge for you between the knowing and the doing? And it's always in the being who you're being, and that's a mindset thing. So, that's what I wanted to leave you with today and invite
you in to go to my website. Kim nickel.com go to the new manager, page and right at the top, you'll see a link. Link to register and you'll see all of the information so go do that. And let's get you in and we will make this happen. All right, have an amazing week. Thank you for being here and for listening and I will talk to you next time. Hey before you go if you like this podcast, please leave a review. Tell me why you listen and what has helped you Thanks so much.
I'll see you next time.