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. You're listening to the New Manager podcast. My name is Kim Nickel. I am a coach. You might think of me as an executive coach, a life coach, a leadership coach. My clients describe me as all of those things because we work on all of those things to help them be more effective and just more satisfied in their work life, in
their personal life. It all connects. Today, I want to share with you some lessons that I have been learning by watching the Summer Olympic Games. Oh my gosh, I have been so inspired, so impressed, so blown away by the hard work and the talent that I've been seeing. And there's so many athletes and so many events and I have only been able to see a little bit, but a couple of things really stood out to me that I know can help you in your day-to-day work
and your life. What I've come to really believe is that when we are feeling more confident, calm, more capable in what we are facing at work, the rest of our lives will also be better. You will have less frustration to bring home and vent about with your partner. You will be less distracted. You won't be thinking about work so much when you're feeling better about how work is going.
And on the other side of that, you know when your personal life is feeling fulfilling and you're feeling really happy about who you are as a person and what you know that the trajectory and path of your life is, and that includes your professional life. Then you will also have a better time at work because you'll be able to see it more in that bigger picture perspective. Think sometimes we forget that every job is temporary. Even if you're a founder, even that job is temporary.
There will be a time when you choose to move on, or maybe it's not your choice, but you are suddenly released from that relationship, either through a reorg or through a layoff. Or maybe something happens, the company is merged with another one and things just end. There are so many different why, regardless of whether you choose it or it just happens, when we remember that every job is temporary, that we're only here
for a certain amount of time. It helps to reframe, I think, and kind of rescope the size of the problems and the challenges that you're going to face over the course of your career. And I like asking this question, which is what do you want to do with the time that you have? So while you are here in this role in this organization, what is the effect you would like to have? What does it look like for you to be effective as a leader or as a manager?
What is the effect you want to have on your team? As people, you know, sometimes we have to step into a leadership role under the most challenging of circumstances. And while there may be a lot that's out of your hands and outside of your control, you might simply decide that even though things are really hard, you want to be a person who helps to ease the load of the people you work with with.
Or you might want to choose to be the person who helps uplift those you work with by reminding them of what they're good at, by helping them navigate their careers, by helping them to focus on the most important parts of what needs to happen and setting aside the things that we don't have control of that are maybe not so important. So our time in any job is
temporary. And coming back to what I was initially thinking that I wanted to share with you is watching these athletes has really given me a couple of things to think about. And specifically, watching the US gymnastics teams. And there are three lessons that I'm taking away that I want to now present to you that they might be useful for you. So first lesson is that a powerful team has diverse strengths.
And I don't know about you, but I have watched some of the footage of Steven Nutter Rosik, and he is the US gymnast who is the pommel horse guy. And Oh my gosh, he is so good at this, this apparatus, and it has traditionally been one of the most difficult ones. And the US team of my understanding is that have historically not done very well
at this one particular skill. And years ago, Steven decided this was the one thing in gymnastics that he was going to specialize in. He wanted to be really, really good at this. And he was, you know, he was brought onto the team because of his very specific skill and this one very difficult thing that as a team they had a lot of strength except for in this one place.
And so when you think about what does it mean to have a really effective and powerful team, it includes like you might even say, it requires a diversity of strengths. You don't want everyone to be the same. And so for you, when you think about the leadership role that you have and the people that you have to work with, ask yourself,
what are my people good at? And especially if you have someone on your team and they are really challenging for you, like if you think like, oh, this person is just they're not stepping up. They're not, you know, they're not, you know, showing up the way I would want them to. Maybe they're just very difficult to work with. Ask yourself, OK, So what is this person really good at?
What is their strength? Maybe they're currently working in an environment, you know, or, or dealing with stuff in their outside life that is interfering with their ability to show their strength. We don't always know kind of what's going on with somebody. But when you ask yourself, what is it that each person on my team is really good at? What are their strengths? How can I identify and
understand what that is? Because then you'll be able to work with those strengths and develop them and use them even better. And sometimes people don't even know what their strengths are because they come easily perhaps. And they just, you know, have always been able to be good at this one thing. And so they might not even recognize it. So one of the other values is when you have a conversation with people, right? Because you don't always just
have to guess. You don't have to observe someone and identify their strength or you don't have to guess. You know, I, based on what I've seen, I would guess your strength is this. You can also ask people, how would you describe your strength? What strengths are you seeing in your work lately? What strengths have we not been able to use? What strengths are you not bringing because maybe you don't have the resources or the right
work to line up with that? Get really curious about the strengths of the people on your team and also for yourself, what are the strengths that you are bringing? What are the strengths that maybe you haven't had the opportunity to exercise in this particular space? And also remember, when you remember that a powerful team has diverse strengths, then it's also that reminder, that sense of ease that your job as the manager is not to be the best at everything. It's not to be better than
everyone at the thing. This becomes really important when you are, for example, managing people with greater subject matter expertise than you have. Your job isn't necessarily to be the best at that thing in order to be a really outstanding manager of people who are better than you at a specific subject matter. It's also not your job to know the most.
So you might work with people that have been in your organization longer than you have, or maybe you're joining a a team that has been intact for a while. So they kind of have a way of working. They already have a lot of organizational intelligence and knowledge that you don't because you're new to the organization or you're new to the team. That is OK.
Sometimes we forget that maybe the strength you bring is the strength of the outside perspective, the strength of fresh eyes, the strength of everything that you've learned by having a different kind of background, either a different kind of work history or a different kind of life history, that now allows you to see things in a different way, in a way that is valuable because now that you're there, you can see things in a way that others would not be able to see.
So that's the first lesson. OK, Powerful teams have diverse strengths. Consider that for yourself as well As for the people on your team. Another lesson that I got from watching the Olympics is that different bodies have different skills and specialties. It is amazing to see all of the different Olympic athletes and see how their bodies are different. They are taller or shorter or, you know, more muscles in one part of their body and less than another.
And it is amazing to see the variety of powerful, highly competent athletes. And they have different shapes
and sizes and different ages. And it's, it's wonderful to be reminded that excellence doesn't look one way, that there are lots of ways a person can look kind of on the surface and yet still be exceptional, like world class level at the thing that they do. And I find this is really helpful because one of the questions my clients come to me with, especially when they're in a new level in their career or they're looking at where they want to go in their work is
they'll ask, well, what does it look like to be there? How am I supposed to be? And I'll look around to see if, you know, for examples. And sometimes that creates over identification and over comparing with something that is way outside of your actual style preference and the way that you are. Great. So if somebody said I want to be an Olympic athlete and, you know, and they looked around and they said, oh, here's an Olympic athlete, you know, they are a shot putter.
Oh my gosh. I guess in order to be an Olympic athlete, I need to look like that. OK, That would be not enough information in order to determine if that was a useful role model, right? Or you might have someone say I want to be an Olympic athlete. I guess I need to look like this other person. Instead, you want to ask that question of you know, how Like, what are my strengths? What can I really excel at? How do I excel in what environment and in what
circumstance do I excel? How can I really tap into what like who I am and what I am bringing in order to achieve excellence and realize that might look very different than the others around me? And that's totally OK. So your leadership style does not have to match somebody else's. The way that you are successful does not have to match someone else's.
This can feel kind of scary, especially if you're used to becoming successful by kind of quietly reading the room, learning the unwritten rules, and then operating within them. That is a very effective and useful skill to have, right? It's a way of kind of creating harmony, reducing friction.
It's a way of being kind of sensitive to cultural context and social norms that might not be made explicit, but you want to make sure that you're not abandoning other qualities, strengths, and values that you bring just because of who you
are. And sometimes being able to navigate that nuance and that distinction can be a bit of a tricky thing, especially as you move into higher levels of responsibility where you might feel like there's more pressure for two reasons #1 when you are in that higher level, more people are looking to you for guidance and for direction. And the other thing is that when you are in a higher level of leadership, there's that feeling of there's more at stake now.
You might feel more fear about doing things that seem a little bit different than what you're being presented with because the fear might be if I do this my own way and it doesn't work, there's so much more at stake and others might be hurt.
Whether it's like this doesn't work, it will have a bad effect on the people on my team or on our customers or on our constituents or, you know, they're the idea that when you're in a leadership role, if something goes wrong, it's not just you, but it's those around you that are depending on you
that might be affected. So that also can create a subtle pressure to compare yourself in a way that starts to move against your own intuitions about how we know how you want to lead and what kind of leader and manager you want to be. So that's Part 2 lesson. Two different bodies, different skills and specialties. That's all. That's all part of what excellence looks like.
It can look different. And then my third big lesson, my third big insight from watching the Olympics and especially the women's gymnastics team, the women's U.S. team is have fun. I mean, have fun, cheer for everyone, cheer for yourself, definitely acknowledge all of your hard work and like, revel in your own abilities, Yes. And cheer for your team, cheer for the other athletes, cheer for everyone there because everyone is there working hard and doing everything they can to
do well. And there was, you know, a bit of an interview I caught with Simone Bai files, and she was talking about another athlete who was really close on her heels in terms of the scoring. And she said she was cheering for her. And she was also kind of worried. She's like, she's doing really well. But there was no animosity in it. There was no unkindness in it. She was just like, I was cheering for. I wanted to see her. Do you really, really well?
I was a little nervous because she was getting so close. But, you know, she did such a great job. And so I love that so much, that idea of we can celebrate and cheer for each other, that we can celebrate and cheer for others who are also in our field wanting to do well. And I think especially when you are thinking about your career. So yes, when you're a manager, for sure you want to remember to celebrate the small wins for yourself as well As for your
team. That's an important part of longevity of creating sustainable work environment where people feel supported and they're willing to sometimes go the extra mile because if something doesn't work out, they're not worried about being punished or about something bad happening. It's a way to foster trust and a sense of connection with each other. But also remember, every job is temporary.
And so there may come a time when you are looking to join another team, either another team in your organization or another team beyond this current organization. And so when you're cheering for others, that requires, number one, that you're paying attention to others, that you're noticing who else is here, you know, beyond, you know, we don't want to get so tunnel vision that we're only looking at ourselves and our individual team, but we also want to look
beyond who else is here. What are they working on? Can I cheer for and celebrate them as well? Can I hold that sense of, hey, we're all in this together? And even if it is a literal competition, can you still feel a genuine sense of appreciation, a sense of joy, and a sense of
wanting to see others do well? I think one of the things that makes that possible is when you know that you are doing your absolute best to do what you came here to do, to be who you came here to be, then it doesn't take away from you to acknowledge and celebrate others. And when we think about, you know, your career as part of an ecosystem, like you are not just an individual in an individual role, you're also a person who's operating in this bigger
ecosystem. That is a way to maintain that sense of awareness of connection with others because you might find yourself in a different part of that ecosystem one day. You might want to maintain relationship relationships with other people who you see doing interesting work. And the reverse is also true. There might come a day when you are hiring and on your team, you're trying to decide who else do we need to bring onto this team. And you might think, you know what?
I saw this other person, I remember them having this big win. I remember cheering for them. I wonder what they're doing now and if they'd be open to a conversation about a potential opportunity or partnership. Over here, so there's a kind of, you know, connectedness, a kind of mutuality when we think about this in terms of that bigger picture. And so I wanted to share that with you too. I have so many other thoughts, but that is what I wanted to share with you.
You know, there was an an earlier episode I did around you will get valuable leadership lessons from everyday moments. I feel like this week with the Olympics going on, just begin to notice what kinds of inspiration and insights you can take from these incredible athletes and all that they're doing. You will be able to gather something that will help you in your day-to-day life too. So thank you so much for listening. Have a great week and I will
talk to you next time. When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your life, and when you're happier in your life, you're more effective at work. I can help. Go to my website, kimnickel.com and sign up for a coaching consult. It can get better.