Welcome to the new Manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim Nichol. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. Today's episode is about what I am calling the dishwasher dilemma. Before we get to that, I want to tell you that the next cohort of communication strategies for managers, the six week course that I teach to help you become more confident and feel more calm in everyday situations.
Enrollment is open now, so you'll find a link in the show notes or go to my website, kimnickel.com to find information about registering for that. Also, your work might be delighted to cover the cost, so they can't say yes unless you ask. And if you have trouble asking, or if you're not sure what to ask, reach out to me directly through my website and I can walk you through a framework to help you advocate for yourself. So check that out. Now let's get back to the
dishwasher dilemma. Imagine that you have a kitchen filled with dirty dishes, and the job is to get those dishes clean. You've got a dishwasher. You have the way that you like to load the dishwasher. But you notice, you know, I'm the one always doing the dishes in this household, and I am not the only person who lives in this household. It might be time to delegate this task to somebody else. And that person might be your partner, your spouse, your child.
It might be a roommate. But let's just say, you know, you've decided it's time to delegate this task, let somebody else do it. And so you tell them exactly what to do. Hey, you know, your job for this week is to do the dishes. You're going to load the dishwasher, run the dishwasher so that the dishes are clean and not just piled up in the sink. Now let's imagine that they say, great, got it? They go ahead and they do it.
And you open the dishwasher after seeing what they've done, and you feel this knot in your stomach. Your heart sinks and you think, what on earth were they thinking? The way the dishwasher is loaded is not the way you like to do it. You've got very precise way of approaching this and you've got very sound reasons for why you do it in this way. Now, at this point, you've got some options. You can find that person and sell them. You've done a terrible job. I have no idea what you were
thinking. You need to do it again. You could give them a point by point instruction about here's every single thing that you did wrong in the way that you did that task. You can say, you know what, maybe dishes is just not for you. We're going to put you on a different task instead. Never mind. I will do it the way that I like it to be done. You have a few different ways to think about how you want to approach the situation.
And the reason I'm telling you this right now is because I think sometimes what I see with my students and with my clients is they sometimes, like you, don't realize you already know how to think strategically. You do it all the time. You make decisions all the time about how you want to communicate something in order to get it done. You probably delegate tasks more than you realize, more than you
give yourself credit for. And so part of my job as the coach is to help turn on that light switch so you realize, oh, I'm not starting from scratch. I'm actually starting with a great foundation of skills and thinking and practice. I just need to apply it into this new situation, into this work relationship, into this work situation.
And so with dishwasher dilemma, it's that moment where you realize delegating a task, telling someone, you know, here's the outcome I want, here's the thing I need you to do, right? The outcome is we need these dishes clean the way I want you to do it. You're going to use the dishwasher, put the dishes in the dishwasher. The person you give that instruction to might have their own ideas of how to do that. They might have their own strategy.
Their strategy might be I need to get this done as quickly as possible, so I'm going to optimize for speed and I'm just going to dump everything in there all helter Skelter. Whereas for you, because you've got perspective or knowledge or different priorities, you might think to yourself, OK, in order to have the best outcome, to make sure the dishes really get clean, we need to rinse them so that they're not covered in stuck on baked on dried, on leftover foods and sauces.
You might say, OK, the forks and the spoons and the knives, all those utensils, they need to go in this direction. I don't know, in your house, maybe it's handles down, maybe it's handles up. Most people have a preference and they have reasons why. Maybe One Direction of those utensils, it works better to get them clean. There's probably a reason why you like it a certain way.
You might have an internal rule of when we put dishes in the dishwasher, we need to make sure that these kinds of dishes are not knocking against each other. Because maybe certain kinds of dishes or bowls or plates are more fragile, are more prone to break, and you want to reduce the risk of breakage. There might even be some things that are not to go into the dishwasher, and you might understand that very clearly. But the person to whom you delegate that task, they may not
know. So when you're thinking about delegating, when you're thinking about communicating instructions, there's going to be a few different things in play #1 realize you probably have a more specific idea of what you want then you've even articulated. If you have never had to specifically lay out these nuanced decisions about how something is supposed to happen and why there's a good chance that this other person doesn't know. You might have more organizational knowledge or background.
You might have experience about why things work a certain way a little bit better than another way. And so you're going to find out pretty quickly what assumptions were you holding that this other person did not hold. You'll also start to learn what is it that you are prioritizing for that the other person may not have had that same priority.
Sometimes we get to the same end result, but we get there in different ways and it can be very interesting to understand what was the thinking, what was the strategy or the reasoning behind the choices that this person made and how they were different from your own. You're also going to be managing relationships and emotions, not just giving a task, but also thinking about what's the relationship I want to create
with this person. Often with people in our personal lives, we actually want to manage that relationship in a way that builds more trust, that builds more sense of team. We don't want to be feeling at odds or against the people that we care about, the people that we live with, the people in our families. So even if you look at that dishwasher load and you think, Oh my gosh, what were they thinking? This is terrible.
You might not go to them yelling and telling, you know, just like tearing them apart and telling them, you know, why they were so careless and terrible. Instead, you might say, OK, I want this person to feel successful at this job so that they do it again and I don't have to do it. And how can I manage this relationship in a way that helps us feel connected so that they are receptive to what I have to
share with them? And maybe even I can communicate with them in a way that sparks their creative thinking or helps them to open up and share with me, you know, what their process is. That maybe we can develop a way forward together so that we have more trust because we're going to be working together for a long time and we want that to be good. So thinking about how do I manage that relationship and how do I manage the emotions, your own emotions as well as the other persons.
I think this is one of the reasons why stepping into a manager role can feel so draining because there's a lot of emotional labor that goes with that job. Because you are not just managing tasks and budgets and numbers and priorities, but there's now a lot of work that you will have to do that is about managing relationships, managing emotions, building trust, influencing people.
There's so many other things that will come onto your plate now that maybe we're not there when you were an individual contributor. And of course, at work, every team is a little different. Maybe you are the outside person who is joining an intact team that has been working really well together. Maybe they loved their last manager and they're not really excited to have somebody new.
Or maybe you're the person on the internal, you know, on the internal team who got promoted and now instead of being peers, now you've been elevated to a decision making position above your friends. And so now maybe there's a question of what does this friendship look like? How do I, you know, still do trust here? If we used to be peers, but now I'm their manager, Maybe there's
a big age gap. Maybe you're managing people that are a lot younger than you, or maybe you're managing people in a generation or two older than you. That can create some really interesting dynamics as well. And so this idea of thinking strategically, what are the reasons behind the decisions you're going to make about how you communicate, how you're going to work with people, that's so important. And it's a muscle that you're
going to use every single day. So the more that you have awareness of this and you feel like, OK, yes, this is exactly what I'm doing. I'm simply making decisions and I'm communicating and I want to do that from a place that has me feeling calm and grounded, very intentional, as opposed to being reactive or exhausted or just, you know, making decisions from feeling overwhelmed and insecure.
We want to reduce that kind of decision making as much as possible because it tends to be less useful and less effective in the long term. So that's what I wanted to share with you today. You know, when you think about the dishwasher dilemma and your own experience in your own life, have you ever delegated the dishwashing task to someone and then felt disappointed or frustrated by how they carried out that task? Or maybe you are the one who said, hey, don't worry, I'll do the dishes.
And you stepped up. You did the dishes and then someone was disappointed or frustrated at you and they didn't like the way you did it. And you felt micromanaged or unappreciated, even though you had gone ahead and completed this thing and the way that you thought was right. That's the same kind of dilemma that happens in the workplace.
And it's so important to feel like you've got a pathway or a road map for how to address those kinds of situations because they will only happen more and more. The good news is what I've found is once you understand that once you see that dynamic and have a way of approaching it, it will start to reduce that feeling of overwhelm and frustration and you'll start to feel more trust in your own judgment. You'll start to realize you really are capable, you really
can do this. And you'll start to like blossom in your own leadership style and your own communication style. So that is what I hope for you. That is what I want for you and for all the people that work with you. If that's something that you want my help with, then join the next cohort of communication strategies for managers. Or if you really want to dive into individual goal setting and strategies for reaching those goals, then you and I can talk
about one-on-one coaching. I do have room for new clients starting in April, so go to my website, chemical.com, and schedule time for us to talk about that if that's something that's on your mind. All right, that's what I got for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you 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.