Welcome to the new manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome. I'm glad that you're here. And I hope you're having a great day. I have been releasing new episodes on Mondays for a couple of months now and I'm feeling quite proud for creating more consistency and how I produce and release episodes. If you've been following me for a while, you know, I did not used to always be this way used to be a little bit more. Haphazard never really knew what
a new episode was coming. But since October November or so, of last year, I'm proud to say that I have become much more consistent. And if you are looking to create consistency in your life with anything, I will tell you the one thing that helped me to do it so that you can take it and apply it in your own life. And it's when you're feeling, Resistance, look for the love and this is because your brain
is very intelligent. And of course, you know all the reasons why you need to do things. But anytime you're in resistance or avoiding or procrastinating, it's because there's some little nugget of love that you are not paying attention to. And when you connect with that and for you, it might be a sense of deep purpose or it might be the compelling reason. Why? There's always going to be a nugget of love in there.
And when you connect with it, it makes it a lot easier to let go of your judgment to drop your resistance and to move forward towards the thing that you want to do. So in my life, in this podcast, it was about becoming more consistent with my episodes and deciding that what I really love is, I love knowing that on Mondays, you get a new little It of inspiration. In sight, maybe an idea that will help make your week better. So that's what I wanted to start
with today. Now, the core topic I wanted to share with you is this idea of facilitator mindset, the job of a facilitator is to make things easier and when you think of yourself as a facilitator in a manager, Next, a couple things will happen. First. You'll start to question. Will, what exactly are we trying to accomplish here? Because if you're thinking, how do we make things easier that's naturally going to draw your attention to the question of what, like, what are we trying
to do? What is the outcome? We're trying to create. What is the goal that we want it? Immediately begins to connect you in spite of all the noise and all the distraction. What is the Come you want. What is the thing that really
matters here? It will also start to get you to pay attention to the bigger system or context you're in, or you can think of it as the environment that you in that you're in. So when you think about how can I make this easier, you'll start to look at what are the elements of the system? I'm working with in, what are the characteristics of the environment? Environment that I'm working in. What are the different personalities of the people that I'm working with?
And all of this is just so helpful because it begins to distill and organize all of the information that you're surrounded with. So instead of feeling overwhelmed, you begin to look at how things relate to one. Another, what the end result is that you're going after and then, where can you exert some influence? Lance or where can you make a decision that will simply let
everything be easier. Another thing that happens when you think with a facilitator mindset, is it places your attention on other people and it really orient's you, in this sense of I'm here for you. Like I'm here to make things
easier for you. Whether the person you have in mind is someone on your team or your manager or your Customer or your client that this orientation of, I'm here to make things easier, not just for me, but also for you helps a lot because that also gives you the perspective to ask, like, what is this other person need in order to make this outcome
happen? And they might not be able to see it because they're so in the weeds or on their own thing or because of their position in the organization. They may not have the same ability. To understand all of the different pieces.
Like, I've talked in the past how when you become a manager, you have access to more information, you get a different perspective on how different things fit together so you can ask questions and find really helpful answers in a way that another person might not be able to see if it's somebody on your team. So years ago, when I was managing a team they were mostly Lee older than me, the people on my team that were experts at what they did.
They'd been doing it for years and when I stepped into the role of being their manager, you know, my job was not to tell them what to do. They knew what to do. My job was not to onboard them. They had been on-boarded. My job, really was to facilitate things for them. What did they need? What could I do? What could I do? Could make things easier for them. And sometimes that was about adding context to information that was coming from leadership
or from upper management. Sometimes it was helping them focus on the things that I wanted to them to focus on and eliminate the distractions that were getting in the way of them doing their best work. And sometimes it was simply letting them know. I'm here to help. However, you need. Tell me how do you want to work together? What would be most helpful?
All for you, if you are managing a group of people that are really expert that have more knowledge that have more experience than you, I want to call your attention to this example because what I see a lot is the insecurity comes in because you might think if I'm the manager, I'm supposed to have more experience or knowledge, but that's not always true. Ultimately. I believe a great manager makes things easier for people to do good work. And it doesn't matter.
If you have the most information or the most experience, you don't need to have the most information or the most experience in order to be a great manager. Who helps people do great work, right? If you are managing a team of folks who are a lot younger than you or that have new experience and they're just learning and trying to understand what's expected and how Why I work in this environment, it's still really helpful to think in terms
of facilitator mindset. How can you make it easier for them to feel successful to understand? What is expected to understand what they're doing really well to feel valued. Like, how can you think about ways to make it easier for them to be doing great work? Facilitator mindset is also really Helpful, when you think about your boss, your manager, how can you make their life easier? How can you help make the desired outcomes that you both want easier to have happen?
And once you start practicing facilitator, mindset and just having this question, the back of your mind, how can I make this easier? What are we trying? To accomplish who are the personalities involved. What are the things I can do? Or the decisions? I can make that can facilitate the outcomes that we want.
It starts to make the work more dynamic, because you'll feel less like, I'm doing it wrong or, oh, I did it right this one time and it has to work all, you know, in the same way with all the people, it gets you into a state of being more Dynamic, more. Or willing and able to learn as you go more resilient. So you'll take things less personally, which number one is good for you because it takes a lot of energy. Let's be honest.
When we take things personally, and you end up creating better outcomes and it can be simple. So, this is the idea. I want to share with you here today, facilitator mindset. How can I make things easier in the A couple of years before the pandemic most of my work was facilitating, group trainings in different companies and I typically be there all day. So I'd be on site around 7:30 or 8:00.
We'd set up the room, make sure everything, you know, we had everything and organize the way that we needed it, then we would run a full day training on public speaking and communication skills. We'd wrap up around 5:00. Five and then have our after Workshop, debrief, and any cleanup and answering any questions. Now, public speaking is something a lot of folks have fear around, and they were stepping into a workshop with strangers that they'd never met, and they were committed to be
there for the full day. So, one of the things I got really good at was learning to ask this question. How can I make it easy for these folks who are coming for the day? How can Make it easy for them to get the most out of this training. How can I make it easy for them to do something? Scary? That, maybe they've never done before? How can I make it easy for them to be here for the whole day? And that was everything from thinking about food to standing up to moving to creating a
dynamic learning environment. So people didn't shut down or zone out to actually keep people engaged. Aged and present and actively learning through a full day event. And that's also what made it fun every time, even though I was always teaching the same course, kills the group dynamics were always different, the individual personalities, always different, the culture of the organization, always different, even within a single In addition, the culture
of the teams were different. Like the engineering team and the marketing team and the finance team and the sales team. They all had really different Dynamics and personalities. And so it became really fun to find all of these ways to reduce the friction and to increase the ease with which we collectively could reach our goal. Can I my give them this information and create the environment that allows them to
take it, to make it their own. And then to do the scary thing, which is speaking publicly in front of their peers or folks that they might not know very well. So this is what I want to offer to you. Facilitator mindset, how can you make things easier? Have fun with it? Don't try to be comprehensive and find like 20 things. It's start with just one thing maybe even just today. What is one thing today?
That can make things easier that can make it easier for you and your team and the folks that you work with to reach that outcome, that you're here to reach. All right, let it be easy. That is what I wanted to offer to you. I hope you have an amazing 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.
Kim nickel.com and sign up for a coaching consult. It can get better.