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 doing well. Today, we're going to Dive Right In to our topic. There are three skills that I think it's important to have in your tool kit. No matter where you are in the organization, whether you officially manage people or not, these are skills that you can use to make your It's better to make your relationships better and to get more of what you
want. However, you define that.
So, the three skills are talking about today, are the skill of advocacy, which is the skill of speaking up on behalf of someone might be on behalf of yourself or your team, or your customer or client, the skill of advocacy speaking up on behalf of someone Number two, the skill of feedback and this becomes really important when we are officially managing people, because that's often built in to the job requirement, that you give performance feedback, but there are lots of others times when
you will find it useful, or even just really important to give feedback to someone whether they report to you or not, maybe you're giving feedback to your manager, as part of the way that you manage up. Maybe you're giving feedback to a client as part of managing that client relationship or feedback. To someone you work with cross-functionally as a way of establishing. How can we work effectively together?
So the skill of giving feedback and number three, the skill of boundaries and I'm speaking especially about boundaries as an agreement, you make with yourself. And what I have seen and also experienced in my own life is that often we come to the learning of boundaries when we feel that our boundaries have been violated when someone does something or says something to us. That feels maybe not okay or disrespectful or injurious and we think, wow! What is that?
Feel so bad? And we realized, oh my gosh, I feel like they just totally walked all over me.
I feel they really, you know, ignored or disregarded me or they really treated me badly and that's what happened here is like there was a boundary violation but what I want us to focus on is first like what is the agreement you have with yourself about what you need about how you want people to treat you about what your working hours and expectations are because when you have clarity about Out what that is for you, it makes everything else a lot easier.
So that's the angle that we're going to look at today. Now the reason I'm talking about these three topics together is because they are connected through one specific question. And the question is, what do you want? And when you start to answer this question for yourself, what is it that I want? Then you have a few different ways to go about making That happen.
So if what you want is, you know, more time for something, maybe that's an advocacy issue, you need to advocate for a change in schedule or you need to Advocate to have additional Staffing to free, you up to do this other thing, they could also be advocating for summer hours. A lot of organizations have been experimenting with different ways of doing hours in the summer.
As they realize You know, people are still burned out and it actually is more cost effective and helpful for retention and hiring when we do some kind of reduced or, you know, different arrangement for summer. So it might be advocating for that. I also see a lot of folks advocating for professional development. Maybe there's a course you want to take or a coach you want to work with or a conference you want to attend.
But asking speaking up on behalf of your own learning development and growth is Place I see obvious advocacy, come up when you get clear about what you want. Sometimes the skill you'll reach for, is the skill of feedback that could look like giving feedback to your manager and saying, hey, you know, are you open to some feedback about the way we've been doing our one-on-ones? I have an idea that I think might be good to try out. And what do you think about that?
Right? So you can use feedback as a way of opening a conversation. Ian to get more of what you want when you're thinking about the people that report to you, what you want, might be something related to their performance or two like a quality of work or to a certain Behavior. There might be something that you want to see change as a result of giving that feedback. And this is important to be clear about because the mistake we can make is I'm just going to
give comprehensive feedback. Which starts to feel number one, overwhelming number two, like a criticism dump. And number three, people can get lost in general or comprehensive feedback because they don't know what you actually want. And the more you can be precise and intentional. I'm giving you the specific feedback because this is what I want, right? It makes it a lot more
effective. It's not just around correcting Behavior but you might have someone on your team who's expressed to you their ambition and desire for their professional growth. So if you have someone and let's say they want to start presenting to stakeholders or they want to start leading more of certain meetings or presentations. You might give them feedback related to that skill set so they know how to continue to improve. You might even give them
feedback around. Here's what I see you doing really well. Well I want to make sure you understand that you're doing that really well because if you don't know that you're doing it really well then you will disregard it over. Look it you won't know that that's a quality in a skill and a strength you possess and that it's valuable and then we get to boundaries. So when you're thinking about what is it that you want, sometimes that's a boundary skill.
If what you want is more time for other things, whether it's other work things or It's more personal life things. Maybe what you need to do is start to create some agreements about, you know, your own work, patterns and habits.
I see this a lot as you start to shift into management roles because now you're having to ask questions about what you delegate about, how much you take on yourself about the balance between, are you giving yourself time to do strategic thinking, or are you only We in tactical execution mode, and that can be a hard transition to make, because it can feel really satisfying to take things off the box, which we do when we're
in that tactical execution mode. And sometimes, that time to pause and look up at the forest and do more of that strategic thinking, can feel less satisfying, because you don't have that sense of, oh, I've done it right? Like, it's It can feel a little bit open-ended and, you know, it can also feel good to do their urgent things that are, you know, that the messages in the inbox or the messages in the slack channels. And then we step away from that.
Really valuable, but non-urgent strategic thinking strategic planning mode. So when you are going through your day, going through the week, notice Like what is it that you want and the more clear you can be with that the better, although, to be honest with you, sometimes you won't know exactly what that is. But when you know what you want then you can start to ask how might I get this? How about I create this? Do I need to Advocate?
Do I need to speak up on behalf of myself or my team to need to ask for something and make a case? For why we should receive this resource? Do I need to give feedback to someone? Do I need to establish? Boundary. Do I need to clarify an agreement with myself? And once you consider all of those options, I want to offer one more which is the possibility is what you want available to you in your current environment.
It's like if what you really want is an avocado and you're in an apple orchard and you're surrounded by the most beautiful, delicious apples and you go from tree to tree, looking for an avocado because what you really want is an avocado, you can try really hard. You're not going to get an avocado off of that apple tree. It doesn't matter how smart you are. It doesn't matter how good of a person you are, it doesn't matter how long you've been there.
How much time you've invested in that apple orchard, it will not deliver an avocado to you. And so you have a couple of options you can either. Decide, I'm going to plant an avocado tree in this apple orchard or you can say you know what I have learned so much and I have really enjoyed being in this apple orchard and now I'm going to take myself into an avocado Orchard or into a place where there are avocados because
that is what I want next. And I think, sometimes what happens is we get this sense of loyalty or the sense of if I try hard enough, I can make this better, or I can make this happen and that is not always the case. Sometimes it's really useful to just notice, okay, here's what I want. I am not seeing that available here and so it might be time to leave.
It might be time to go someplace out, not to go some place next to go someplace else so I can have this next thing that I want to try or this next thing that I want to make. So each of these are skills, they all require knowing what you want speaking up. And this is where we as humans if we feel uncomfortable or Nervous speaking up will tend to just silence ourselves hold back grin and Barrett absorb the discomfort and the danger with that.
Is it ends up draining us, it gets exhausting, it builds up resentment and then passive aggressive behavior can also start to creep in. So the more honest you can be about what you want without any judgment about it just yeah here's what I want and then start to Think Through how could I advocate for this? How could I offer feedback to someone that might, you know, facilitate me getting this or do I need to re-establish, or create some kind of boundary in
order to make that possible. That is what I wanted to offer to you today. Thank you so much for being here for listening along and I will see you next time if you know, it's time to level up, but you feel your perfectionism. And Self Doubt and uncertainty getting in the way then come work with me. We'll have six months of one-on-one coaching and it all starts by going to my website, chemicalguys.com coaching and joining my waitlist talk to you soon.