Impact Society

Dreading sharing some bad news with a team member? Here’s 3 steps to approach it 👇. If you have bad news to share with someone, the kind and effective way to do it is directly and with compassion. Don’t beat around the bush or procrastinate. Giving bad news is hard. But receiving it is certainly harder. So meet the other person as a human. Be present, sensitive and compassionate. Don’t shut down emotionally and be a hard arse. Here’s three steps to approach it: 1. Plan it - Write down your objectives for the meeting: as a minimum this should include: a) Clearly communicating the key messages to the other person; and b) Ensuring the other person feels supported c) Understanding the other person's point of view - Write down your key messages clearly - Write word for word your opening line, which you’ll use to kick start yourself e.g. “I have some bad news to share, so I think it’s best I get straight to it and clearly lay it all out on the table - I want start by sharing my objectives for the meeting” 2. Do it - Keep informal chit chat to a minimum. You’ll likely be nervous and the other person will sense it. Lingering in the chit chat will torture both of you and raise the other person's anxiety - Say your opening line, word for word, if you need to. This will kick start the conversation - State your objectives, including very clearly saying you wish to support them - Clearly articulate your key messages - Ask the other person to share their thoughts and ask questions - State the next steps 3. Follow up - Send an e-mail that reiterates your objectives and key messages, and the next steps - Clearly outline what support you’ll provide the other person - Check in with them: to ensure they're ok, to make sure they've understood the news and to see if they'd like to talk further about it If you have bad news to share with someone, it’s best to move swiftly and share it with them in a direct and caring manner. To have a successful conversation, plan it, do it and follow up. ----- Want more content like this? Sign up for our free Impact Society weekly newsletter: https://buff.ly/3TVfXtf

In a new management role? Hold off on making big changes. Here's why: When stepping into a new management role, the impulse to make early, significant changes is natural. The idea of making a big improvement to the team or the business feels energising. For most managers, this comes from wanting to have a positive impact. The desire to leave your mark is natural. But this instinct is risky - particularly when you're fresh in a new role. Teams and organisations are complex systems, where changes can have unintended consequences. It's hard for any manager to grasp all the intricate details of how decisions will affect the whole organisation or team. And this is especially true when you’re new to the role and still learning how everything fits together. You may feel that you need to make big changes to prove your capability in the role. But this is wrong. In fact, team members are more likely to resist changes if they feel the new manager doesn’t understand the team and the environment. Instead, bring a patient, open and learning mindset to the early period of a new management role. By focusing on listening and learning in the early days, you can avoid pushing through changes that may cause disruption or frustration. Communicate this intention to your own manager. Make it clear that you plan to spend your first month or more gathering information and building trust. This helps set the expectation that you won’t be rushing into major changes. Instead, share what you’re learning with your own manager to demonstrate progress. To learn more on managing complex systems and making smart decisions from day one, check out my full article here: https://buff.ly/3ZLuMCr -JB

Management and leadership tasks can be hard. But there’s a bunch of easy stuff too. So get that right. I was listening to Scott Galloway talk the other day and his advice to young people included “get the easy stuff right”. It occurred to me that this is generally good advice for life. And it’s good advice for managers, but especially new ones. The time will come when we’re asked to grind out some hard tasks. Hard because they take more developed skills. Hard for the effort required. And hard because they involve tough decisions. But there’s many things we can do that are not hard at all. So why waste the opportunity to get easy things right, like: - Schedule regular one on ones with your team, a long way in advance - Say hello to your team members, everyday - Show an interest in people as human beings, instead of treating them like lifeless drones - Organise regular team meetings - Make all actions SMART and allocate them to someone. Every single one - Define the purpose of every meeting - Arrive on time (if not a little bit early). Every time - Say what you’ll do. And do what you’ll say - Turn up to meetings prepared - Be honest. Always And the number one easy thing to get right? Be kind. Always 😊. SC. ----- Want more content like this? Sign up for our free Impact Society weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eRqAXMxD

Alice in Wonderland and Roman philosophy demonstrate the importance of a vision for any team or organisation. How? While vision statements are incredibly common in organisations, they're rarely used well. Often, they're one liners on posters used to decorate the walls and collect dust. Rarely are they used to drive extraordinary alignment and progress within an organisation. And here's why that's a problem... There's a moment in Alice in Wonderland when Alice approaches a fork in the road where the Cheshire cat is perched on a tree. Alice asks the cat, "Which road should I take?" to which he responds "Where are you going?". Alice says she doesn't know, to which the cat finally says, "Then any road will do". The lesson here for organisations is perhaps even better captured by the Roman philosopher, Seneca, who said that "When a sailor knows not which harbour they set out for, no wind is the right wind". The point behind these stories is that - without clarity on an organisation's strategic destination - it's impossible to consistently make the right choices at each fork in the road. Which prevents us from arriving at our desired destination in a timely, deliberate and efficient manner. This is what happens all the time for organisations with no vision. Or where their vision is ambiguously defined and/or insufficiently understood across the organisation for people to use it as a guiding beacon in daily decision making. To read the rest of this article, including how to quickly create a solid vision for your team or organisation, head over to Impact Society: https://buff.ly/3ZyFbB6 ----- Want more content like this? Sign up for our free Impact Society weekly newsletter: https://buff.ly/3XS2QuZ

Icebreakers are a great way to kick off a workshop. But beware: when done poorly, icebreakers can leave your attendees rolling their eyes and feeling like their time is being wasted. Here's my three best tips for icebreakers that will lift the energy levels in the room, help people to start communicating, and break down barriers. For more help, download our Icebreakers for Meetings and Workshops Facilitation Guide. This kit sets out our tried and tested approach for delivering icebreakers that are effective and enjoyable. Get it free, here: https://buff.ly/47Fk81P -JB

Loyalty gets a lot of attention from managers (especially when they’re hurt that someone’s quit). But we should focus more on commitment, less on loyalty. Loyalty has the potential to be abused. It’s often positioned as something that should be prioritised (especially by employees, lest they be seen as ungrateful), irrespective of what’s their working conditions. Loyalty can be abused by organisations and old school managers to suppress employee mobility. Allowing them to treat them poorly, while at the same time pressuring them to stay (because, "loyalty" 🤷♂️). I prefer the idea of commitment. I think of commitment as being a willingness to persist with something, even when it’s hard. To take a long term view of the payoff, even if it sometimes requires short term sacrifice. And to problem solve and work on problems together, when they inevitably pop up. Commitment - in any part of life, whether are work or in our personal relationships - doesn't ask us to tolerate situations that don't serve our long term interests. And much less abusive ones. And commitment in the workplace should go both ways. For example: - Committed organisations let underperforming employees know early about performance problems and are willing to give them reasonable clarity, support and time to address those issues - Committed employees speak up about issues they’re experiencing at work, and give the organisation reasonable time to address them - Committed organisations and employees work together towards better long term outcomes for both parties, with balanced give and take in the short term Must commitment last forever? No. But it requires us to be unequivocally “in” until such time we're not. Until we've clearly communicated - on behalf of ourselves or the organisation - that our needs are changing and we're planning a shift. SC. ----- Want more content like this? Sign up for our free Impact Society weekly newsletter: https://buff.ly/3zwaZvY

Struggling to bring clarity to your work and life? You’re not alone. Getting clear (in big and small ways) is one of the most rewarding things you can do. Because when you know where you're heading, it's easier to get there. These are my three best tips to help you gain that clarity. To see the full 'top 10', and further advice for implementing them, check out the full article at the link below: https://buff.ly/47AsOql -JB

Here’s 3 things that effective leaders take total responsibility for. While average ones might own one or two (and bad ones none 🤦♂️). Strong leaders don’t make excuses. They accept that - if something happens on their watch - they’re responsible. They don’t just parrot “the buck stops with me”. They own it. And they mean it. Because they know their role is to get the job done, whatever the circumstances. Not just to get it done when it’s easy. Here’s three examples that you might commonly hear ordinary leaders avoiding responsibility for. But which highly effective leaders take full ownership of. 1. Poor performers in their team Sure, when we take over a team, we inherit a group that we had no say in. We take the the good and with the bad performers. After a period (let’s say, six months max), strong leaders take full responsibility for underperformers. Because they recognise that they’re the ones who: - Set team member priorities - Coach the team - Choose whether or not to performance manage them - Choose whether or not to let them go 2. Bad decisions Even when they delegate decisions to their team, strong leaders take responsibility for any bad decisions. Because they’re the ones who assessed (or should have assessed) that person’s competence for the decision. And they’re the ones who coach and develop their team members to make better decisions. 3. Vision and direction Sometimes leaders work within an organisational environment that lacks direction. But effective leaders don’t use that as an excuse not to provide vision and direction within their team. Because they recognise that having a clear sense of direction is critical to high performance. And they recognise that - if anything - a lack of organisational direction provides a lot of freedom for them to freely identify their own. ----- Want more content like this? Sign up for our Impact Society weekly newsletter: https://buff.ly/4e71sKG

When we step up into a management role, our time management needs to go to the next level. Most people manage their time by: - Keeping a to do list that they add to, as things pop up - Reacting to things that come in (e.g. e-mails and our boss sticking their head in our office) - Ignoring out to do list and just jumping into whatever comes to mind when we get a spare moment The most important change is to move from reactive to proactive time management. Reactive often works well enough early on in our careers when things come at us from one direction (our boss). But, rather than being driven by the requests of the day, we need to regularly (e.g. weekly) map our work and identify those tasks that are important, not just urgent. To do this, set a regular time to write a list from scratch of all the work you *could* do in the next period. Weekly works best for most people, so I’ll use that as the example, but you could vary it to fortnightly, if you have a job that has more important and less urgent work (but a month is definitely too long). To compose this list, check in with: - Your (or your team’s) quarterly goals (if you don’t have any, check out our Quarterly Planning Toolkit: https://buff.ly/3TxixFD): What is required to keep moving towards them and/or to resolve obstacles? - Your e-mails: What new tasks have popped up in the last week? - Your calendar: Review last week’s meetings for new actions and the next four weeks’ meetings for upcoming deadlines - Last week’s list: What hasn’t been completed and is still relevant Then plot this long list in a two by two Eisenhower matrix, with more/less urgent on one axis and more/less important on the other axis. “More urgent” means the task must be done in the coming week (like, it really *must* be done, not it would be good to get done). Then do this: 1. Block out daily chunks of time (1.5 to 3 hr) in your calendar for focussed work in the coming week. This is when you’ll start with important and urgent chunky tasks 2. When you find yourself with smaller stretches of free time, go to your list and pull out anything that is important and small, starting with the urgent first 3. Delegate anything that’s urgent, but not important 4. Delete/forget about anything that’s neither important or urgent As a manager, you can’t control your workload or expect to get everything done. But you can make sure you’re investing your time in the most effective way. ----- Want more content like this? Sign up for our free Impact Society weekly newsletter: https://buff.ly/3MIYlga

The best teams I've been a part of are comfortable with feedback. Something I've learnt: The easiest way for a manager to raise the level of feedback within their team or organisation is to ask for more feedback, rather than give more. Want more advice on giving and asking for feedback? Check out the link below: -JB https://buff.ly/3Xsesng