Ever wondered how you can step up your leadership game and provide the right kind of support to your middle managers (and whole team)? Well, your search ends here. This episode is a deep dive into the 4 core components you need to be providing for the people you support if you want them to be successful. If you are lacking in any one of these areas, it could explain why you are having challenges with your team, why your middle managers are stressed, or why you are just not getting the results you want.
If you are looking for a guide to becoming a more successful leader, don't miss out on this opportunity to sharpen your leadership skills.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Ever wondered how you can step up your leadership game and provide the right kind of support to your middle managers (and whole team)? Well, your search ends here. This episode is a deep dive into the 4 core components you need to be providing for the people you support if you want them to be successful. If you are lacking in any one of these areas, it could explain why you are having challenges with your team, why your middle managers are stressed, or why you are just not getting the results you want.
If you are looking for a guide to becoming a more successful leader, don't miss out on this opportunity to sharpen your leadership skills.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
How to actually support your staff team. This is the ultimate question for leaders, isn't it? We become leaders because we want to help people, but what does that really mean? Now, this actually comes off last week's episode when we were talking about NL's problem and I had CB write me in with a very simple question. He said you talked about being responsible as a leader, especially in supporting your middle managers. Can you expand on how to do that? So thank you so much for asking CB and, of course, I'm excited to go more in depth into what this actually looks like. What does it mean? What are we supporting and how do we do that? And I will talk, you know, in the context of if you're a leader supporting middle managers this is all critical. This is also important, just as a leader in general supporting your staff. So these are skills you can use for honestly anyone that you're trying to help, from staff members to your kids, any other kind of leading role that you take on in your life.
Speaker 2:
Now, as we've talked about on this show before, right from the beginning, the first thing we're going to go into is a little bit about power, because any leadership role whether it's CEO, middle management, parent there is inherent power in that role, this ability to influence, to make changes that people who are not in that role don't have. So the first thing we need to be aware of as a leader is the impact that this has on the work that we do, and so the piece is our people that we're leading. They have less power in that situation. There is a part of their life that you can actually have more say over than they do, and that is inherently vulnerable. We've talked about this in other episodes as well. Now, because that position is inherently vulnerable, we inherently want to take more responsibility in our position as leaders. The uncle Ben quote with great power comes great responsibility. I love it because it really speaks to this role of leadership to take something extra on. Now, what is that thing that we're taking on? And I would actually say that we are taking on a responsibility for the structure and the health of the relationship.
Speaker 2:
Now, to expand on this everyone who shows up everyone leader, follower, direct report, whoever you want to talk to has 100% responsibility for how they show up in a relationship and in their role. So you're responsible for if you're able to emotionally regulate, how you communicate, how you contribute. Those are all things that you personally need to be able to do in your life to be healthy, a valuable member of society. That is, ethically, the way that you want to show up. Now, that being said, of course, you're influenced by everything around you. There is going to be situations, there's going to be people who treat you unjustly. There are going to be times when you don't have the resources that you really wish you had to be able to interact in the way that you want. And this is especially true for our staff members, because one of the situations they could be in is having leaders who aren't able to sufficiently meet their needs, don't understand what they're hoping for and aren't attracting in the way that they hope. So, as much as every person in the relationship is 100% responsible for how they show up and they need to take that accountability, we also need to recognize that, especially for people who are following these leaders, they have this, this complicating situation, so, as leaders, we need to be even more aware.
Speaker 2:
So, of course, as a leader, you are 100% responsible for how you show up, the same way that anyone else is how you communicate, are you able to regulate? Or emotions, how are you contributing? And now you have this responsibility as well for the people that you lead. So this is the additional component what are you doing for them? And so I'm going to simplify it and break it up into four different areas that I have found are really critical for how we support people, and they might help you break it down into what you would need to look at as a leader to help out those people on your team and I. These are four s's, so shield, supply, structure and sensitivity being sensitive.
Speaker 2:
So, to start off, shielding is, honestly, it is the protection that you offer to the people who are on your team from whatever is coming down to them from above, from outside. However, you can protect them from things that are either going to harm them or, honestly, don't impact them but would still cause that harm. So it could be as a leader, making sure that things that are coming down challenges happening in higher levels of management aren't directly impacting your team. It could be not sharing financial challenges. Maybe the organization is going through if it's not relevant to those people, if they can't do anything about it, you know. Another example would be in your personal life If you have kids, you know that there are things that you shield them from. You're not going to talk about your financial struggles in front of your child. You're going to protect them from that knowledge. It doesn't serve them and they can't do anything about it.
Speaker 2:
So are we just adding stress and CB as you are looking at strategies to support your people, especially middle managers? There might be things that middle managers are impacted by but can't control from higher levels of leadership, and that would be a great thing. Potentially, that they might need shielding from. And you can start to look at some of the other big negative impacts that are affecting you as a system, as a team, as a structure. And are there other places where you could specifically be taking out some of that stress for your leaders by actually managing and shielding them from things that they cannot support or control?
Speaker 2:
Next, of course, we have supply, and this is very simply providing all the things that your team will need to be able to do the things that are asked of them. This could be time, this could be money, this could be physical supplies, this could be the right information, these could be other people that they talk to for resourcing. All of those different pieces are the requirements that they might have to do the tasks that you have asked of them, and this is where that leadership responsibility comes in, because as a leader, you had a role and you task them something, but did you actually give them everything they need? This is, unfortunately, something I do see. A lot are teens who are under resourced for the things that they've been asked to do, the two biggest ones probably being time and money, and of course, these can be tight. There's some. I came from a non-profit world. Money and resourcing financially could be really challenging For a lot of companies. Right now.
Speaker 2:
I hear a lot of struggles around understaffing and the impact that that has on the team, because when people aren't properly resourced, that leads to two things happening. One is they have to stretch their own resources to make up for this lack that they do not have, that they have not been given in terms of resources, so that might mean people working overtime when they shouldn't. It might mean people paying for their own supplies or not being paid to get properly trained. They have to provide that themselves. Or the other thing that can happen is the work doesn't get done. Tasks don't get completed because staff don't have the resources to do them. The challenge with this, of course, is the accountability for that not being done falls on the staff, not on to, potentially, the multiple levels of leadership that weren't able to resource them properly.
Speaker 2:
And so, as a leader, cb, anyone else looking really at what does your staff team need? Have they expressed some of these things being low, being missing for them, and what could you do about that? Like I said, I know it can be challenging in a situation, especially if you're maybe a middle manager yourself. You don't have full say. But if you talk to your team, you'll learn about some of the resources they might be missing and it'll give you real insight into some of the places your team might not be thriving, might not be getting the best results, because they're not feeling like they have the resources to do that.
Speaker 2:
The next component to all of this is structure, and as a leader, you need to provide for your team the knowledge and the bounds of what is expected of them, what they can expect of the role. Those are all the components of structure that we should be providing, and I tend to see this come up as challenges because it ends up on either end of the spectrum. So some workplaces have a very, very rigid structure. They have very strong expectations. Nothing is flexible or dynamic. This is the way things are Now. Of course, that can be comforting because you know what's going to happen, but it's not flexible to respond to situations. So that's where usually those groups get into trouble.
Speaker 2:
Now, on the other side, something I've been seeing more and more which can be a bit challenging is, as a lot of organizations want to flatten out their hierarchy and become more flexible and adaptive and responsive, they're losing leadership. Who are still giving that structure to employees, and it is really critical. You want to know what is expected of you, what you're supposed to do, what your daily schedule looks like, and if you're just told to do things, you might not feel confident in what you are doing. You might worry that there is still a boss. Of course, there's still someone who hired you, who could fire you, and there's a concern that I might be upsetting them if I don't do this, because I don't know what the limits are. So again, people often end up overworking or people become too siloed because they don't know what the structure is around working with others, and it means that people end up doing repetitive tasks or they're not as efficient in the work that they're doing so often.
Speaker 2:
This piece of structure. When we can come together and I can support team and having conversations about what roles, responsibilities need to exist, what those expectations are, how to hold each other accountable, then we can actually create a structure that does work for everyone. It doesn't have to be as hierarchically loaded and then suddenly these inefficiencies disappear, and this works quite well for supply as well, making sure that we're having those conversations about how to properly resource our teams, that people can advocate for their needs, get heard and leadership can support them. So structure and supply really come together, because structure is something that your team does need you to give as a leader in order for them to be the most effective and do their work properly. Now, finally, we get to the last piece, which is sensitivity, or being sensitive, and by that I don't just mean being emotional, which is what we associate it with, but I mean being sensitive and responsive to the people and situations that you are involved in as a leader.
Speaker 2:
Now, this I was going to say is probably the most complicated in a lot of ways, because it's not black and white. Now I have some tools and tricks and I'm going to share in a little bit and that we're going to in further episodes. But essentially it would be really nice if someone could give you one tool, one modality, one structure and said do this as a leader and it's going to work for you in every situation with every person you lead and you're good to go. I personally believe that doesn't quite happen in the world. There might be really great tools for specific situations. There's great modalities that help you see the world.
Speaker 2:
In certain ways, as a mentor, mine likes to say all modalities are flawed and some are useful. So there's different tools, certainly, that we can rely on, and some of the things that you rely on are probably things that, as a leader over the years, you figured out work best for your situations. So at that time and that place, with that staff team, I learned that if I tended to behave this way, I got the best results. The challenge is we tend to take those things on even if you're a newer leader and you haven't had that experience. You've had all your life up to this point where you've learned certain ways of being, ways of communicating, places where you feel the most comfortable and, of course, when you have that comfortable space or that space that you think works. That's what you're going to want to go with, and we often end up relying too strongly on this as a kind of this absolute truth, versus a foundation we should be building off of and being flexible to.
Speaker 2:
This is one of the reasons I talk so much about those spectrums, and that's what we'll get into soon. Is these spectrums of behavior? Can you shift along them to move to different places instead of staying in one point? Now we all think we are better at this than we are to be flexible and adaptive and responsive to different situations and different people, and I would really encourage you and this is my last piece for today something to think about is what are your leadership habits? And these are habits both in how you tend to respond to situations, how you tend to interact with and respond with your staff team. That's the big one that we'll be going into soon is more that relational side.
Speaker 2:
And when you start to look at those habits and patterns, the big question I have for you is how do you know when they're effective or not? Most leaders I talk to don't have a way of saying that the tool I just used or the idea I just used worked or didn't work because we don't track it and we don't actually know what might work better, what might work worse and how we can choose in those situations which way we're going to go with that. This is some pretty high level leadership stuff, maybe not the first thing we dive into, but you can actually do that tracking in the long run, figure out what's going to work for your team. And it sounds like that is what CB is really working towards. It's making sure that he is supporting his team the best way, and he is hopefully open to looking at this how he might start to adapt his own behavior, his strategies, to be able to best serve each individual person in a situation that comes along. So, cb, I hope that started to answer your question.
Speaker 2:
Again, we're dipping our toes in the water here and I look forward to our conversation. As a reminder, if you do share your story with the show, I will follow up to make sure the question is fully answered and so we can dive a little deeper into it, into the details, and I certainly invite you, if you do have a question or story you want to share. The details for that are in the description. So please share your story with us and if you want to join us live so you can comment and ask your questions, we would love to have you. The link for that is in the description below. I want to thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I hope this percolated some great new ideas for your leaders out there and I look forward to seeing you next week.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.