4 Questions for Team Leaders as 2023 Ends

As 2023 draws to a close, you might find yourself in a whirlwind of year-end tasks, deadlines and holiday preparations. In the middle of all that, you might not have had the chance to take a step back and assess the broader picture of how your team is faring. But as we approach the new year, it's crucial to set aside time to reflect. Taking a pause to evaluate the collective journey of your team over the past year can provide invaluable insights on the path you should take going forward. Use these questions to help you take the pulse of your team and identify what they might need from you.

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

What does your team’s stress level look like? As a leader, it’s crucial to recognize the symptoms of burnout on your team and to address them quickly. The effects of long-term stress (which we’ve all been experiencing!) can show up in different ways. For example, you may have noticed that your team members don’t seem as focused as they used to, or that communication feels strained. If your team members are showing signs of burnout, affirm your commitment to their well-being and look for ways to address the situation. Do you need to adjust workloads, deadlines, or the pace of work? Do team members need more support to navigate any changes or uncertainty? 

How can you help team members manage their energy? To address stress and burnout, you can also ensure that team members have the resources they need to maintain balance and sustain high performance. Leaders play a pivotal role in fostering a supportive environment that encourages overall well-being. Encourage healthy habits like regular breaks, setting boundaries between work and personal time, and actually using vacation days. And don’t forget to lead by example: If you work around the clock or don’t take breaks or vacations, your team members will assume that’s what you expect of them (no matter what you say).

How clear is your team on what success looks like? Since the beginning of 2023, a lot may have changed in your organization. Priorities and expectations have shifted; new challenges and opportunities have emerged. You may assume that your team knows what’s most important now. But, in times of rapid change, sometimes key messages about priorities get lost in the busyness of our day-to-day work. So, take some time with your team before year-end to talk about priorities going into 2024. Connect the dots for your team members about how their roles fit in and affect those priorities. Make sure each team member knows the top areas where they should focus to have the biggest impact on the business and empower them to focus on those “big three.”

Is there a need to upskill your team? If you have observed performance issues in your team in 2023, ask yourself whether they have the skills and training necessary to succeed. Over the past few years, so many organizations have gone through resignations, layoffs and restructuring, leaving their employees grappling with new roles or evolving responsibilities. Beyond that, if staffing is lean and workloads are heavy, your newer team members may have received little to no onboarding. But even your seasoned employees may need additional training if they’re taking on different types of projects. We’ve definitely seen these struggles and created the New Lens® app to address them while making it easy to fit development into busy schedules and tight budgets.

This week, I challenge you to identify one area to focus on with your team in 2024, and one or two initial steps you will take. This small investment of time will yield big payoffs in the coming year.

Our New White Paper: Managers Under Pressure

At Newberry Solutions, we work with some of the world’s top companies. That means we get a firsthand look at the latest challenges organizations are facing, as well as how they are doing in meeting those challenges.

Across all fields, we’ve seen a clear trend emerge. Managers are more important than ever in helping organizations navigate key issues. But, at the same time, managers are more likely to suffer from burnout than either higher-level leaders or individual contributors are. In other words, the very people your company likely needs most right now are at high risk of disengaging or even leaving.

That’s why we created our new special report, “Managers Under Pressure: Why these key employees are feeling squeezed in 2023 — and what you can do to support them.” In it, you will learn:

• The current state of both layoffs and resignations, and all the ways that this turbulent employment environment places additional burdens on managers.

• What the “new normal” of remote and hybrid work looks like, and how managers are dealing with it.

• The cumulative effects of three change-filled years on a stressed-out workforce.

• How to support your managers’ wellbeing and productivity so that they can support your organization’s success.

Take a moment now to download your own copy of “Managers Under Pressure.” We hope that it will become a valuable resource for you and that you’ll share it with other forward-thinking leaders. After you read it, we’d love to hear your feedback and questions. So please tag me in your LinkedIn posts about our white paper, or contact us directly at info@newlensleadership.com. 

Five Things Employees Want from Their Leaders

Have you heard the old saying that “employees leave managers, not companies”? As turnover rates remain elevated (one in five employees said they were extremely or very likely to leave their companies this year), the stakes are high for developing the kind of leaders that employees don’t want to leave. But what do employees actually want from their leaders? This list will give you some insight and aligns with what I see as an executive coach time and again.

Photo by Rebrand Cities

Appreciation

According to a survey by McKinsey & Company, employers underestimate how much employees want to feel valued by both their manager and their organization. They also underestimate how much feeling valued affects whether employees stay with the company. Providing the appreciation that employees crave doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. Here’s one idea you can start using right away: Start your next team meeting by asking people to share their recent successes or what’s been going well so that you can all celebrate your wins together. This doesn’t take long, and it makes people feel good as they start noticing what they’re actually getting done. Bonus: Besides giving your team members a lift, this appreciation exercise also gives you more information and insight about what is working well with your team.

Clarity

A survey of 1,000 U.S. workers about communication issues that hamper leadership found something striking: 57% of respondents complained that their leaders do not give clear directions. That was the second-most-cited issue in the whole survey. As an executive coach, I have also personally observed this. I frequently hear from employees who get frustrated because their bosses don’t set clear expectations for their work or define what success looks like for their roles. In addition to sharing this information, it also important to “connect the dots”: Explain the reasons behind your actions, questions, or decisions so that others understand what you are thinking. As Brene Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

Feedback

Employees want to know how they are doing and expect their leaders to tell them. Even if it might be hard to hear in the moment, most of us value getting practical, actionable feedback. However, a Gallup survey found that only about one in four employees strongly agrees that the feedback they get helps them be better at their job. If you always dread offering performance feedback, it can help to reframe how you think about it. Approach feedback with a spirit of generosity. You're not being the "bad guy" by criticizing. Instead, you're giving the employee valuable information to help them be successful. Wouldn't you be grateful if someone took the time to tell you what you should know?

Learning and Growth

Employees want leaders to care about their growth and development. Providing feedback is part of that, but so are recommending employees for training opportunities, delegating with growth in mind and exploring new ways your organization can promote ongoing learning. These efforts will pay off in engagement and retention. In a 2019 survey, 94% of employees said they would stay at their company longer if it invested in helping them learn. A study that year by Sitel Group found that 92% of U.S. employees said that learning increases their engagement and motivation at work.

Respect

There’s one critical factor that trumps everything else: respect. If you remember just one thing from this article, remember that employees want their leaders’ respect. In her research, Christine Porath, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, found that treating employees with respect outweighs all else when it comes to making a leader successful. “No other leadership behavior had a bigger effect on employees across the outcomes we measured,” she wrote in Harvard Business Review.

What Can You Do?

As a leader, how are you doing across these areas? How is your organization’s leadership doing as a whole? What are the top one or two biggest opportunities to improve? Remember that Newberry Solutions has resources that can help you, including the award-winning New Lens app, our program to develop effective leaders at all levels in a way that is affordable and scalable. We would love to help you determine if it’s a fit. Schedule a demo now.

How to Stop Fixing and Start Coaching

As a high performer, you're good at solving problems. But do you ever feel too good at it?

I'm hearing from a lot of leaders lately that they're spending their days putting out fires, dealing with crises and answering questions for their team members. 

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

If that sounds a lot like your days, too, you may feel like you're stuck in this situation. Things are still busy and unpredictable. There's no end in sight for problems that need solving. But maximizing your impact as a leader does not mean always jumping in and coming to the rescue. Today I want to give you some alternate strategies that will benefit both you and your team.

The Downside of Solving

It's easy for leaders to get into the habit of being the fixer or the solver, especially in stressful times like these.

After all, you're a leader because you've proven that you can efficiently solve problems. When team members come to you with a quandary or crisis, you can probably identify a solution quickly. You really want to get this problem off your plate, and coaching your direct report through it seems a lot more complicated than dealing with it yourself. So, once again, you become the solver.

But while you are saving time and stress in the short term, you are setting yourself and your team members up for longer-term problems. When you regularly leap to solving instead of coaching or delegating for development, here's what can happen:

• You lose time for your most important work. As a leader, your priorities should include big-picture thinking and helping your team members develop. When you're neglecting these priorities to do the work your reports could be doing, you aren't adding all the value you can as a leader.  

• You get caught in an unproductive pattern. The more you solve for them, the more your team will ask you to solve. And the less time you will have for anything else.

• Your team members miss opportunities to grow. By over-relying on you, they're hampering their own career development.

• You sow discord on your team. If you're always solving problems for some team members instead of helping them develop, the rest of the team will notice — especially if their colleagues' underperformance creates more work for them. On the other hand, your direct reports who need development may not understand why others are your "go-tos" for important assignments.

3 Questions to Ask Yourself

So how can you balance the short-term concerns of getting things done quickly with the long-term concerns of strengthening your team, developing its members and maximizing your own leadership? Here are a few questions that can help you move from solving to coaching and developing.

• What is your role? Even if you complain about being "the solver," does your ego get a boost from playing this role? Becoming aware of this can help you get unstuck and start finding better ways to use your expertise.

• How do you want to show up? How do you want others to see you as a leader? If you’re always in the details problem-solving, you’re less likely to be viewed as someone with the capacity to move up and contribute more strategically.

• How capable is your team? If you feel nervous delegating to certain team members, is it because of their competence? If so, identify the need for additional training beyond coaching from you.

Making the Shift

With your answers to these questions in mind, what's one small shift you can make to go from short-term problem-solving to investing in your team’s longer-term development? For example, it might be as simple as pausing when someone comes to you with an issue and reminding yourself that this person has the ability to learn and that you can coach them.

As you do things differently, others might not know what to make of your changes in behavior. So remember to connect the dots for them by framing your actions, "I trust you and want to give you a chance to grow. I'm here to help, but I'm going to step back to let you own this project."

From time to time, you will find yourself in urgent situations where you need to jump in and take action. But you can still coach even in these cases. After the problem is resolved, meet with your team member to talk through what you did and prepare them to handle similar scenarios in the future.

As a leader, preparing your team members to lead is one of the most important things you can do. And it shows your own readiness for a bigger role. For more strategies like these, pick up a copy of  "Building a Strong Team" from my Leadership EDGE℠ Series.

Put Your Wisdom to Work

I’ve noticed a theme that keeps emerging with my clients and others I meet. I’ve talked at length with several people about the importance of thinking big—and beyond our selves. In the midst of day-to-day life, it can be easy to forget how many people have helped us along the way, personally and professionally, and how much we have to offer.

So, instead of writing a full article on this subject, I want to challenge you to think about how you will put the power of your knowledge and wisdom to work to help someone else.

Take a look at the four questions below to get your wheels turning.

1. Who do you see struggling that could use your support?

2. Who do you see repeating the same mistakes because no one will give them the feedback they need to break the cycle?

3. Who could benefit from your influence, perspective, expertise or contacts?

4. What have you been excited about getting involved in that you just haven’t taken action on

So, before you dive back into your day, identify one thing you will do this week to pay it forward, leveraging your unique value and perspective. You might be surprised at how much you get from the experience.