The Manager - Edition 71 - Style has little to do with being effective
The Manager - Edition 71
This week I've been mostly thinking about:
Why style has little to do with being effective
Hi,
I hope you've had a cracking week and are looking forward to the week ahead.
I've had a week of deep planning. Planning for my business, my consulting work and my life. It's been a reflective week.
I think its important sometimes to take a step back, look at what you're trying to achieve and then putting in place a strategy to move forward. It can help put things in to perspective and to give you the distance needed to put a sustainable plan in place, rather than simply moving from one thing to the next.
Anyhow, enough pointless wander from me. How are you?
All good I hope.
Style has little to do with being effective
That’s not my style.
I hear this a lot.
It’s not my style to have difficult conversations.
It’s not my style to address the whole team in weekly meetings.
It’s not my style to tell people what I expect of them.
It’s not my style to have to manage poor performance.
It’s not my style to follow up about requests to do work.
It's not my style to build strong relationships with those in my team
It’s not my style.
It’s not about style.
It’s about effectiveness.
It’s about being a manager and leader and building a high performing team.
It's about doing the right thing, solving the right problems, moving out of our zone of preferences and doing the things that get results.
We should be careful about the path of least resistance. The path that lets us avoid doing the right thing. The path that lets us skip over being effective and simply call it style.
Style is something you apply to effective and productive practices - to add your flavour, delivery and presence to it. It's not a way out of doing what needs to be done.
Yet - everyday I hear managers saying “it’s not my style”. It's always a shame.
Effectiveness is the job of management. Style comes later.
Until next time.
Go forth, be effective - add style after.
Rob..
BOOK OF THE WEEK
I might just remove this section :)
Cultivated Content Of The Week
This week's content I reckon you'll enjoy.
1 - Mental health in the workplace.
A good article with some suggestions of what may cause high levels of emotional stress at work such as: lack of control, long hours, heavy workloads – the never ending ‘to do’ list, lack of job satisfaction, too much responsibility
2 - The power of walking.
How walking can help you be more productive.
3 - Hold on. This isn't the job I signed up for.
Ever taken on a job to discover it's miles away from what was described?
4 - Slow your thoughts down
and maybe you can slow time also (or at least the feeling of it as you get older).
5 - Thinking about coffee may improve focus, according to research
Think about coffee. Become more focused. Really? Apparently so.
6 - Delivering bad news through a DVD
Sad news about Honda closing its factory and making lots of people redundant. Sad how the news was delivered to them - via a DVD recording.