Stepping into a role as a new manager is exciting. But before you can get comfortable there are plenty of challenges staring you in the face right away. The good news is there are quite a few specific, practical skills you can utilize quickly with your team to give you a big advantage as you navigate your role as a new manager.
Here are some of the ones we’ve found to be the most valuable.
EFFECTIVE TIME MANAGEMENT
One of the most important skills for new managers is learning effective time management. As you’re getting up to speed with your new role, you’ll need to juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities, which means staying organized and managing your time efficiently is key.
Start by mapping out a system that works best for you and stick to it. Communicate clearly with your team about this, and be transparent about how much time you have to commit to things.
For more, check out Dr. Scott Dust’s “Four Ways To Improve Your Time Management”
Setting Clear Goals
As a new manager, you’ll need to set clear goals for your team. This means laying out what you expect from them and what you want to achieve together.
If your team doesn’t have a clear goal to work towards, they can quickly become frustrated and lose motivation. This means taking the time to develop specific, achievable goals with your team is vital.
Once you have a goal in mind, make sure you communicate it to your team. The more everyone is on the same page, the better your chances of achieving that goal.
Delivering Results Through Your Team
Delivering results through your team is another important skill for new managers. To achieve this, new managers will need to delegate effectively and keep their team motivated to do their best work.
One way to accomplish this is by including looking at someone’s personality and strengths to help them push outside of their comfort zone to achieve more. Collaboration and accountability are good options too, nudging people toward
You can also nudge people towards collaboration and accountability through powerful questions like “What can I do to help you accomplish your goals?” Learning these skills in partnership with Cloverleaf can help accelerate your growth as a leader.
Building Good Relationships
Another key skill for new managers is building good relationships. This happens when an open and supportive environment is fostered where everyone feels comfortable communicating honestly. And that helps build trust, which might be the most important element to ensure your team is comfortable enough to come to you with problems and concerns.
Being Too Tolerant Or Too Strict
One of the biggest challenges new managers face is finding the right balance between being too tolerant and too strict. If you’re too passive, your team could take advantage of you and you may lose their respect.
Of course, if you’re too strict, some team members might start to build resentment or lose motivation. So you must find a happy medium. One way to do this is to get to know your team better and find out what motivates them. Once you have a better idea of what makes them tick, you can find the perfect balance between being supportive and firm.
Managing Former Co-workers
New managers that have been promoted from within the company might suddenly be faced with managing co-workers that were previously their peers. Many can maintain those relationships but it’s important to establish yourself in your new role.
If this applies to you, remember to be upfront and honest with each person. Let them know things might change now that you are their manager, but hopefully, nothing changes when it comes to your friendship.
Having Difficult Conversations
As a new manager, you’ll need to be prepared to have difficult conversations with your team. It could be addressing a performance issue or providing constructive feedback. Either way, these conversations are often awkward and difficult.
To help you navigate these conversations, it’s helpful to view them as an opportunity to improve communication within the company and your team. This viewpoint along with some learned skills for conflict resolution will help you be prepared and confident when difficult conversations arise.
Providing Effective Feedback
Another important skill new managers need is learning how to provide effective feedback. By “effective” we mean feedback that is positive and constructive. Your team needs regular, consistent encouragement along with reminders on how they can continue to improve.
Be specific and consistently communicate clearly with your team in one on ones and when you’re all together.
And don’t forget to provide opportunities for growth and development as a part of your communication.
Learning Your Team’s Strengths and Weaknesses
The more that new managers learn about their team members strengths and weaknesses, the better they will be prepared to succeed together. New managers will be better equipped to delegate tasks and play to each individual’s strengths. And having an idea of a team member’s weaknesses offers you an opportunity to come alongside them and offer them ways to improve through consistent feedback.
Get to know your team members by listening and learning about what they are passionate about and what drains them during the workday. This exercise can be the key to unlocking the potential in each member of your team.
Building a Positive Team Culture
A positive team culture is another important part of a new manager’s job. This involves fostering an environment where each member of the team feels valued and respected. Team members want to feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves and when they do it often adds to motivation and increased effort.
Focus on communication and collaboration while encouraging everyone to share ideas and give feedback.
Goal-setting can help as well. Guide your team through a goal-setting process and give them the resources and needs to achieve their goals. And don’t forget to recognize and celebrate your team’s successes. This reminds everyone that hard work and dedication are valued.
Do Cloverleaf’s assessments help with understanding neurodiversity?
While we don’t directly ask individuals about neurodiversity, the mix of assessments on the platform allows us to cover many of the behaviors and work preferences of neurodivergent individuals.
But first off, what is neurodiversity?
According to Harvard Health, neurodiversity is “the idea that people experience and interact with the world around them in many different ways.”
As for how the Cloverleaf assessments apply, consider the example of a user who has Autism. This diagnosis manifests differently for each person. Let’s assume that for this autistic person, he or she is relatively anti-social around people he or she doesn’t know and is somewhat reclusive. These behaviors would present themselves as being very low or high on one or more of the existing assessments (e.g., very low on I of DISC, very high on I of 16 types, very low on approachability of culture pulse, etc.)
We haven’t yet done a large research project to map each neurodiverse category to specific assessments scores. Eventually, with the guidance and approval of an institutional review board, we could pursue such a project in order to help contribute to understanding this important question. Such a project would also help ensure we’re not missing anything behaviorally. But at a high level, it does appear that our assessments have many different types of neurodiverse behaviors that are already being covered. (Additional examples include but are not limited to Aspergers, ADHD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia.)
Why not offer assessments that specifically address neurodiversity?
Assessments can help uncover neurodiverse diagnoses, but these diagnoses need to be paired with behavioral observations and conversations with a medical professional. Additionally, it would be problematic to track such diagnoses in a platform where others would potentially have access to such information, because it might accidentally facilitate discrimination and/or biases. Our platform is purposefully neutral such that no one is targeted as “good” or “bad,” but just different.
Overall, I think that Cloverleaf helps facilitate the conversations that really need to happen among neurodiverse employees (and in many cases, the conversations these employees are afraid to have). Instead of neurodiverse people needing to explain their neurodiversity, all parties can instead focus on preferences and behavior (i.e., how they like to complete tasks and work with others). In other words, the reason why someone behaves a certain way shouldn’t matter (i.e., neurodiversity). What matters is that they do behave a certain way and that all parties should work better together to accommodate those tendencies and preferences.
Learn how to make Cloverleaf your coaching partner to understand the individuals and teams that you work with, drive conversations and even training sessions.
Recognizing the symptoms of burnout is only the first step. Understanding the causes of burnout is the next step toward recovery. There are typically three main driving factors of burnout.
The first, job demand, might be the most important. Think of it as anything that is just too much while you’re at work: work overload, time pressure, and role ambiguity.
Another main driver of job burnout is psychological contract breach. For example, during the pandemic, a lot of retail and restaurant workers experienced burnout. Why? They had a psychological contract of “I signed up to serve people and get tips, I didn’t sign up to get sick.” They felt that their job situation did not align with promises made. When employees experience a work situation that doesn’t present opportunities for growth, workload, balance, and flexibility- this psychological contract breach is a trigger for employee burnout.
There are also some individual characteristics that are related to burnout. People with lower emotional stability tend to experience burnout more strongly. Type A personalities–those go-getters who have a strong need for control experience increased burnout. When people believe strongly in external locus of control, an opinion that external factors impact their life more than their own actions, they experience more stressors and a higher level of burnout.
What happens when people experience burnout?
There’s plenty of research out there suggesting that the physiological symptoms are equivalent to clinical depression or clinical anxiety. Ignoring these symptoms can be dangerous to physical health. People need to evaluate how they feel on the burnout scale, and even if they are a 3 out of 10, they need to think through solving the problem before it gets really bad. A higher level of burnout may require a clinical solution.
Burnout takes a large toll on work performance. People experiencing work burnout can struggle with:
- Absenteeism
- Turnover
- Productivity
- Job Satisfaction
- Low Organizational Commitment
- Spillover to Work Team (Burnout can become a contagious mindset that can spread to the team).
- Spillover At Home (Burnout can extend to family members and disrupt your work-life balance)
It’s important that people are proactive as they recognize the signs of burnout, taking the approach of “what am I going to do about it…how do I solve this problem”. If you’re seeing some of these signs in yourself or feel there is a risk of burnout in you, don’t hesitate to attend to your well-being and mental health through the proper self-care.
Click here to read Part 3: Recovering From Burnout- 5 Stages Of Recovery
Are you interested in trying Cloverleaf with your work team? Invite your entire team and try Cloverleaf free for 14 days.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
At its core, this theory is about having the versatility to adapt the style and nature of your leadership to a situational approach so that you can meet ever-shifting workplace dynamics.
Here at Cloverleaf, we use the situational leadership style of learning so we can help our clients be the best leaders they can be. That doesn’t mean being domineering or controlling because leading is no longer about the amount of positional power you have over others.
Our leadership style is about putting people in the best place possible so they can do their best work. We use a situational leadership model to accomplish this. Our organization is about elevating others, and we give you the tools and resources you need to excel and deliver exceptional quality work.
WHAT IS SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP THEORY?
Situational Leadership Theory is a style of learning that relates to how good leaders manage their teams in the workplace. Essentially, it’s about having the skill to provide a flexible and effective leadership strategy. That way, you can adjust according to each task and situation and the needs of the people you lead every day.
In 1969, Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey developed this theory in their groundbreaking book, Management of Organizational Behavior. The book sold millions, and its ideas and practices are still in use today across the world, and for a good reason: because it works.
The Four Leadership Styles
According to Hersey and Blanchard, their theory depends on the particular style of leadership and the maturity level of the team members.
They claim that the situational leader should adopt these four traits when adjusting and implementing different leadership styles in the workplace.
Selling: Also called persuading, leaders use this style for unmotivated employees or those who have low competence and a low commitment level. The leadership approach for this style involves being open to communication, collaboration, and feedback, so the employee feels valued and wants to participate.
Telling: Telling (direction) is for leadership situations that require supportive behavior and reliable guidance for all employees who could benefit from close supervision. This management style requires you to be a strong type of leader and take charge.
Participating: Participating and sharing skills are most effective for a team member with high job proficiency who can help with decision-making or critical planning. Every skilled team member gets to make decisions and communicate effectively.
Delegating: This model is ideal for teams of self-motivators with well-developed emotional intelligence. As a leader, you must have an understated management style yet be crystal clear with the outcomes you expect and your directions.
Read more about leadership and coaching styles here.
Develop the Situational Leaders You Need for Effective Leadership Styles with Cloverleaf
Here at Cloverleaf, we implement all four leadership styles to help our clients develop the situational leadership model that fits their organization best. Right now, we offer five different packages modeled around this practical theory of leadership, so our clients can employ an effective decision-making process as a leader and foster positive employee development.
No matter what kind of leadership style your organization needs, one of the following comprehensive support packages should be right for you:
Individual: Increase your self-awareness, realize your potential, and leverage your strengths to become a leader in your own right.
Small Teams: Our leadership studies have helped us provide top-notch coaching for team members so that you can gain critical insights into your team’s performance.
Coaches: We have the expertise and skill to help you deliver value as a head coach. We’ll help you foster performance readiness so you can keep your team consistently producing their best work.
Enterprises: Develop an effective coaching style and integrate technology to implement our leadership styles on a large scale.
Non-Profits: We can help your non-profit build a stronger community organization so your team can collaborate seamlessly to help those who need it most.
HOW TO PRACTICE SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP
If you want to practice situational leadership, you’ve got to have a range of different management styles. Good leaders have the ability to shift these styles at a moment’s notice to accommodate any situation, whether you’re the Editor-in-Chief, the director of human resources, or the COO of the whole shebang.
These situational leadership styles are only effective when you practice them in accordance with the four development levels:
Low Competence and High Commitment: This first development level is also called the “enthusiastic beginner” level. Such employees have a very high commitment level to the task behavior required for their work but don’t have the maturity levels or expertise they need to accomplish the job with any level of skill.
Mild Competence and Low Commitment: This level of worker possesses a moderate amount of skills but may be a “disillusioned learner” with only a low level of commitment to the team structure. Such contexts require a leadership style with lots of coaching and positive affirmation.
High Competence and Variable Commitment: A member of this level, also known as a “cautious performer,” exhibits high levels of maturity and skills but may not have the commitment level required to excel at his or her job. This situation requires an approach that supports every member of the team and fosters willing participation. Your role needs to present the correct task behavior as a shining example.
High Commitment and High Competence: This level of worker, also called a “self-reliant achiever,” has developed skills and expertise to a high level and usually has more mature emotional intelligence. He or she will be ready to help whenever necessary and is typically focused on the tasks at hand throughout each day.
This development level also involves learning effective delegation, so you can empower your team to make the right decisions without close supervision.
HOW TO APPLY SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP
If you want to change your leadership style to meet the basic principles of Situational Leadership Theory, there are a few skills you need to master first.
Once you have the tools, you need the knowledge to apply them to your specific work environment. Here are the critical skills you need as a leader to keep your team functioning at its absolute best.
Versatility: Regularly examine the needs of your job, the team, and the business itself and adjust your leadership style as necessary.
Comprehensive and Clear Directions: Give your employees clear direction and guidance for them to succeed, regardless of their maturity level or relationship behavior with others in the workplace.
Listening and Communication: Use active listening skills and promote positive relationship behavior among teammates, so everybody collaborates to ensure a desirable outcome.
Reward Dedication and Participation: Be sure to reward members of the team who participate and encourage everyone to share their opinions, expertise, knowledge, and skills.
Effective Skill Implementation: Have the skill range and tools to be an effective leader while coaching teammates with varying maturity levels to bring out their best work.
Read more about leadership styles and Cloverleaf here.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is Situational Leadership Theory?
This theory of leadership focuses on the ability of a leader to be flexible, versatile, and adaptable when it comes to their specific leadership style. Leaders need to be flexible so they can better meet the needs of their team and adjust their style to find practical solutions to the task at hand.
There’s another theory by Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) that includes six leadership styles:
Coaching Leader
Democratic Leader
Affiliative Leader
Authoritative Leader
Coercive Leader
Pacesetting Leaders
What are the four leadership styles of situational leadership?
In this theory of leadership, the four styles of leadership include:
Selling and persuading
Telling and showing
Participating and sharing
Delegating and directing
What is the main principle of situational leadership theory?
The key is to have the flexibility to adapt your leadership skills and style to fit the many variables in your workspace to lead your team more effectively.
It’s about being a mentor, a coach, a leader, and a delegator and learning how to shift between those leadership styles and skills to best tackle the situation at hand.
What are some examples of Situational Leadership Theory?
One great example of situational leadership theory would be a team leader working on a video game release for a client. Halfway to completion, there’s a major crisis and the client asks for a complete reinvention of all the progress so far. Naturally, the employees of the team feel upset and don’t know where to begin.
The leader of this team would adopt a “Telling” style of leadership, giving team members direct supervision and close guidance to get everything done efficiently.
Another real-life example would be Abraham Lincoln, who led the country not only through the Civil War but also its aftermath, helping repair the war-torn country. Had he been unable to deploy ever-shifting leadership styles, he would not have been able to achieve the great things he was able to accomplish, including the Emancipation Proclamation.
Partner with Cloverleaf and Grow Your Leadership Approach
For innovative leadership strategies, you need to keep your team excelling, contact the professionals at Cloverleaf today and learn how Situational Leadership Theory can elevate your team to the next level.
When you receive disappointing feedback, does it feel like a personal attack or an opportunity to grow?
Carol Dweck has spent decades researching fixed mindset vs growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, we view our abilities as innate, (aka, “just the way I am,”), making failure and constructive feedback feel personal and insurmountable. On the flip side, in a growth mindset, we are comfortable with improving over time, not fearing being wrong, and making failure or difficult feedback an opportunity to be curious about how to do better next time.
The good news is, we can learn to choose a growth mindset. So the next time you get a Cloverleaf coaching tip about an area for growth, know that that is truly what it is: an area for growth.
Or, the next time you realize you made a mistake or didn’t perform up to your own standards, take it as an opportunity. Ask others for feedback, or dig into your Cloverleaf profile to learn more about how you can do your best work.
What about your Teammates?
Just as we can have a growth or fixed mindset about ourselves, we can view others through the same lens.
When a teammate makes a mistake or doesn’t meet your expectations, do you start to question their abilities, or even their character? Or do you feel the freedom to have an open conversation, knowing that your teammate is innately valuable, and can grow from this experience?
The next time a teammate drops the ball, watch your internal reaction. If you find yourself questioning their abilities, head to that teammate’s profile and look through their work style insights to see where their strengths truly are. You may be surprised.
We’re all in this together!
Commonly overlooked, evidence-based recommendations for virtual leaders.
For managers now working from home, leading a team virtually presents new challenges. And because the pandemic changed the work environment so drastically and so quickly, our advice for managers is yet to catch up.
The virtual leadership reminders currently floating around the infosphere are straightforward. Leaders should touch-up on their technical skills, focus on building trust, and encourage social cohesion through regular team check-ins.
These are accurate and helpful, but virtual work is here to stay and moving quickly. It’s time to go deeper.
Below are five overlooked, evidence-based recommendations for leading in today’s virtual work environment.
1. Pay Attention to Emergent Leadership
Ideally, everyone on the team steps up as a leader when their knowledge or skills are needed. However, this tendency to emerge as a leader changes in virtual work environments.
Communication apprehension—anxiety due to anticipated communication with others—is more common in real-time virtual communication.
This isn’t the same thing as introversion. In fact, it’s more strongly associated with neuroticism, which means that some of the most critical, perfection-oriented employees aren’t speaking up.
Leaders should nudge these employees to contribute, clear the floor to give them the spotlight, or consider alternative outlets for them to voice their suggestions and concerns.
2. Establish Virtual Communication Norms
Moving to virtual-only work disrupts preexisting face-to-face or hybrid communication norms. Embrace the change by thinking through four questions: What medium? How often? What tone? What level of detail?
In new or uncertain environments, employees mimic the behaviors of their leader. Choose wisely.
3. Stop Overloading Your Employees With Information
We’re getting comfortable with communication in a remote work environment. Too comfortable. We post or send messages about everything.
Just because it’s easier to communicate electronically doesn’t mean it needs to be communicated. Employees are overwhelmed. Be judicious.
4. Use Asynchronous Video
Employees log more overall hours when working remotely compared to face-to-face. Partly because the days are filled with Zoom meetings that disrupt employees’ flow and deep thinking.
Help your employees be more productive by recording videos with key information that they can watch whenever is convenient for them. They’ll likely watch them during the transition time between meetings or when their energy is low and they need a break.
5. Practice Balanced Monitoring
Over-monitoring employees is common when leading virtually. Leaders tend to overcompensate when they can no longer pick up on subtle signals during face-to-face interaction.
Although some degree of monitoring ensures stability in productivity, too much will annoy subordinates and degrade trust.
An Eye Towards The Future
Just like preexisting virtual leadership listicles, these recommendations will soon become outdated and overly straightforward. The foundations of leadership don’t change in virtual environments, they just make the need for high-quality leadership more pronounced. What will change, however, is the nature of the virtual work environment.
History clearly illustrates that technology changes quickly. The best virtual leaders will continue to think deeply about what’s new or different as virtual work environments evolve, and how they can go deeper to meet the needs of their team members.
A version of this article is also published at Business Insider.
Visit www.scottdust.com for more free resources for human capital enthusiasts, including a free e-book titled “A Field Guide to Human Capital Assessments.”