What Was Your Part?
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Managers, both very experienced and inexperienced, can benefit from this No BS Management Advice
I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. This is another instance of No BS Management Advice for you. Whether you’re an experienced manager or a relatively new manager, I believe that folks need some advice and help. And it’s sometimes best to have someone that they can talk things through with because managing doesn’t have to be quite as hard, difficult, painful or complicated as it often is. It’s just people need advice. That’s good. People need sounding boards and allies to help them. Someone to discuss situations with.
So, let me just start off with a scenario where people let you down. They failed in some way. They’ve screwed up. So, it begs the question of, instead of pointing fingers at them, start off by asking yourself a question.
“What was your part in this?”
“How did you allow this to go on in such a way that caused the failure or the screw-up?”
Was it that you didn’t really monitor their performance or check in on them that you put yourself in a situation, or put them in a situation where they didn’t feel comfortable coming to you for advice and they felt like they had to figure it out on their own? What did you do that caused the failure? Not them here? Yeah, they screwed it up. No question about it. But, start off by asking how it was that got to this point, and what your part in it was.
What I found over the years is when I acknowledged my failings as a leader, as a manager, my people can wind up feeling better about coming to me with things. So, yes, you want to sit them down and talk with him about the screw up that’s occurred. Absolutely! But you don’t want to do it in an attacking way.
You don’t want to do, “What were you thinking of? Where were your brains?” No, because who’s going to ever respond to that? You want to sit them down and say, “Let’s do a post mortem on what happened? Let’s go from the very beginning. What started this off? How did it progress,” and go through the talking points here.
You listen. You teach. You coach. You’ll learn. You’ll learn how they think, because how they think may need to be changed. One of the questions along the way that you can ask in doing the “deconstruct” of this, the post mortem is to say, “I’m curious, why is it you didn’t feel you could come to me for some guidance? How did this wind up happening where you felt like you had to do it on your own when you were really unsure?”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Well, here we are. We’re trying to solve this situation after the fact when we could have headed it off before the failure occurred. Wouldn’t that have been better?”
“Yeah.” Okay.
And thus what you’re able to do is teach them that that’s what you’re there for. So start off with yourself, acknowledge your failures in this situation, learn from them about what you can do differently as a manager. Thus, when you work with your people, you can own up to your part in this so they go, “Gee, he’s taken some the heat for this, too, and then go from there.
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ careers easier. Those
things can involve job search, hiring more effectively, managing and leading better, career transition, as well as advice about resolving workplace issues.
He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2900 episodes.
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