How To Virtually Plan The Next Financial Year With Your Team
August 13, 2020
How To Manage Uncertainty Through Being More Present
September 1, 2020
A lot of my clients at the moment are in a position where they are having a managed team or manage their staff. And if you are one of those, you’re at work, you got a bunch of people who are really uncertain about their futures and every single day they’re getting news, bombarded with news around the world, struggling with the pandemic, their families struggling with a new rhythm and that’s changing every day, week and month.
So a number of them have asked me to speak to them about what to do about that and what expectations can you have of people in terms of their performance during this time.
Expectations
I think if you get this right, it takes the stress off you right, you feel calm, you feel like you’re doing the right thing. If you get this wrong you know you’re the person you don’t want to be or that leader you don’t want to be.
You know the one I mean? When you are just saying the wrong thing, you’re doing the wrong thing and your team is not reacting to you the way they want you, not supporting the way you want.
So here’s the idea: progress comes from within. So if you feel like you’re not supporting those that need you right now, then it’s because within you and you’re not aware of something that’s either keeping you doing it the way you were or stopping you from being flexible enough to shift the way you need to do things right now.
Inside Out Model
When I’m talking to a client about this I talk about the inside outside model, so just imagine that you know just here, this is all your inner thoughts, or your inner feelings or your inner awareness. So just imagine that our awareness and the outside circle is all of the external world so you know this is all your clients, this is all you KPIs and expectations.
Everyone that needs something from you, this external world at the moment is in change and flux and one of the things that we carry with us on the inside is an expectation of things going back to how they were.
Here’s the one thing I know, is that in the world of business, in the world of work that there is a receding, things are always appearing and going away in all industries, in all workplaces. And so if we get attached to things then we’re continually going to feel like we can’t make progress, because at the moment or that it’s uncertain it’s changing all the time.
Shift From Within
The only way that we can cope with that better is to make a shift from within around our assumptions, the way we see the world and what we expect. When it comes to shifting the way you behave on the outside if it’s just a tactic, if it’s just a strategy without the intent behind it, it will never feel the way you want it to feel.
A true shift has got to come from within, and it’s about a new awareness of what’s true for you and how things really are. So that’s the big picture. If you think about performance management right now, we’re going to focus on is before this all happens and the way we thought about it was we thought about expansively.
So we thought 12 months ahead, we thought about the big problems, the big opportunities. Then our job was to essentially manage the team, we were able to do check ins to make sure what they were doing was right. And we could manage all their outputs because we could see them. They are usually next to us and we rely on all the hallway conversations to keep connected, and you know that let ourselves to pretty easily being able to have control over what we’re doing and how we were working.
And from a performance management point of view in terms of the HR system you know set yearly goals, review them regularly, adjust them, make them work that was all you just followed the system and the system is there and it worked.
So it was expansive it was easy to manage work, you could control things in that sense and you could follow the system. And now as you know that shifted, so what we need to do now is we need to prioritise what’s important. So prioritise on a weekly basis but also sometimes on a daily basis, we need to tell our team rather than we’re doing the 12 months ahead.
What’s important right now in the present for you to do? Which you need to trust that rather than manage everything was a single thing they do, we need to focus that even though they’re working from home that they’re going to actually achieve the right outcomes? And we need to let go of the fact that we need to have control over every single thing they do.
Summary
We need to be agile and much more flexible in the way we respond to situations and what we expect. It’s often about our expectations of to what extent what can get done, which is the problem rather than the person themselves.
And rather than following the system of performance I think we need to do much more regular check ins.
So this is the principle which is that if you are stuck in there before and you want to do things differently now, the principle is – change starts with a shift from within. And if you think about it like that, at some extent this is a little bit of a blessing, it’s hard but It’s not bad.
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
So what I would love you to do is if you’re in a team right now and you need a little bit of different thinking and you’re a leader, just either send me a comment down below around what your question is. I would love to respond to it and give you some advice. And if you need a little bit of a few new ideas around this you’d love me to speak to the team, just let me know and we can work out how that might specifically work for you. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff virtually with teams at the moment.
I hope this has been helpful… Talk to you soon!
When you are ready…. let’s work out if we are a good fit.
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I look forward to the chat…
