As a manager, are you constantly barraged with questions from employees on what to do next or how to handle a situation? Are you hesitant to delegate to your team because you’re not sure your staff has the skills? Do you wish you had more headcount to handle the workload in your group? Are you looking for way to help develop employees? Here are a few things you can do today to make a difference.
1. The “Stop It” Exercise
This is a great exercise you can assign to all of your staff (and yourself) to assess the relative value of the work you are currently doing and to identify what work can be discontinued to free up precious time and resources. How to do it:
List all work – routine tasks, projects, reporting, meetings, etc.
- Identify those items that are known to have critical/consequential impact (either within the team or for the organization). Identify ways to make these more efficient.
- Identify those that have questionable impact, research their importance and move them to list A or B accordingly.
- Identify those that are done “just because we’ve always done it”. Stop doing those.
A good way to force the thinking on this is to imagine that the team collectively decides to start a commune in Utah and leaves the organization. What work would be urgently re-assigned to others in the organization, what work would sit in a pile waiting for someone to take it over and what work would be deemed unnecessary in those circumstances.
Bonus Tip to help Develop Employees: Share the lists to increase understanding and appreciation of the whole team’s contributions and how each part depends on others to be successful. Have the team brainstorm any additional ways to streamline the work.
2. The Resume Review
If you haven’t already reviewed and discussed this information with each of your staff, you may be surprised to find resources and skill sets hidden right in your own team. How to do it:
- Let your team know that you’d like to take a more concerted approach to employee development and aligning their skills and interests with the current and future work of the team.
- Set up one on one meetings with each direct report and let them know you’d like to hear about what they most enjoy doing, what they’d like to do more of, what they’d like to learn/develop and what their long term hopes are for their career.
- Ahead of your meetings, review your employees’ resumes/CVs to get a sense of past experiences/education that could be applied to current or future work.
- Hold the meetings and listen.
Once you’ve held your meetings, gather your learnings and identify opportunities for delegation, training, task or project swapping for better skill set matches, etc.
Bonus Tip to Develop Employees: Share interesting backgrounds and skill sets with the whole team to increase appreciation for the diversity and depth available across colleagues.
3. Stop Solving Problems
If you are like most managers, you probably answer a lot of questions and solve a lot of problems. You need to stop that. You’re wasting time, preventing people from developing their own capability and missing opportunities to reward your stars for good thinking and initiative. When an employee asks a question or brings a problem to you – resist the urge to answer and, instead, consider having a developmental dialogue. Here’s how:
- Good question! Tell me more about the situation.
- Bring me up to speed, what have you tried so far?
- If it were up to you, how might you handle next steps?
- What challenges would you anticipate?
Holding a dialogue engages the employee in thinking through the problem, allows them to develop problem solving skills in a relatively safe environment and gives you the opportunity to recognize capability.
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