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Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

These are things that may help you in developing your leadership skills and improve your interactions with your people.

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The Importance of Shadowing

Have you ever taken the time to sit and shadow your people?
What does it mean to actually shadow someone?

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I know that I am guilty of attempting to shadow my people and being more involved with my laptop responding to emails or instant messages or focusing on my cell phone and responding to text messages. This is something that I have learned through my own failure and I hope that others can gain some wisdom from this post and not make the same mistakes that I have.

Put your phone on silent, leave your laptop in the office when you go out to shadow your people. Make sure that you spend the whole time that you wanted to shadow watching your people and seeing how they interact with their employees or their customers. Use this to provide valuable coaching and development for your people. If you have never done this before it may be a shock to them the first time so be prepared for it.

By spending a few hours a week shadowing your employees you can determine the kind of person that they are. You can determine if they are someone that leads by example or someone that leads with words alone. You can provide a significant amount of feedback through 2 hours of shadowing that your employees may not have ever received just because you took the time to work with them.

My challenge for this article is to take 2 hours and sit with an employee. Learn who they are and how they interact with your customers or with the other agents. Then provide them open and honest feedback on how they are doing, if they are not meeting your expectations tell them that. This will be a large challenge for the first few times as your people may think they are doing things wrong, they will attempt to be proper and do everything they can to impress you. This is something that you need to be mindful of and shadow multiple times.

Jared

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The art of proper Delegation

The art of delegation is, simply put, moving low value tasks to your subordinates in order to reduce your overall workload. Delegation is extremely important in any leadership role but it is something that can cause tension and disdain if done incorrectly.

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When you are looking to delegate tasks you should always find a positive undertone to provide your subordinate for them to complete the task. This can be something as simple as gaining face time with other members of management or learning skills for their next opportunity in the organization. In some cases your people will approach you and ask for additional permission or responsibility and they will do it because of a few different reasons.

  1. They want to prove their abilities.
  2. They feel the task will help them move into a new role quicker.
  3. They genuinely want to help reduce your work load and stress.

These are the 3 reasons that I have found are the most common reasons any employee will want to have more responsibility. While all these reasons are fine you must ensure that you are providing the proper message when you delegate someone a task. Always provide the underlying reason that you are delegating the task to the, whether it is to free up your time to work with other members of leadership or the employee themselves or to get them more face time with other management.

What should I delegate?

This was a question that I had to ask myself every day when I became a supervisor and moving into the manager role. Throughout the tasks I have given to my supervisors there have been a few rules that I have made for myself that has made me decide what I can and cannot give out.

Due Date: When the project has to be completed is a big determination on whether or not the task should be given to an employee or done yourself.

Visibility: If the project is something that will be viewed by the executive staff then it is something that will require you to have a chunk of input on. You will want to make sure that if you do delegate this project that you leave enough time to thoroughly review and make any modifications necessary.

Development: Is this going to teach your employee something? If it is then it is something that you should give them so that they can learn the skills that the project can provide.

Workload: Is this a task or is it a project? How much workload is it going to place on your employee? Are they going to be able to complete their daily tasks at the same time? These questions are important to make sure that you don’t overwork your employees.

Now lets look in the Workload category, is this a task or is this a project. This is one of the most important things you have to answer because it is going to determine where this will end up. If this is a task you must be willing to delegate it permanently to one or more employees, whether this is something that happens every day or something that happens once a month. If this is a project you need to ensure that you are comfortable having your employee spend the time on it. If they have other tasks and projects going you need to help them balance their workload so that they do not get overwhelmed.

Here is the challenge for this article. Sit down and determine how much of your time is spent on tasks that could be delegated to others within your organization. Then determine if they fall in line with the categories above. If it is something that can be delegated then do it! The art of proper delegation is something that can take years to learn but is a key weapon in a good managers arsenal.

Jared

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Strengths and Weaknesses for Leaders

Everyone in any role has heard of mapping out their strengths and weaknesses. This is a great practice for everyone to help develop their skills and teach them where to focus the majority of their time.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths and Weaknesses

 

 

 

 

If you have worked with your own strengths and weaknesses in the past then I am sure you did something like the paper above. Again I cannot stress the fact that this is a good thing enough. This is something that EVERYONE should do on a regular basis. Once you move into leadership you need to change this a little bit, when you sit down to do your strengths and weaknesses you need to add additional people.

For each person that reports to you, as well as your peers and superiors (If you are comfortable doing this with your superiors) so that you can get a good idea of the people that you surround yourself with. One of the most difficult things that I have learned moving into a leadership role is the fact that I am not alone. You have to rely on your peers/superiors and even your agents at times to help fill in where you have weaknesses.

You should develop a spreadsheet similar to the one below.

Me
Strengths Weaknesses Support
Communication Saying “No” John
Planning Time Management Bob
Execution Work Life Balance Jason

 

Now you are going to see something different on my Strengths and Weaknesses chart that you do not normally see. There is a column for “Support” that is normally left out of these exercises. This column is extremely important not only when you first start out in leadership but whenever you have a weakness that you need to work on. This support structure is going to be there for you and be the people that help to hold you accountable when you do not actively work on your weaknesses. You should make sure that you have advised these people that they are going to be your support structure as well, not that you wouldn’t in the first place, but if you don’t they will not be able to help you to the best of their ability.

The next step is to do this with your people.

Team
Agent Strength Weakness Mentor Leader?
John Consultation Tech Joe Yes
Amber Tech Consultation Samantha No
Shaun Closing Consultation Bobby No
Chelsea Rapport Tech Joe No
Samantha Consultation Tech Randy Yes
Bobby Consultation Tech Joe Maybe
Robert Closing Tech Randy Yes
Randy Tech Closing Samantha Maybe
Tom Tech Consultation John No
Joe Tech Consultation John Yes

 

Now when you look at your team you are going to see a couple more columns as well. The Mentor and Leader columns are added in from the standard Strengths and Weaknesses layout to help identify the support structure that you can have for yourself and for your people. Assigning mentors is something that is huge for all types of agent development and this is simply pairing people who excel in areas that someone else is deficient.

The most important item of this spreadsheet is determining who on your team has leadership potential. These are the people that you need to focus additional time on developing because they are your bench and the people that will replace you one day.

By assigning your leaders people to mentor you will show them that you have trust and faith in them and it will help them to begin developing your other agents. By doing this you are now effectively increasing the management staff that you have on your team by making “mini yous” to work with your agents that may or may not have the natural leadership abilities or the drive to get into leadership.

My challenge for you is to create a spreadsheet like the one above for your team and for yourself. If you are confident in it then you can also build one for your peers and for your supervisors and work with them to help them improve as well.

I hope this exercise helps some of you to determine not only your strengths and weaknesses but also to determine your support structure and those people that can help you develop your agents.

If you are having a hard time coming up with your own strengths and weaknesses you can check out this Link

Thanks again for your time and attention.

Jared

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Investing Time in Leadership

Time… Time is one of the most important resources that we as leadership have. There is a huge challenge in determining what we should be investing our time in and what we should be putting to the sidelines or delegating to someone else.

Investing time in leadership

What is your time worth?

This can be a very difficult question to answer especially if you are new into a leadership role. Your organization has given your time a dollar worth but is that really what you think your time is valued at? It is a lot more difficult to put a value on your time when you are in leadership than when you are able to tie a productivity number to it like revenue or contacts. You have to sit down and weigh the time that you have to spend with your people, your family and doing anything else that you may enjoy doing (like me and my video games).

When I first moved into leadership I felt that I needed to invest the same amount of time into each of my employees to make things fair across the board. I quickly learned that this was not the best way to do things. Some of my agents took longer to learn things while others would pick it up extremely fast, some agents wanted to spend large amounts of time in one on one settings and others just wanted to be left to do their daily tasks. After a few months I began to learn who I needed to spend time with and who was self sufficient and I only needed to maintain their skills. I began investing different amounts of time into different agents based on my observations and something amazing happened, they all started performing better!

After another month I found that my agents that only needed to be “maintained” only needed subtle encouragement as well as our standard bi-weekly sit down which was at about 30 minutes. This allowed me to change my investment strategy and begin investing time in the agents that either needed more assistance to get better or to the agents that have shown me leadership qualities and the desire to develop as a leader themselves.

One of the biggest suggestions that I can give you on this subject is to try investing your time in different areas. If you have a project that can be delegated to one of your agents or your peers then do it. Find the time to invest in some of your agents that show potential in leadership. The more time you invest in these people the more they will be able to take of your plate and the more time you will have to develop others. It is a great circle just like a clock, the more you do the more you gain.

I have a challenge for everyone reading this. Take a step back and look at the time that you are investing in each of the people that work for you. Is this time being used properly? Are you gaining something from your interactions? Are they? If you are not, those interactions are not worth having and there is no since to continue investing that time. Kick me an email or a comment and let me know what you have discovered about the time you invest, maybe you can free up a few hours to play a game with me 😉

Jared