The new year is a time for setting personal and professional goals. As a leader, it is not a bad idea to set goals for yourself as well. Not just what metrics to hit for your team & yourself, or other quantitive measurements. No, I am talking about qualitative goals; one's that require not just brain work, but heart work and gut work as well. After all, that is where true leadership challenges are located!
My tip for leaders this year is simple: when a challenge arises, consider multiple perspectives on that challenge to consider.
What I mean to say is, don't necessary try to solve a problem right away with the first perspective that comes to mind. Doing so is very easy to do, and is a habit we human beings tend to default to. This is especially true when the world around us wants solutions to our challenges right away.
An example of this might be as follows:
Your department is not bringing in enough billable hours to meet this year's quota. The first perspective that a leader might consider is that the team is not working hard enough or smart enough. This fits well mentally for you, as it is comfortable to shift responsibility away from yourself and onto the front-line workers. It also feels like the safe choice, as that is what other leaders would focus on as well. The solution? Increase productivity.
But after implementing a strategy to improve productivity of the workforce, you begin to receive pushback. The call for more in-office work fires up your employees, some of who threaten to quit if this policy continues. You have managers who push back, saying that they do not want to micro-manage all their employees billable hours tracking when that was never the issue in the first place. You have lateral colleagues in other departments come up to you and question whether cracking down so hard will yield better results.
Something had to change, you say to yourself; but was this the correct change?
In the above example, "you" end up choosing the first perspective that comes to mind, without much (or in this case, any) consideration for other perspectives to the challenge at hand.
A better solution would be to choose to take more time to diagnose the challenge by considering multiple perspectives. In my coaching practice, I like to have my client's consider upwards of 5 perspectives; their own, their best friend, their biggest competitor, their team, and their organization. This exercise broadens their view to be both more inclusive and more strategic in how they might respond going forward.
Now this list of perspectives can be altered a bit to suit the environment you are in (such as "best friend" being changed to a peer or colleague you trust), but the intention is still the same; how many quality perspectives can you get to better view your challenge from
Let's see how it applies in the example going forward:
After some considerable criticism and feedback, you decide to convene a meeting between yourself, a middle management representative in your department, a non-managing employee from your department, and a lateral peer from another department.
The mission was to brainstorm the challenge of low billable hours, and how others might perceive the cause.
You share that your perspective was that the department was not working hard enough to make the billable hours quota.
Your middle manager advises that the overall inflow of work has been up and down all year, yielding inconsistent results.
Your non-managing employee advises that people they meet with are simply not willing to spend as much money, causing them to negotiate over rates and hours more than the previous years.
Your lateral peer from another department advises that the challenge may be related to the ongoing turbulence between the board of directors and the Executives over who to target for their customer base in a rapidly changing economy
You ask everyone in the room what their biggest competitor would say is the reason for our challenge: Your middle manager and non-managing employee say lack of updated technology for services provided, while your peer from another department and yourself think it would be the lack of innovation across the board at their organization.
The point of the example is this: multiple perspectives provide a bigger vantage point for you to see how to diagnose and solve a challenge.
So for this new year, try to exercise the ability to view a challenge from multiple perspectives. I'm willing to bet that challenge has a much better chance of having progress made than before!
Kommentare