Graybeard Leadership and Executive Coaching
Helping leaders grow since 2014
I love to help leaders grow
Technical skills only get you so far. "Soft" Skills Determine Who Rises.
I'm an International Coaching Federation Master Certified Coach and former CFO who'll be your partner in refining your "soft" skills so you can overcome the day-to-day frustrations of managing so you can develop your people, build high performing teams and succeed as an executive by:
- Enhancing your self-awareness
- Increasing your emotional intelligence
- Strengthening your listening and communication skills
- Honing your unique leadership style
- Refining and communicating your strategic vision Inspiring employees
- Delegating effectively
- Delivering effective feedback
- Developing employees
- Building trust among superiors, peers and employees
- Making conflict less stressful and more constructive
- Creating a healthy office environment and engaged workforce
- Enhancing your executive presence
- Asking more effective questions
New Supervisor Survival Guide - Foreword
Why should anyone under 40 care what an old, retired guy writes about leadership? To quote my friend Mike, another old, retired guy and former manager of a city with half a million citizens, "Us old guys, we know a few things.”
This book distills fifty years of observing good and bad leaders, making mistakes, reading books and articles, attending leadership development programs, training and working as an executive coach, leading teams ranging from six Boy Scouts to hundreds of peers, and serving as the Chief Financial Officer of a multi-billion-dollar organization.
I wish someone had given me this book when I became a new supervisor. My hope is that supervisors find it useful in speeding their leadership development journey and avoiding at least a few of the mistakes I made along the way.
This book is only possible due to lessons I’ve learned from partnering with great coaching clients. After several thousand hours of coaching conversations with hundreds of clients, one thing has become abundantly clear: from small, private, family-run businesses and start-ups to the largest corporations and government agencies, most leaders struggle with many of the same challenges.
This Guide addresses the dozen most common challenges confronting new supervisors; additionally, it offers communication and leadership techniques, with accompanying self-observation and accountability suggestions, that have been implemented successfully by real people in real work settings.
They’ll work for you too.
Table of Contents
Shift to Developing Great Individual Contributors
The Dozen Key Skills
Get Off Autopilot
The Dozen Key Skills
Skill 1: Listen To Understand
Skill 2: Ask Questions that Encourage Thoughtful Discussion
Skill 3: Provide Feedback that Encourages Thoughtful Action
Skill 4: Delegate Challenging Work
Skill 5: Establish Clear Accountability Standards
Skill 6: Overcome Fear of Tough Conversations
Skill 7: Encourage Innovation
Skill 8: Inspire Commitment
Skill 9: Articulate Your Authentic Leadership Style
Skill 10: Foster a Healthy Work Environment
Skill 11: Lead Former Peers
Skill 12: Imagine the Future
Begin Your Lifelong Leadership Journey
Shift To Developing Great Individual Contributors
Successful first-time bosses quickly learn that to build a strong team, they should focus on two objectives. They must develop their team members to be more effective—rather than making themselves more effective—and create a healthy work environment. The question is how?
The first step is to shift your mindset from being a great individual contributor to being a developer of great individual contributors. Your knowledge, expertise, and drive earned you pay raises, bonuses, recognition, a promotion, and maybe even a bigger office or a better parking space. But ask yourself, which will be more effective in the future—increasing your personal productivity by ten percent or helping each of your team members increase their productivity by ten percent? Liz Wiseman has a great name for leaders like this in her book, Multipliers, How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. She describes a “Multiplier” as “the leader who sees, provokes, asks, and unleashes the capabilities of others.”
I’m continually amazed by how few new supervisors receive any leadership or management training, formal mentoring, or coaching to help them become the kind of “multiplier” who develops stronger team members and better teams. New supervisors, however, shouldn’t despair—helping your team members reach their potential and create a great work environment begins with and depends on conversation. The more effective your conversations, the more effectively you can develop people. I’m convinced that anyone can do it if they learn and employ the skills described in the following pages.
As authors Chalmers Brothers and Vinay Kumar make clear in Language and the Pursuit of Leadership Excellence, nearly everything that occurs in the workplace is the result of a conversation. Leaders are paid to have conversations. Lots of them. Conversations are how we:
● Create relationships
● Build trust
● Share information
● Assign work
● Teach and are taught
● Set and enforce accountability standards
● Shape culture
● Listen to, and learn from and about, our team members
Conversations take on additional importance in the hybrid, work-from-home era. Conversations keep team members feeling connected when so few opportunities for informal, spontaneous conversations exist. There are fewer quick chats in the hallway, by the coffee pot, or before and after in-person meetings. No matter where your team members work—from home or in the office, full or part-time—it is important to make the most of every conversation, whether in-person, on the phone, or via Zoom or Teams.
In their book, Nine Lies About Work, authors Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall posit that a manager must have at least one brief conversation per week with each direct report, during which two key questions should be asked:
● What are your priorities?
● How can I help?
They also state that if a manager does not have time to hold these conversations, they have too many direct reports. Such conversations are the bare minimum necessary to keep employees engaged, to build trust, and to create opportunities for their development. They also show your commitment to their growth and your interest in their challenges.
So how do we make our conversations and our efforts to make our team members as productive as possible? The Dozen Key Skills are here to help.
The Dozen Key Skills
I tell every coaching client that I don’t have a pre-conceived plan to make them an amazing leader, because there is no one-size-fits-all path to great leadership. Every leader possesses their own unique strengths, challenges, and personality traits. Only individuals can determine what will work best for themselves and their team. The most successful new leaders I’ve worked with, however, use most or all of the following skills to foster conversations that are vital for building strong teams, and to help their team members reach their full potential.
I call these The Dozen Key Skills:
● Listen to understand.
● Ask questions to encourage thoughtful discussion.
● Provide feedback that encourages thoughtful action.
● Delegate challenging work.
● Establish clear accountability standards.
● Overcome fear of tough conversations.
● Encourage innovation.
● Inspire commitment.
● Articulate your authentic leadership style.
● Foster a healthy work environment.
● Lead former peers.
● Imagine the future.
These skills are not rocket science, nor are they out of reach. Everyone can learn them. Everyone can implement them well. Each of the dozen skills is based on common sense and human nature. Some may come naturally. Some won’t. Each skill is useful by itself and even more useful when applied in conjunction with the other skills.
Each of the following chapters examines a skill and describes:
● Why the skill is important;
● How to implement the skill;
● A related story or example;
● How to hold yourself accountable for using the skill; and
● Where to find additional information.
All of these skills can be mastered with a bit of effort and self-awareness. And of course, the necessary investment of time—time to commit to your own growth as a leader.