(upbeat music) I can't talk today. Oh, my words get jumbled up. That's all right. Yeah, I don't know what it is. Let me speech class or something. Well, this is Unleashing Leadership and I'm Travis, my CEO of C-Plan Group and your host. And with me is co-host Dave Nurchi, Chief Operating Officer of C-Plan Group as well. And this podcast is all about how we implement key takeaways from great books into our business. And today we're working on a takeaway from the book, billed by Tony Fidell. We're about a third of the way through, I think. That's my best estimate where we are with this. All right. Our takeaway today, we got a couple. We actually had a reshoot to be in this episode because I can't get my word straight today. So our takeaways today, we're gonna dive into. Once you become a manager, you stop doing the things, you did really well and start managing others to do those things. And then management is a learn skill, not a talent. And it is a lot different than being an IEC. And as always do us a favor, like or subscribe, give us five stars, give us some thumbs up, give us some comments, share this with some friends. If you don't like this show, just go listen to something else. Every time you help us out, other people get to find the show. And that brings more people into this community. And hopefully we can feel the room full of people trying to grow personally and professionally. And this episode is brought to you by Seed Planning Group, our day job, David Mine. Seed Planning Group is a field in fiduciary, a wealth management firm that helps people overcome the challenges that are keeping them from personal fulfillment. Check them out at seedpg.com. And all right, Dave, we're gonna take two and put them together. This is timely, this is really good 'cause while we're doing this episode, literally yesterday I was working on training for class one of our third quarter, which is about balancing, going from being a individual contributor to a manager and what that journey is like and kind of what that entails for the typical manager. So I think that this just seems like a perfectly timed episode that dig into, you know, anybody can have the title of being a manager. How do you be a good manager? I know our managers, they really wanna do a good job. And so the question is, how do you do that? How do you, first of all, what are the expectations? And then second of all, how do you meet those expectations? Right. Yeah, that's a big priority. I think what we've learned and you mentioned your work, you're developing the next round of training classes here. You can't just tell someone or promote someone and say, hey, you're a manager now, go manage, right? And some people might be able to do that or be successful at that 'cause it might be something that they can develop quickly or have some of those skills already. But if that person doesn't understand what the expectations are or what it means to be a manager at your company, right? 'Cause it's different than how could you hold them to a standard? Or how can you tell them, you know, failure or success because they're kind of just winging it at that point, right? Oh, I think that this might work or I had a good meeting with somebody. There's no plan. There's no like overall kind of structure to it. And I think that's what we've found and what we're doing in these training classes at SEAD, right? Is this is what it means to be a manager at SEAD. And if you follow these guidelines, these principles, you know, drive your team forward, basically. - Yeah, so you're talking about we came up with that. Our first training program was about our management creed which set out principles that if the managers are following the principles or the spirit of the principles and they screw up, that's a learning experience. If they deviate from the principles and they screw up, that's a them problem. And that's something that's going to have to be addressed. And that stems on, well, for one, our managers, we asked them what would help you the most and they said training. Management training is hard though because I mean like you can go to college and you can take classes on leadership and management and then you can still be a horrible leader and a horrible manager because management is all about application to the scenario. You know, what's going on in the scenario and how do you apply to that? And then how do you build long-term foundations, systems, processes, relationships, those types of things which is very different than I got to hit some results here for the next 90 days or I'm not gonna get my bonus. And we did an episode, I think it was team of teams. Might have, way back when, maybe a year ago or so, on empowerment. And the point was really about empowerment and expectations which I think was what you were just talking about. People say, well, I'm gonna empower you. You're gonna be a manager now. You are now empowered to do things. Okay, but like you said, set the expectations 'cause empowerment without expectations is too broad. I don't know the depth or the reach that I can have unless you give me permission. I may be afraid to reach across the table or grab something because you didn't explicitly say I could do it or I might not be afraid I might reach across and you might slap my hand because you're like, no, that's not what I empowered you for. So I think leadership has to do a really good job for managers of defining, you know, their expectations like you said for what this role means. And I think if a manager doesn't have definition from their leadership, they need to go to the leadership and say, please define this for me. Should I just do an ask for forgiveness later and what would be the parameters? Where could I get myself in such hot water? It's not gonna be okay. Right. You're gonna kind of like manage up. You're gonna say, hey, boss, you're not giving me enough structure here to understand really what you're asking me to do. And that's that example you gave is, to me, what gives empowerment, like it makes it effective to say you're empowered to do something, right? 'Cause you could say that to someone, but if they are constantly kind of like tiptoeing around thinking, I don't know if I should do this or that or am I gonna get in trouble if I do this? How do I approach it? And they're scared to take action. They're not actually empowered and they're not managing. They're just kind of filling this role and almost like a middleman or like a mouthpiece to the more senior leadership if they can't actually execute and take action. So that defining how you can operate, what's okay, what the guidelines are, that's what makes empowerment actually effective. Yeah, one of the things that, just you made me think of it while you were saying people who are afraid of doing whatever, one of the things that we've had, you have to work really hard to get your managers to know that they can make mistakes and not every mistake deserves an apology, right? There's situations where you're learning, you're doing the best you can, you screw up, you don't need 20 minutes of apologies. All we need is, I know where I screwed up, I'm gonna fix that. That's it, just have a plan to fix it. It shouldn't be any more emotional than that. It should just be, yep, you screwed up, we acknowledge that you screwed up, let's just move on. You fix it, I trust in you, you're in this position for a reason, I trust in you to address the issue and I expect that you won't make the same error twice. So just move on from here. And I think that that's one of the hard parts about when you get into management is a lot of people are just struggling to manage themselves and kind of their own things that are going on with them. They're not really understanding your job now is to manage other people and the way we lay this out and like the training that we're doing, you need to know where your people are going before your people know where they're going. Which means you also gotta have yourself in order. You know, you've gotta have, you've gotta be working on being the best example of what an employee should be as you possibly can. Notice I didn't say the best producer or the most brilliant person in the room or anything like that. The best example of what you consider an ideal employee and that would be somebody who's prepared, who's paying attention to the rest of the business, who's engaged, right? It would be all of those things who understands how things go together, who understands kind of the direction where things are going and who can help articulate that to others so that others can get in the right position, right? It's kind of like hurting cattle. If you have a cattle that starts wandering off to the right, somebody's gonna go get them and pull them back in. Well, this earlier you see them wandering, the easier it's gonna be to go get them. You don't have to travel three miles, go get them because they wander too far away. If you can get it right when they step out of line and say, "Hey, let's get going back in that direction." It's a lot easier and a lot better for everybody. And bad management is when people get really, well, it can be bad management or it can just be a bad employee. But I think that there's nuance and deciding which one it is is when people really get out of alignment and nobody tries to rub them back in and say, "Hey, we gotta get you focused back over there." But I think that that's the job of good management is helping you understand, not helping you understand, me understanding where you're going so I know how to set the foundation for you. Right. Basically, I can put you in the right path. Yeah, and the other thing I think we discussed here quickly is last episode we talked about the pit, right? And like forming relationships. A lot of times you might find yourself in a situation where you're managing someone you might consider a friend or you have some sort of relationship just kind of like outside of the day to day, defining that having those conversations openly, right? Like, hey, we hang out sometimes outside or whatever the snare is, right? You could come up with it in your head, but defining that, having the open conversation, "Hey, when we're at work, this is what we do." Or one-on-one type meetings, right? Those can be a casual chat or a fully in on the weekend type of chat if you don't have an agenda for that or if you don't have a purpose for the one-on-one. So things like that when you become a manager as well, you might be now managing your colleagues that you were working with before, it's a different role. So define that having an open conversation is something that I know and see a lot of us have done and it's worked really well because it's not this like weird thing you tip toe around anymore. It's okay and here's how we act in the manager employee capacity. - Yeah, part of our management creed is employees first, friend second, when you're at work. Because and we're our next episode is about honesty because you have to be able to be bluntly even to the edge of being considered cruel but you have to be that honest with people about what's going on. Otherwise you're doing them an incredible disservice. And like you said, it's very hard when you're trying to toe the line unless you've got good examples. Okay, that's how you can do that. And that comes with trust and mutual respect and all those things we talked about in the last episode about being in the pit and everything. If you have those things, then people won't feel like they're being a victim or they won't feel like they're being picked on they'll feel like, okay, you know, they've loved me and that's why he's coming to me and saying I gotta work on this because he knows what I'm capable of and he can help get me there. (upbeat music)
