Agenda Items For every Leader and Manager: The Three R’s
By: David Deacon
Tags: Leadership, Pandemic, Management, Self Management, Management And Leadership

As we approach the end of an unquestionably tough year, there are three things that every leader and manager — whether responsible for one other person or an entire company — must do over the next few weeks. All three things conveniently can be made to start with the letter R, so here are the three Rs.

Recover is the first R.

This means you need to find the ways to get some rest, to change your perspective , and give your mind and body a break. I know it is easier said than done, but the holidays are kind of designed for this. Take a little time to immerse yourself in something completely different (a Christmas movie is sometimes good for that..); increase your exercise regimes a notch, enough that you notice; tilt the balance a bit more towards family and friends; take different routes to your usual destinations; do some day-dreaming. Take yourself off the treadmill of tasks and virtual meetings for a while, so that you can recover some perspective and some enthusiasm.

This matters because, truthfully, you cannot get perspective when you are in the thick of things: you actually need to bring yourself away in some way, so that you see more clearly with the benefit of distance. This means distractions are worthwhile, things that consume your attention for a while that are not work. Find activities that take you out of yourself. Give yourself some time to relax your mind. And as for enthusiasm, you will regain this once you step away, once you break the normal patterns, throw out the habitual rhythms.

The trick is to disrupt yourself a little bit, and allow the end of year rituals to help you alter your approach.

Come the New Year you will rediscover your enthusiasm for what lies ahead. And you are going to need that.

All this is really about energy, and you have to manage that if you are to lead others. In the self determined manager training we talk about the reality that next year will be tougher than this year — every year is tougher, with higher expectations to achieve more with the same resources, or the same with less resources.

And I am sorry, I know 2020 has been hard. Like most people, I hope and believe that 2021 will be a lot better in many ways — but in some respects next year will be even harder. Why? Because the pressure to grow and press on, and to reinvent and do things differently, and to succeed quickly, to take advantage of new trends and emerging opportunities, will put enormous pressure on leaders everywhere.

Next year will be a race, and we will all be under pressure to lead winning teams. 2020 has tested us in all kinds of ways, and we have been resilient and patient and resolute; flexible and adaptable; resourceful and creative. 2021 will build on those tests and add new pressures. So you have to take opportunities when they occur to recover so that you can be the leader your teams need you to be — the manager who leads them, who brings them energy, who has the spirit to press ahead.

So to be ready for everything that is coming, find some opportunities to recover.

Review is the second R.

In some ways this is a component of recovery, but it’s so important it deserves its own section. Many of us believe that we review the year every year, but actually we tend to do a pretty poor job of this.

It’s hard to look back, especially on your own performance with a critical eye. This is why we spend a lot of time — and use plenty of checklists and tools to help us — on reviewing our own managerial impact in the self determined manager training sessions: reviewing your own effectiveness is a discipline that doesn’t somehow come easily. But without stopping to reflect on how you have done you cannot decide what you are going to keep in your leadership repertoire and what you are going to look to change going forward.

So you do need to spend a little bit of time on reflection, thinking about the impact you had on the team (or teams) that you lead, on the things you did that worked, the things that aren’t really working, and the gaps you are leaving.

If you need a prompt to get you started, simply ask yourself:

1. Did you act like a leader and manager you would want to work for, and,

2. What can you change in your leadership behaviour next year that will make your teams and your people even more able to outperform and grow?

Keep in mind please that reviewing has two equally important elements — the good things and the bad things — and you must remember to reflect on the things you are pleased about, the successes you have had and the things you will keep or even increase in your leadership toolkit, as well as thinking about changes to be made.

One of the interesting things this year is how the wrenching and sudden changes increased the scale of difficulty of managing well, and brought out some hidden skills and approaches in some managers and leaders that were very positive. Some people really stepped up in the crisis, were more visible, connected, encouraging and available. And more flexible, more trusting and transparent. There was so much more demanded of us this year, and some leaders did really well.

So give yourself credit where it is due.

As an aside, the increased demands this year were so many I ending up writing a new 20-item “loyalty balance” self-check so that managers could cover all the big themes. That’s a lot of expectations. It doesn’t lend itself to an article, but email me at david@thetalentoffice.org if you want a copy.

Anyhow, the point of the reflection is to decide what to keep doing next year, and what to change. The year is gone, but looking ahead, how will you be even more like the leader you want to be next year?

Reset is the third R.

The way ahead is different and the keys to a successful 2021 and beyond will owe much to reinvention as you rebuild.

Crises provoke big changes, but not normally during the crisis — that’s when you focus on surviving. It’s soon after that the new ideas and new approaches get formed and tested, the new models get adopted and adapted. Almost every new thing will emerge in some form, fairly soon. So this means being open to ideas, to experimentation, to ambiguity, to failing. This means embracing trends and possibilities. This means giving up on any notion that you might know much at all, let alone everything.

And this means leaning hard on the skills of bringing people together to create shared wisdom, novel innovation and amazing problem solving.

Some of these trends towards adaptable leadership were already clear before we slipped into the pandemic, but like flexible working and online shopping, these are now more clearly part of the fixed landscape. So you will need to make sure that you are the team leader who gets the best from people, who creates strong team spirit, who collaborates for solutions and co-creates the future. The teams that bring bright ideas, execute fast, adapt almost instantly, and never declare victory, will be the ones to watch. Will your team be one of those?

So however you approached your leadership tasks before the pandemic, now is the time to reset your approach. Resilience and vision will be tested for sure, but so will flexibility and creativity. So take the time now to get your head straight.

Your to-do list for leading your team next year includes:

· increasing their creativity and inventiveness

· encouraging thoughtful risk taking,

· giving your people licence to try things, and celebrating failures as well as successes

· showing enthusiasm for ideas and experiments even when they don’t work,

· making fewer assumptions about what will work and

· being more open to possibilities.

If this isn’t your usual working style, it might be worth showing this article to your team and having a conversation about how you will all become adapted, really quickly, to the opportunities that 2021 will present. Just because you cannot know exactly how those opportunities will look, does not mean that it’s ok to wait.

A lot will be different next year, so you need to make sure that your attitude is open to that, flexible in reaction, positive in action, quick to adapt, slow to criticize. This is the reset.

You know that next year is going to be exhausting, exhilarating and thoroughly unexpected in good and bad ways. Don’t sleepwalk into it, and don’t let your team do that either. Take time, just a little time, to Recover, to Reflect and to Reset.

Come the spring, you’ll be glad you did.

At The Talent Office and the Self Determined Training Company we use our core principles and broad expertise to help build great companies, fantastic cultures, amazing leaders and high impact managers. Drop me an email (david@thetalentoffice.org) for details of our Self Determined Manager training or talent consulting.