What can you do today to take your management style from good to great?

#1 – Make Your Feedback Memorable

Receiving feedback isn’t always easy. Giving it can sometimes be uncomfortable too, but it’s a skill managers need to nail.

The key to great quality feedback is that it is memorable and constructive. And few will forget being told to make their feedback WHIFF. Here’s our technique.

#2 – Think Informal First

There are a few circumstances where you would normally need to deal with an employee’s complaint as a formal grievance from the get go:

  1. If what being complained about effects lots of people
  2. If it turns out to be a deliberate or reckless ignoring of the rules

If none of these are present in the situation you’re dealing with, why not explore whether you can handle the situation informally first?

#3 – “Help me understand…”

This is the ‘magic phrase’ in a managers toolkit to improve your management style. As open as just about any question can get, it is a great way to get to the heart of an issue.

If you need to be increasingly specific with it, you can also try: “Help me understand…..

  • What happened…
  • What specifically you did…
  • How you felt about…”

Our video ‘Killer Questions’ runs through different question types and their uses.

#4 Trust your instincts

If you think something’s not right for a team member – ask them. How to do it? Our advice would be not to use the phrase ‘are you okay’? This is a great article explaining the reasons why and what to do instead.

We have a video called ‘are you okay’ as part of our Difficult Conversations suite too.

This leads us nicely into our last tip…

#5 Ask Awesome Questions

Encourage your team to find the solution to their challenge for themselves when you just know that they have it in them.

How? Use constructive questions.

First: open questions, the who what where when how or why’s of this world. These questions will encourage your team member to do good quality thinking.

Then ask them how it (the challenge) needs to be different. Next, ask how they can make that come about (and give them a couple of goes at this one).

What we’re explaining here is similar to the coaching model GROW. Our video ‘constructive questions’ goes into more detail in the difficult conversations suite. Drop us a line if you’d like a free trial.

 

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