Article: https://ideas.ted.com/do-you-have-any-of-these-4-bad-habits-of-managers-heres-how-to-change-them/
Do you have any of these 4 bad habits of managers?
While positive behavior can help foster a culture of respect and trust, negative behavior can trickle down and make employees (and teams) mistrustful, inefficient and ineffective.
Tips on creating high-performance teams.
When you take on a new role, you have to shed the old one,” Here are the habits that can hold back leaders — and people on their teams — and how to break them.
Bad habit #1: Solving instead of delegating
As they rise through the ranks at work, many people are rewarded for being great “solvers.” Once promoted, they often think the same behavior is how they’ll succeed as a leader.
The problem: When a leader swoops in to fix every problem, they’re robbing the members of their team of the chance to learn and grow.
How to break the habit
1. Give up some old duties — and do it openly Until we’re explicit about what we won’t be doing anymore, we can’t make room for our teams to rise to the occasion and perform those responsibilities in ways that work for them.
Make commitments to yourself and your team by saying
• “This is what I did before, and now I expect this of you”
• “Here’s what I will do to complement and support what you’re doing”.
• “I am no longer the problem solver; I am the reviewer of potential solutions.”
2. Get comfortable with saying “I don’t know”
• It doesn’t make you unqualified or vulnerable. It just means that you’re being responsible.
• Leaders set a bad example when they give half-baked answers, because their employees learn that it’s not OK to say “I don’t know.” Which means they’re being groomed to become people who also give half-baked answers.
• Overemphasise ‘I don’t know’ because even saying ‘Oh, I’m not sure, but here’s what I would guess’ will be taken as gospel by your team.
Bad habit #2: Discouraging bad news
Reacting in a way that makes people not want to be honest with you means the problems will become crises. That’s because they’ll learn to delay telling you because they’ll become too scared of how you’ll react. If they know you’re going to react well, you’ll get visibility into problems you didn’t have before and the chance to help them fix it before it becomes a big issue.
How to break the habit:
When you’re told bad news, pause and say “thank you”
• Commit to yourself that the first thing out of your mouth will be ‘Thank you for letting me know because now we can solve this before it becomes a crisis’
• When you “interrupt the habit” with a thank you, all of a sudden your brain has launched into a very different kind of conversation.
Bad habit #3: Avoiding complex issues
We white-wash complexity by having meetings that are so diplomatic as to be, quite frankly, pointless, So much of the time we’re trying to avoid the gray areas where we might surface conflicts, and we smooth over what are likely to be uncomfortable and complex conversations.
How to break the habit:
Use complexity to inspire discussion and debate
• Carve out time at the end of a meeting to say, ‘OK, knowing that this thing has imperfections, how can we try and de-risk it as much as possible?’
• Invite your team to challenge the conclusions that you’re coming to.
• Ask ‘Where are the holes?’ ‘If we were in a different position, what could we do?’ or ‘What would our customers say?’ to bring other perspectives into the room.
Bad habit #4: Not asking for feedback
Start early, because it will help you build up a reputation as someone who genuinely wants to hear feedback and will act on it. By the time that you’re senior, people will know that you’re open to hearing what they think.
How to break the habit:
Be specific about how you ask for feedback
• To get helpful assessments, you can’t be vague. Ask for very explicit feedback, and ask for it ahead of time.
• Don’t say, ‘Every two weeks, I’d love to sit down and I’ll give you some feedback; I’d love if you could do the same.’
• Bring up specific situations. For example, you could say, ‘In the meeting the other day, I meant not to be the first one to speak but I did so anyway. Next time we meet, I’m recommitting to not being the first one to speak, so I can hear from the team first. Can you let me know if I do this? What else could I do in meetings to encourage others to contribute?’’ You’re basically saying, ‘I’m going to be following up with you to ask how I did,’