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eManagement Tips - June 2020

Our monthly update for Associates and Members of RiverRhee's Managers' Community
Welcome to the June 2020 issue of eManagement Tips.
 
This month's issue focuses on authenticity, choice and learning and development in the workplace.

We are continuing to deliver our training, workshops and one-to-one coaching to our clients over the internet. The two Assertiveness courses, and the two Introduction to Project Management courses are now complete. We are interested in talking to other clients who would like a course delivered in this way, or would like to explore how we could deliver face-to-face courses with suitable health and safety measures in place.

We also have some 6-session one-to-one coaching programmes in progress and starting up over the internet . And we are in discussion about delivering some Team Coaching over the internet too.

We are excited about our webinar: "Your learning and development journey: 10 self-reflective steps with RiverRhee" which we have just recorded for One Nucleus's digital ON Helix conference in July.



Do get in touch if you would be interested in any of our courses, team workshops, or if you would like us to support you through one-to-one coaching.

Building trust through authenticity as a manager and leader

One of the things that we stress in our leadership course is the importance of being authentic: being true to yourself.  People respond to who you are.  If this is at odds with what you say and do, this can not only cause stress to yourself, but also affect other people’s trust in you.

So how does this sit with Goleman’s (2000) description of different leadership styles, and the suggestion that leaders should flex their style to meet different situational requirements?

There may be some answers from Frei and Morriss (2020) in their HBR article: “Begin with trust.  The first step to becoming a genuinely empowering leader”.

Authenticity is the first component in their triangle.  It's about when you are being “the real you”: in terms of what you know, what you believe, what you think and how you feel.

Empathy is the second component. It’s an easy quality to recognise that managers and leaders have needed to tap into at the present time.  It sits well with the affiliative and coaching styles of leadership.

Logic is the last component, and sits with the authoritative (or visionary) and democratic styles of leadership.

The coercive and pacesetting (do as I do, now) are sometimes needed: in times or crisis or when time is short.  But ideally only in the short-term.

Could a manager or leader (or coach) still feel they are being authentic if they were to switch between these styles, if they were not their most natural?  How could they do so and still maintain trust?

You can read more about this in Keeping hold of our authenticity as a manager, leader and coach.

Helping others find their personal goal

One of the challenges that we set delegates in our management courses is to find their 'unique contribution' at work: what is it that you are uniquely placed to do?  What do you enjoy and excel at?  What purpose motivates you to get up in the morning?

Michael Bungay Stanier’s  (2010) “Do more great work” has proved to be a valuable starting point for helping people who are making decisions about their direction in life: what they want to achieve.

This is how it works:

1. Use the 3-part circle to help individuals differentiate between the aspects of their work that is OK, that they don’t particularly enjoy, and that is ‘great’. What you’re after are the instances of great things that happen for them in their work. When they feel wonderful, fulfilled, 'in the zone'.

2. Ask them to differentiate what they have defined as 'great' in terms of:

  • How it relates to interaction with others 
  • The kind of thinking they are doing 
  • What they are practically doing
3.  Help them to drill down in this way to identify the kind of work they might want to focus on going forward

The ideal is to achieve a perfect match between what the individual cares about, and what the organisation expects. The reality is that we tend to have a mix in our work – and the individual may need to decide what they want to do about that.

You can read more about this in The manager as coach: helping others find their goal.

Starting from a position of choice in manager - employee relationships


An article in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review (Groysberg 2020) explores a case study of whether a manager should fight to keep a star employee who decides to leave the organisation without any apparent prior indication of wanting to do so.

There follows some very valid discussion, from the author and from two contributing experts, on the merits or otherwise of various remedial-style actions.

Such actions could be even better positioned were managers and employees to take a more preventative approach and adopt the mindset that:

  1. People work for a company by choice, just as a company chooses to recruit people for specific jobs
  2. The relationship between an individual and their manager is a collaborative one, which combines meeting the organisation’s requirements and supporting the individual in their personal development plans
  3. An individual may find that their personal development is best continued elsewhere
  4. A company’s requirements from an individual will also evolve over time
Steps that could be taken to support this mindset include:
  1. Having regular one-to-one discussions which are not only task-focused, but also reflect on how things are going in terms of mutual expectations
  2. Discussing succession planning
  3. Regularly demonstrating, through positive feedback, how much you value the individual’s contribution to the company.

You can read more about this topic in The manager as coach: working across generations.
All of RiverRhee’s courses can be tailored and run in-house for your company.  We will schedule open courses where there is enough demand to do so.

We can also explore most topics in one-to-one coaching sessions.

See the RiverRhee Consulting website or contact Elisabeth at elisabeth@riverrhee.com or on 07876 130 817.
Copyright © 2020 RiverRhee Consulting, All rights reserved.


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