Free Up Time to Lead by Empowering your Team
Free up time, energy and bandwidth by empowering your team to tackle more challenges and opportunities on their own.
✅ Mindset Monsters
Are you plagued by the leadership ‘mindset monsters’? Sometimes we think leadership is about:
🗣 telling people what to do
⛑ saving the day
🎮 controlling everything
👹 TELLING: as leaders we can think it’s our job to have all the answers, plus it can give us an ego-boost.
What is the impact of this approach on the team? Do we always have the right answers?
👹 SAVING: we’re the hero, taking responsibility for our team. Sweeping in and avoiding pitfalls.
When and how do you do this? Does your team always need you to step in? What would it be like if you could train and empower your team to save tricky situations themselves?
👹 CONTROLLING: when you’re working to a deadline, KPI or with a tricky client, we pull back into ‘control’ mode. All thoughts of delegation and empowerment go out of the window.
When can we step back to use mistakes to enable people to learn? What are some ‘safe’ mistakes for your team to learn from?
So how can we banish these Mindset Monsters? The Push/ Pull continuum and the GROW model can help us.
(With credit to @Michael Bangay-Stanier. )
Push vs Pull: How to coach your team to success
Keen to empower your team, and yet concerned you don’t lose people or throw them in the deep end?
As leaders sometimes we ‘tell’ people what to do. Here we’re at the PUSH end of the continuum. This is ideal with colleagues new to a task, in an emergency or when nothing else has worked.
Other times we ask questions, encouraging people to think more and make their own decisions. Here we’re at the PULL end.
Both are useful, the skill is knowing which to use in which situation
Questions to consider:Which style do you usually use, and when?
Which style do you default to when under pressure? What is the impact of this?
What might happen if you try flexing your style and try a different approach?
Creating time and space to lead is a common theme in executive coaching or leadership training. Do get in touch if you’d like to find out more for you or your teams.
Kate Jennings