Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

-If you listened to last week’s show, you know that we talked about self-compassion and why we need it in leadership. And we also talked about the most commonly reported leadership challenges. Well, this week we are going to offer you some easy solutions to overcome those challenges! 4 of them to be exact.

What are the common leadership challenges? Here is a list: difficulty giving feedback, not making enough time to spend with your team to get to know them and listen to them, being too hands-off, being too friendly and unclear about boundaries, not establishing clear goals and role clarity, misunderstanding motivation (i.e. that they are only in it for the money), hiring too quickly, not delegating, not being clear about your own role, not developing their team, struggling with how to make changes. If you are a leader that struggles with these, the good news is that you are not alone! You can read more about these here too.

We are going to begin with a big premise here. That premise is that everything happens by agreement; either implicitly or explicitly. And you can’t make clear agreements if you don’t know what you are agreeing about.

Here are the 4 steps:

Step 1: define your role and the roles of your team as clearly and as best as you can. What are you each responsible for and be clear about it.

Step 2: Share appreciation and input for growth regularly; not once a month or once a year. Establish a rhythm with each person for giving input. Will it be “on the fly”, every day or once a week? If this is established up front, people will know to expect this from you.

Step 3: Ask for input from your team-where do they need more support, what is going well for them and how can they spend more time doing their best work. This really resolves paying attention to them and also, removes the bias that we can create about motivations.

Step 4: Accept that change is part of life and work and also, part of being creative. Make change and creativity a normal part of your conversation with your team. Your team wants to know that they can be successful and during change, people want to know if they will be able to succeed. Accept creative tension.

What have been your steps to addressing these common leadership challenges? We would love to hear about it.