Tips for the Manager s Role in Resilience

Transcription

1 Tips for the Manager s Role in Resilience Resilience comes from having robust attitudes towards challenges that threaten the psychological health and wellbeing of individuals. The more robust the attitude, the more likely the person is to have a will do approach to facing up to the challenge and addressing it without difficulty. The Manager's Role in Resilience is, therefore, two fold. One is to ensure the workforce has a positive and robust attitude towards leaders and managers, so that the workforce has a will do approach to those who manage their work. The second is for leaders and managers to reduce and eliminate the events and behaviours in the workplace for which resilience may be needed. This means creating a working environment that is positive and supportive of individuals psychological health and wellbeing, and less likely to cause stressful reactions from the workforce. Managers at all levels of the organisation set the tone, the climate and the expectations for the workforce. They control a controlled community that we call the workplace. Managers wield enormous power over others. It is important that this power is used to achieve mental wellbeing and performance for organisations to achieve consistent peak performance. Sharing responsibility for future success of the organisation Ask your people about their ideas for making the organisation and their part of it much more successful tomorrow compared with today. Implement what they tell you. Have a will do attitude not a can do attitude Anyone can do anything, but will they? You should have a will do attitude towards everything. That s addictive, and your people will adopt your attitude! Change Change is a constant as every organisation and workforce has to change to adapt to internal and external pressures. Always adopt the strategy of conviction (never the strategy of imposition). Always use rational argument or examples of why change is necessary and what the new arrangements will look like. Always keep communication open and honest about changes, even if you don t know much yourself. Share what you know and share what you don t know. Always find the guy whose bright idea it was to change and invite him or her to tell everyone why it s necessary to change. If you re part of the change process and have to manage change, share the process as part of sharing responsibility and ask for observations as to how best to bring change about, as well as asking about the factors that need changing. info@mas.org.uk Derek Mowbray P a g e 1

2 Be curious Always ask questions, all the time. Be curious about what s going on; and about what s happening. Be inquisitive. Go deep down. Do some Socratic questioning (dig deeper by questioning answers to previous questions). Do this until your people get used to you asking questions and taking an interest, by which time they ll tell you everything without you having to ask. Be encouraging The workforce is your gold mine. Encourage it to try out ideas, new ways of doing things. Your people have a combined intelligence far greater than yours alone, so milk the intelligence and make it work for all of you. You re all in this together. Be rewarding Offer lots of congratulations for work well done and advice for work not so great. Give feedback Provide regular feedback to your people on anything they do. Ask for reverse feedback your people provide feedback to you about how you re doing as a manager. Establish mutual expectations Establish mutual expectations in everything you do with others. This is particularly helpful in team work, when different members contribute specific skills in completing a task or project. Timing of the contribution of the skills may be crucial to the smooth running of the project. Mutual expectation will sort this out. Relationships Always try to make sure the relationships that are important to you are also very strong. Important relationships are those that help you achieve success and happiness at work. Communication Try to ensure your communication with your people is done personally. Impersonal communication always allows others to wonder what you re up to and erodes trust. A wrong word in the right place does damage to relationships. If you have to send s, agree with your staff the key word in the subject line that distinguishes the significance of your s from the rest of the inbox, or use a priority category such as priority 1, 2 or 3 to signify the degree of importance you attach to your . Don t confuse sending lots of s with lots of cc s as communication; it isn t. It s a nightmare. Encourage your staff to meet up regularly with you for very brief moments devoted to keeping communication alive. info@mas.org.uk Derek Mowbray P a g e 2

3 Mingle Make time to mingle with your people, sitting alongside them, not interrupting for long but being curious about what they re doing. Be visible. Anticipation Always look ahead and anticipate what may be just over the horizon. If there are challenges ahead tell your people what you think is going to happen. Early anticipation allows you and others to prepare and plan, making the event easier to deal with. It may be common sense but it s not common practice If something makes common sense to you, do it. It s amazing how much common sense isn t used, so break the mould and do something sensible from time to time. Sell tickets for your meetings Never hold a meeting unless you can sell tickets for people to come. This is the benchmark for making meetings worthwhile attending. If people don t want to pay, the meeting is of little value to them - so make it of value to them! Shadowing Encourage your people to job shadow others in quite different jobs. It enhances understanding and knowledge about the organisation that they share responsibility for. Work for 50 minutes in the hour Performance is about being able to concentrate. Concentration is hard. It requires no interruptions. So, try to ensure everyone works for 50 minutes in each hour and then take a break. This helps the brain relax and you maintain control of yourself, knowing you will have a break. It diffuses the potential risk of tension. Performance will rise several fold. In the break do something completely different possibly look at s, but try to go walking. Then start again. You ll feel fresher at the end of the day and will have achieved and made real progress. Importance and urgency When giving your people something to do, mark it up as being either not important, not urgent not important, but urgent important, but not urgent important and urgent. Try not to make everything important and urgent as it reveals you don t anticipate well enough, and just piling stuff onto your people will create a negative attitude towards you. Also, no one can work on everything that is both important and urgent all the time. If it s important it will always be important, so it has priority. info@mas.org.uk Derek Mowbray P a g e 3

4 If it s urgent, it is only urgent now, so unless it s important, the moment will quickly pass. It s not important enough to do anything about. Let it pass. Help your people in this way to prioritise their own work and link this to mutual expectations. Performance appraisal Continuously performance appraise your people, with brief observations as you go along. This has a great impact as it helps them benefit from your wisdom and skills. If you want to be critical, do so in private, and be encouraging, pointing out how a critical feature will become a successful feature next time. Try not to link performance appraisal with money. As everyone is sharing responsibility then everyone shares the money too. So, there s no point in making the money link with individuals. It can be very divisive. Reverse performance appraisal Ask your team to continuously appraise you. The same rules apply, if they wish to be critical they should do this in private. They should also always be encouraging you and telling you your weak points are waiting to become strong points with a little attention. Agenda setting When you arrange a meeting, always send out an agenda that looks like a series of questions an examination paper if you like. Meetings are hugely expensive, so they should be used to solve problems and the problems should be posed as questions. This allows only those who have something to contribute to attend the meeting. They will feel it is worthwhile. Others will appreciate not being bored out of their skin and reaching for their resilience. Encourage career progression Encourage your people to acquire new skills, knowledge and experiences, and also to think and develop career opportunities. It is natural for people to both wish to progress their careers and to remain where they are. You need to recognise this and encourage career progression for everyone. It opens their horizons and enriches your team. If there are no opportunities in your own organisation, arrange a secondment elsewhere. info@mas.org.uk Derek Mowbray P a g e 4

5 About the Wellbeing and Performance Group Our mission to make the workplace a fabulous place to work Our purpose to prevent stress; to facilitate peak performance; to strengthen corporate and personal resilience. Our approach to establish psychologically healthy workplaces through The WellBeing and Performance Agenda. Our services applied organisation health psychology; consultancy; organisation development; leadership development. Our products The Resilience Assessment Questionnaire (RAQ40); Adaptive Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ); The Cultural Assessment Questionnaire and many others, and. Derek Mowbray s Guides - innovative, practical resources The Guide to the WellBeing and Performance Agenda - ISBN The Guide to Corporate Resilience - ISBN The Guide to Adaptive Leadership - ISBN The Guide to The Manager s Role in Resilience - ISBN The Guide to Personal Resilience- ISBN Guides can be purchased from our website - About Derek Mowbray Derek Mowbray, is a Chartered Psychologist and Chartered Scientist, with a doctorate in leadership. Dr Mowbray focuses on the behaviour of leaders and managers in relation to their employees, and helps them to develop the behaviours that encourage commitment, trust and staff engagement. Derek s techniques include problem focused coaching, cognitive coaching, group work and consultancy. Professor Mowbray combines the unique features of working on the big picture as a strategist as well as facilitating effective leader and manager performance. He is a visiting Professor of Psychology at Northumbria University. info@mas.org.uk info@mas.org.uk Derek Mowbray P a g e 5