The Modern Manager

Latest Episodes:

60: Habits and Principles to Manage Your Email Inbox Jul 16, 2019

Show notes

Email overload plagues almost every manager. After feeling frustrated with myself for missing important emails and watching my inbox slowly tick up, I decided to take a new approach to managing my inbox. I set out to learn more about various approaches to email management and then try them out. In this episode, I share with you the various practices I learned and the impact I’ve noticed on my own mental state, productivity, stress level and inbox management in just a few weeks.

This is part one of a two part series on email. This episode tackles personal email management. Part two will tackle team email practices.

The full episode guide includes questions for reflection on your current email habits, steps for how to clear your inbox, a description of the 5 principles and suggested tactics for each. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community or purchase the full guide at www.mamieks.com/store.

Get the free mini-guide at www.mamieks.com/miniguides.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

Read the related blog article: Strategies and Tactics to Achieve and Maintain Inbox Zero.

Key Takeaways:

Inbox Zero is a mindset that gives you freedom from your email. It’s about having the right tactics and habits to keep your inbox empty so you can spend your mental energy on more important activities.
Often we don’t have intentional practices for email management, which leads to unhelpful behaviors like ‘grazing’ on email all day long, using the inbox as a to-do list, reading email and marking as ‘unread’, etc.
Consider how you can implement these five principles to effective email management - the tactics you decide on will be unique to your particular situation and preferences.
Principle 1: Your inbox is not your to-do list. If an email requires an action that will take more than 2 minutes, add it as a task on your task list (paper or digital) and archive the email.
Principle 2: Not all emails are equal. Not every email requires the same level of attention. Skim an email and then decide if it’s a priority to spend more time on it. Create a ‘someday-maybe’ list to track websites, articles or topics you *may* want to explore in the future.
Principle 3: Touch an email only once. Only open your inbox when you’re in a position to take action. That may mean removing email from your mobile device. Consider scheduling a few 30-minute blocks on your calendar to address email.
Principle 4: Take advantage of technology. Email apps have lots of features native or as add-ons to make email management easier. Look for the ability to ‘snooze’ an email for later, set a reminder for the email to return to your inbox, and create email templates.
Principle 5: Reduce the number of emails you receive. Unsubscribe from newsletters you don’t read or have them auto-filtered into a specific folder.
Clean out your existing emails by selecting a date before which all emails will be archived. For all emails between that date and the present, go through them following the two-minute rule. Select the date based on the number of emails and likelihood of there being anything that still may warrant your attention even if its a few weeks or months old.

Additional Resources:

mamie@mamieks.com

59: Building Culture in a Retail Business with Lorean Cairns Jul 09, 2019

Show notes

I typically follow the 80-20 rule when considering the challenges that managers face. About 80% of a a manager’s role and the challenges they encounter are the same regardless of the setting. But that 20% which is different can be drastically different. So what might we all learn from building culture in a retail setting?

This week’s guest is Lorean Cairns, Co-Founder of Fox and Jane Salons, Skin Habit, and Little Lion Salon. Her initiatives employee over 150+ members in globally. Lorean leads the charge in coaching and mentoring leaders, executives, and managers of all levels.

Loren and I talk about building a collaborative culture in a non-office environment, how everyone can learn from success, feedback, and mis-steps, how to grow consistent culture across multiple locations, and how to stay connected and informed with what’s happening on the floor.

Read the related blog article: Building Culture in an Unusual Setting

Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get 15% Lorean’s book Culture Fox: How to cultivate a lasting culture. My path from hairstylist to international CEO.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

It’s possible, and desirable, to create a retail environment in which everyone feels a sense of unity and teamwork.
Exile the competitive nature and replace it with a focus on winning (and losing) together. Celebrate success and process poor customer feedback as a group. Assume everyone can learn from the experience and be part of the solution.
Incorporate the essential elements of your culture into your hiring practice so candidates know what they’re joining and what’s expected of them.
In the moment coaching can be a powerful technique for providing a gentle nudge that enables the recipient to recognize when their own behavior isn’t appropriate. This may be a slight head nod or simply stating their name as you give a very direct glance.
Develop a monthly meeting rotation that provides insight into the business and activities on the floor. Each week of the month has a designated agenda so topics are addressed on a monthly basis. Topics may include data, customer feedback, progress towards goals, process improvement, professional development, problem solving and more.
When you receive poor customer feedback, don’t assume it’s completely true. It’s critical to explore the feedback in context of what the employee recalls. It’s important to learn from the feedback, but not overweight one customer’s bad experience.

KEEP UP WITH LOREAN

Website: https://foxandjanesalon.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorean-cairns-ba45a162/

Instagram: @loreancairns @foxandjane

Book: https://shop.foxandjanesalon.com/products/culture-fox

58: Leadership Approaches for a High-Performing Team with Bob Dusin Jul 02, 2019

Show notes

What’s the tone of your team? Do you assume people want to work hard, learn, grow, and achieve results? Or do you feel like you’re constantly trying to motivate people to take ownership over their work? Do you set the bar high and support your colleagues to be successful? Or do you set average expectations and focus on compliance?

This week’s guest, Bob Dusin, is the co-author along with Sue Bingham of Creating the High Performance Work Place. They collaborate with leaders and organizations in all industries to help create the highest performing work environments possible. Bob speaks at numerous expos and events throughout the country each year.

Read the related blog article: 3 Critical Ingredients for a High Performance Work Place

Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get 15% off when you register for an upcoming high performance leadership workshop. Learn more about the workshop at https://hpwpgroup.com/events/

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Leaders and managers to create an environment where people want to go to work, not just have to go to work.
Too many managers have been taught to focus on results only whereas strong cultures focus on the people too.
8 elements to a high performing workplace: positive assumptions about people, remove the negative, mutual trust and respect, two-way communication, employee involvement empowerment, high-level training, competitive wages and benefits, and setting high expectations.
The old model of separating yourself as the boss from those you manage doesn’t work. Instead, get to know your team members and build authentic relationships with them.
Set high, not unrealistic, expectations of your team. People will often meet your expectations. When you set low expectations, you don’t create an opportunity for engagement. High expectations signal you believe in the person.
Stop saying, “Just do the best you can.” That phrase gives an excuse for bad performance. Instead say, “It’s going to be tough, but I’m here to help. Let’s create a plan so you can succeed.”
When you make positive assumptions about people, it starts a positive, reinforcing cycle. Try assuming people want to do well, want to be challenged, want to make the ideas better.

KEEP UP WITH BOB

Website: hpwpgroup.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobdusin/

Twitter: @HPWPBob

Book: https://hpwpgroup.com/book/

57: Powerful Systems to Support Autonomy with Carissa Reiniger Jun 25, 2019

Show notes

Flexible work hours, greater autonomy, freedom, virtual teams, work from anywhere… These are growing in popularity but not always easy to implement. To successfully manage a team “at a distance” (whether that be geographic or just being more hand’s off), you need solid systems and colleagues with the right skills to succeed in that environment.

This week’s guest, Carissa Reiniger, is the Founder & CEO of Silver Lining Ltd. She started Silver Lining in 2005 and created the Silver Lining Action Plan - SLAP! - A methodology that has helped over 10,000 small business owners in 9 countries set - and hit their growth goals.

Carissa’s team is 100% virtual, spanning 14 countries and dozens of employees. She has developed systems and processes that enable autonomy and deep engagement without having met many of her employees in person.

Read the related blog article: How to Build Autonomy into Your Teamwork.

Join the Modern Manager community (www.mamieks.com/join) to get Silver Lining’s Team Cheat sheet which they use to set mutual expectations and basic understanding of how they operate AND their Verbal Warning / Coaching Template, which they use as part of the Progressive Discipline process.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

I need your help: What's challenging about being a manager? Share your experience here: www.mamieks.com/new-course

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

It is very hard for humans to learn the skills of being self-disciplined, self-structured, and results oriented. Regardless of culture / country of origin, most of us need to learn these skills.
Too often people have been trained to be submissive instead of contributive, yet to be a good team member, it’s important not to just follow along and say “yes.” Think, push back, share your perspective and help make the system better.
Encourage sharing by creating a virtual ‘suggestion box’ and follow up with each idea. Be conscious about publicly rewarding the behaviors of speaking up. Silver Lining has a monthly “silver stars” program in which anyone can recognize a colleague.
Silver Lining manages using a Roles-Goals process: Once per month, each person in the company spends one hour doing a reflection during which they consider how they’ve spent their time, what they’ve accomplished towards their goals, how they or the system can improve, etc. Then they meet with their manager to review it for one hour and generate any plans for the next month.
Think creatively about how to design the hiring process to determine fit. How might both parties assess whether the candidate will likely be successful in the role and the company’s culture, and that those are also what the candidate wants.
At Silver Lining, the interview process focuses on non-negotiables and then the onboarding is really when the candidate will get the job or not. Each new hire, regardless of seniority, spends one week going through SLAP University, a 40 hour, self-managed one week program where they orient themselves to the company, products, culture, etc.
The onboarding process helps people get oriented quickly but also gives them an opportunity to demonstrate whether they can manage themselves, learn and integrate the information, and have other skills needed to be successful at the company.
Every time you need to teach someone something, record it or document it so next time, you share the documentation instead. Over time, you’ll build a library of how-tos and save yourself hundreds of hours. Plus it becomes a resource to current staff who may need an occasional refresher.
You can invest in underperformers forever, but it’s not healthy for the business or their colleagues.
Silver Lining uses Progressive Discipline: When someone is underperforming, first get them coaching. If after 90 days, the behavior hasn’t changed, write a written warning that includes a clear mandate for change in the next 30 days. Continue to give them whatever support seems appropriate to enable change. If after two weeks there still isn’t visible change, they get a second written warning. At the end of 30 days (2 additional weeks), if there still isn’t adequate change, the person is terminated, totalling a four month process.

KEEP UP WITH CARISSA

Website: www.smallbizsilverlining.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carissareiniger/

Facebook: @SilverLiningActionPlan

Twitter: @silverliningltd

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Episode 5 Providing Autonomy That Works - www.mamieks.com/podcast-005

56: It all Boils Down to Psychological Safety Jun 18, 2019

Show notes

Building psychological safety may be the most important thing you do as a manager. Creating an environment in which people feel comfortable acknowledging mistakes, asking questions, offering ideas and feedback, and experimenting and failing, enables a team to think big, be nimble, and accomplish great feats.

In this episode, I’ll touch on what psychological safety looks like in the workplace and why it’s important, the difference between psychological safety and trust, why people don’t speak up and what you can start to do about it.

Much of what I share I learned from the book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C. Edmondson.

Join the Modern Manager community to get the full guides, guest bonuses, access to the forum and more. Join before June 30th and get two special bonus gifts: a Modern Manager mini-notebook (usually reserved only as a thank you gift for my guests) and Meeteor meeting log to help clarify your meeting outcomes. Memberships start at $2.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

Read the related blog article: Why Psychological Safety is More Important than Trust

Key Takeaways:

Psychological safety describes people’s perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks in a particular context. In other words, what does someone expect will happen if they speak up at work.
Psychological safety is what makes integrating diverse knowledge, perspectives, and skills is possible. It’s what enables teams to think big, be nimble, deal with conflict, give and receive feedback, and so much more.
Psychological safety shows up in every interaction regarless of medium. The level determines whether someone speaks up when they have a different point of view, notice a mistake, have a question, have bad news or feedback to share, or anything where there is potential risk of looking stupid or incompetent, being seen as a failure, coming across as mean or argumentative or otherwise putting themselves out there.
We can’t see when someone doesn’t speak up. It’s a silent act so no one knows except the person who didn’t speak up, making it hard to do anything about it.
Psychological safety and trust are two different things. Psychological safety is a function of the group and is about immediate response, where trust is between two individuals and about belief in future action.
There are three failure archetypes: (1) Preventable failures are deviations from recommended procedures that produce bad outcomes; (2) Complex failures occur when a series of factors collide in ways that have never happened before; (3) Intelligent failures are the result of a thoughtful foray into new territory where you’re going to have to get things wrong in order to get things right.
To build psychological safety, how you frame failure is critical and highly dependent on the type of work and failure you are likely to see. Is intelligent failure seen as necessary in order to be creative and learn? Is the act of identifying a mistake - preventable or complex failure - considered heroic because you’re helping to improve the outcome?
When you focus on purpose and remind people what’s at stake, you reinforce psychological safety. The outcome or impact becomes more important than the fear of speaking up.
To encourage others to speak up, you must be crystal clear in your ask and invite their response through proactive inquiry. Do not wait for people to speak up.
It’s important to respond with appreciation for whatever has been shared, even if you disagree, in order to encourage future speaking up. When a new idea or experiment doesn’t work out, take time to discover the learnings and celebrate what came from it as a way to destigmatize failure.

Additional Resources:

mamie@mamieks.com

55: Become Your Own Coach with Jennifer DiMotta Jun 12, 2019

Show notes

You may have heard the idea of manager as coach before. It’s one of the core ideas I subscribe to as a manager - that we should coach our team members to unleash their potential. But what about coaching yourself? Is that even possible?

This week’s guest, Jennifer DiMotta, is the Owner and President of DiMotta Consulting LLC where she takes her 20+ years of triple-digit growth success and transforms it to easily digestible strategies and plans for clients, particularly in the luxury direct to consumer market.

Jennifer speaks on Women Leadership and has developed a method which she calls Six Steps to Becoming Your Own Leadership Coach, a proven method of developing your leadership skills for personal success.

Jennifer and I walk through the six steps, dig into the process and examples, so you can apply the approach to yourself or you team members.

Read the related blog article: How to Coach Yourself

Join the Modern Manager community to get 2.5 hours of free coaching from Jennifer when you start the 6 Steps to Becoming Your Own Leadership Coach program. Join by June 30, 2019 and get two special gifts - a Modern Manager mini-notebook and a Meeteor meeting notebook to help you distill meeting outcomes.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

I need your help: What's challenging about being a manager? Share your experience here: www.mamieks.com/new-course

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Step one is to become more self aware. Through a series of assessments, you can get a better understanding of your strengths, preferences, and potential areas for growth.
Two great assessments to start with are Strengths Finder and Myers Briggs Type Indicator
It’s not about trying to change who you are, but rather develop in areas that will serve you and your team.
Leaders come in all varieties. There are many attributes of great leaders. The key is to figure out your strengths which you can build on and what specific qualities you want to develop.
Step two is to create a vision of what leadership qualities you desire. Reflect on leaders whom you admire - what about them do you appreciate?
Step three is to create SMART goals which describe the goal, the behavior you’ll adopt, when/where you’ll do the behavior, how you’ll measure success, and when you’ll pause to reflect on progress.
Step four is to find an accountability partner who can speak honestly with you, help hold you to your goals, and be your cheerleader. It’s critical you respect this person so that you can really hear what they say.
Research has proven time and again that when you have an accountability partner, you’re significantly more likely to achieve your goals.
Meet with your accountability partner in whatever format and frequency works best for you.
Step five is to reflect and celebrate progress along with small and big wins. Reward or treat yourself to help stay motivated.
Step six is to encourage others to develop themselves and offer praise and thanks.

KEEP UP WITH JENNIFER

Website: www.dimottaconsulting.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferdimotta/

Email: jennifer@dimottaconsulting.com

Phone: 703-570-5545

54: Creating a Clear Path Forward with Mike Tannenbaum Jun 04, 2019

Show notes

There is an old joke that a manager’s work is to go to meetings. As a meeting expert, that sounds lovely to me, but as an experienced manager, I know that’s not the case.

This week’s guest, Mike Tannenbaum, is Founder, Principal, and Lead Strategist of Humanity. Mike helps people create better experiences by deepening their understanding of humans. He focuses on helping people and teams become the best version of themselves by redesigning the way they relate to their work so they experience more joy, fulfillment, and effective ways of working.

Mike and I talk about the 4 types of work, what a manager creates, the practice of continuous improvement combined with planning, mindfulness and more.

Read the related blog article: What Does a Manager Create?

Join the Modern Manager community to get 25% off everything on Mike’s store including the Clear Path Forward workbooks and course. Join by June 30, 2019 and get two special gifts - a Modern Manager mini-notebook and a Meeteor meeting notebook to help you distill meeting outcomes.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

I need your help: What's challenging about being a manager? Share your experience here: www.mamieks.com/new-course

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

There are four types of work: (1) planning - preparing to do the work (2) coordinating - the activities that facilitate the work e.g. meetings, gathering information, etc. (3) creating - producing your deliverables, and (4) distracting - anything that gets in the way of the other work.
A manager’s role is to create trust, clarity, enhanced team members, a strong team, high performance, results or goal achievement.
There are 5 types of people we collaborate with: (1) collaborators - those we work with to achieve the same goal, (2) leaders - those who give direction and inspire action, (3) advisors - those who offer guidance, (4) people who I rely on, and (5) people who rely on me.
Often there are people outside our team of collaborators who we rely on and/or who rely on us - for information, for help, for specific needs. It’s critical to think expansively about who we need to work with, communicate with, and build relationships with.
There is value to creating plan that provides direction, but things almost never go according to plan. Incorporating regularly scheduled moments of reflection - e.g. what have we learned - allow you to iterate the plan so it stays relevant.
Mindfulness in organizations is really about creating a practice of reflection and awareness, at the individual and organizational levels.
We all have qualities about ourselves that we don’t see, and we have those which we don’t like about ourselves. The sooner we can have an honest view of these behaviors, the sooner we can take action to address them - which can range from accepting a behavior without changing it to investing deeply in modifying a behavior.

KEEP UP WITH MIKE

Website: http://enjoyhumanity.co

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheRoyalTbomb

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tannenbaum/

Workbook + Store: http://clearpathforward.co

53: Moving Beyond Modern Management with Aaron Dignan May 28, 2019

Show notes

Is your organization more like a stoplight or a round-a-bout? That may seem like an odd question but while they do the same thing (manage traffic intersections), they operate in fundamentally different ways.

This week’s guest, Aaron Dignan, has spent the past 10 years studying organizations and teams with a new way of working that prioritizes adaptivity and autonomy over efficiency and control. Aaron contends that teams everywhere need to join them in the future of work.

As the Founder of The Ready—a global organizational transformation and coaching practice—he helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Aaron is an active angel investor and helps build partnerships between the startups and end-ups he advises. He’s also a co-founder of Responsive.org. And he has sat on advisory boards for GE, American Express, PepsiCo, and Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, as well as the board of directors for Smashburger. He is the author of Game Frame (Free Press, 2011) and Brave New Work (Portfolio 2019).

Aaron and I talk about the origins of “modern management practices” and why they no longer serve us, what old vs new operating systems look like and how to being transitioning your team to work in brave new ways.

Read the related blog article: Embracing the Future of Modern Management

Join the Modern Manager community to get Aaron’s OS Canvas PDF and instructions on how to use it to support your learning journey! Join by June 30, 2019 and get two special gifts - a Modern Manager mini-notebook and a Meeteor meeting notebook to help you distill meeting outcomes.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

I need your help: What's challenging about being a manager? Share your experience here: www.mamieks.com/new-course

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Current management practices were developed when work was primarily done on a factory floor. The goal was efficiency. Yet today’s work context is very different - one in which the market is constantly changing, the work itself is evolving, and the goal is to be nimble and adaptive.
Complicated systems are machines that can be fixed and optimized, like a wrist watch. Complex systems are dynamic and unpredictable. They can be managed but not solved, like a garden. Companies are complex and we need to stop treating them like machines and start approaching them more like gardens.
It’s time to update our “operating systems” - the underlying assumptions and norms that guide how we work. We need do annual planning and more dynamic planning, empower the people doing the work to make decisions as they learn.
For every process and practice in the workplace, there is a “command and control” way of doing it and a “trust and empower” way of doing it. Our organizations are overwhelmingly command and control oriented.
The job of a manager is not to create perfect execution - it’s to create continually growing capability.
Start by asking your team members: "What's stopping you from doing the best work of your life?" and then ask "Well, what can we do in our team to take one step forward on that issue."

KEEP UP WITH AARON

Website: https://theready.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondignan

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondignan/

Book: https://www.bravenewwork.com/

52: Looking Back and Looking Forward May 21, 2019

Show notes

It’s been 1 year since I launched The Modern Manager podcast. To celebrate, I take a look back at some of my favorite episodes and lessons learned, and share plans for the future, including some exciting changes.

Get all the free mini-guides (episodes 1-52) in a single download.

There is a new community! Join the Modern Manager community to get the full guides, guest bonuses, access to the forum and more. Join before June 30th and get two special bonus gifts: a Modern Manager mini-notebook (usually reserved only as a thank you gift for my guests) and Meeteor meeting log to help clarify your meeting outcomes.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

I'm launching a new course for managers! Share you thoughts and get 10% off when the course launches: www.mamieks.com/new-course

Key Takeaways:

Lesson from Elise Keith: Productive meetings is a mindset - when you expect meetings to be a waste of time, you don’t invest time preparing for them which results in the meeting being a waste of time, further proving they’re a necessary evil. Break this mental downward spiral by seeing meetings as an important place where work gets done and preparing appropriately.
Lesson from Rob Toomey: Before responding to a colleague or team member, pause and consider how you can communicate in a way that’s best for them rather than what’s easiest for you.
Lesson from Tara Mohr: Rather than trying to argue with someone’s inner critic, help them recognize that it’s their inner critic who is speaking out of fear, rather than a voice that is speaking from your aspirations or potential.
Lesson from Robleh Kirce: When giving feedback, start by getting permission to speak with them about feedback. Share your observations without judgement by focusing on facts and the impact. Then open the conversation to hear their thinking.
Lesson from Jesse Fowl: To help unleash more creative and risky ideas, focus on learning rather than success. Treat ideas that generate learnings (both what works and what doesn’t) as equally valuable.

Additional Resources:

mamie@mamieks.com

51: The Language of Leadership with Krister Ungerböck May 14, 2019

Show notes

How many languages do you speak or understand? Learning a new language helps you appreciate the importance and nuance of language and how it impacts your ability to communicate and connect with others. Leadership and management have their own language which you can learn.

This week’s guest, Krister Ungerboeck, is a CEO Coach, and expert in The Language of Leadership. Prior to retiring at age 42, Krister was the award-winning CEO of one of the largest family-owned software companies in the world. His expertise in the Language of Leadership is based upon his unique experience as a global CEO leading teams in three languages while observing and doing business with executives in over 40 countries, building businesses in six and living in three

Krister and I talk about the importance of language as a manager, how to use language to engage people, and how positivity can transform productivity.

Join the Modern Manager community to get special four tools from Krister including a leadership assessment, plus episode guides and other guest bonuses to support your learning journey!

Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.

Read the related blog article: How Language Can Make You a Better Manager

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Leadership or management is all about how you use language.
Even when the underlying meaning is consistent, how you say it matters. Choose words that are too strong and you risk alienated people. Choose words that are too soft and you risk not getting the behavior you’re asking for.
Power your productivity with positivity by setting metrics that allow each person to compete with themselves rather than each other. Aim for each person to become their personal best. This eliminates room for excuses and allows everyone to be celebrated.
Create metrics that can always be increased rather than a percentage so there is always room for improvement.
It takes lots of energy to figure out answers, but asking good questions is often easier and leads to better answers.
Ask open-ended questions that generally start with ‘what’ or ‘how’ as these will lead to more interesting answers than yes/no questions or questions that are really ideas disguised as questions.
To improve your emotional intelligence, try guessing at the emotion the other person may be experiencing and why. What is it they’re needing?
Use language like “I’m wondering if you’re frustrated by…because you want more autonomy to make decisions,” or “I’d imagine you’re feeling excluded from…because the team didn’t loop you in at the start of the project.”
If your guess is accurate, the person will reinforce it, but if it’s not, they’ll likely correct you. This gives you more accurate information and helps them articulate their situation.

KEEP UP WITH KRISTER

Website: krister.com

Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/theleadershiparchaeologist

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/meetkrister

Book: https://www.krister.com/book