Developing Your Team IS Developing Your Career
A manager’s job is to facilitate their team’s success. This is a critical point to internalize - as a manager, you are measured on the performance of your team, not your direct individual contributions. This can be tough to accept for people who advanced to management roles by virtue of their performance as individual contributors. Remember, it only benefits you to develop your team members to their full potential.
To succeed at talent development, you must genuinely want to help people improve, and engender an environment of trust. Only then will people be receptive to your advice because they’ll believe that you have their best interests in mind (because you really do). The fact is, without this sincere foundational mindset, no advice will make someone a successful manager. You can’t fake it; don’t bother trying - people will see through the facade. If you are going in to an interaction expecting some sort of favor in return for your help, or holding back because you’re afraid your employee might develop into a rival then you’re done before you’ve even started. Your team members are not your rivals; developing them to handle some of the things you do means you won’t have to do those things anymore – it frees you up to get involved in bigger, better, exciting, new things.
Years ago, I began formally mentoring a colleague shortly after he was promoted to his first formal team management role. We hit it off, and for more than a decade I served as his advisor, sounding board, and confidante. He rapidly rose through the ranks (constantly developing and strengthening team members and colleagues along the way) and today is in a top executive role. While I’d like to take all the credit, the fact is he’s a very talented and driven person. Importantly he absolutely exudes sincerity. People trust his advice because they can tell that he doesn’t have a hidden agenda.
Strengthening your team by strengthening the players will ultimately result in more opportunities for everyone (including you). There is no point in pettiness or holding back your best guidance. It’s not a zero-sum game; there’ll be enough success to go around. Throughout my own career I’ve worked to help others succeed without expectation of any form of compensation from them, and I’ve had absolutely no fear that they might turn into rivals adversely affecting my own career aspirations. Both of these attitudes came across when working with direct reports and colleagues. They could sense that I was a true ally, genuinely acting in their best interest (and were therefore receptive to my advice). Knowing that making the team stronger created maximum value, I had confidence that there would be plenty of opportunities for me, and it proved true, there were.
Networking and communication build and sustain the relationships that make business work. Avoid these bad habits immediately or people will dislike you immediately.
Mastering these 5 missing skills quickly maximizes your productivity and influence, which in turn enhances both job security and advancement potential.
I explained the goal in designing any component. Overly tight specifications would make it harder to find suppliers and would drive up costs. The engineer's entire approach changed.
Preparing for a presentation is vital in enabling team members to convey critical points, and influence outcomes with customers. Here are the steps involved.
When customer tensions rise, the right approach can turn friction into collaboration. At CAEDENCE, we call it the 3C’s: Calm, Clarify, Control. Here's more detail.
Will AI Replace Direct Customer Communication? Absolutely Not! In an age of chatbots and algorithms, the highest-impact discussions still happen person-to-person.
B2B customer relationships are not a breeze. We’ve navigated hundreds of challenging accounts and distilled five secrets that consistently turn friction into forward progress.
Ever notice how a quick fix from the top can feel like a shortcut, but it ends up stunting your team’s growth? When managers rush to answers, they inadvertently affect team development.
Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
