A few years ago I wrote an article around Manager, Leader or both. The details of the article was talking about my first performance review with a direct report and the ins and outs of what feedback to provide. For me I was struggling with the feeling of being seen as "judging" someone compared to providing feedback on someone's performance or coaching them through areas of improvement or areas of strengths.
For majority of my career I had worked in a world of influence with no direct authority. Today I am reflecting on what I have been able to achieve over the last few years and what growth I have experienced by having the privilege to be a functional head that has a team of people relying on me to keep them healthy, safe and well. This is at the same time giving them opportunities to grow by giving them a safe space to fall (or some say fail) so they can learn from their mistakes plus creating a space where they are valued and recognised.
Over the last few years I have been part of a wider team working through setting up an organisation with a structure that we could survive the potential downturn of the first COVID-19 lockdown in NZ, that meant working through rejigging our own team structure which meant seeing a team member move to Ops, ask another to do a dual role plus other opportunities being put on hold until we had recovered.
For us COVID-19 created an opportunity where we ended up thriving, this was done with setting up good structures of support and asking more from our key people and they delivered. Then thankfully we have been able to flag areas where we needed to reinvest back into and push in more resources, recognise everyone for the hard work that was done, and then for our team we have been able to deliver on promises we made 18 months ago, promote individuals into key roles or make them permanent, recognised our own efforts and finally create new opportunities which will make our team grow within the organisation plus grow in numbers.
The performance reviews and check ins that we did throughout the unknown world of COVID-19 was a great learning curve for us all as we adjusted what we needed to achieve, why we needed to achieve it and how we were going to work differently to achieve what we decided we needed to do.
Overall Performance reviews are a now a positive tool for me and seen as a way to hear from the team on how they see the world as well as there own performance and then have great honest conversations about how we are both doing and what support we can provide each other. It is also about providing clear direction for the next 6-12 months.
"The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant" Max DePree
Within our role as leaders is the life of PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, (Re)Act). These are basically our management tasks that are required to completed on a regular basic, however what makes us a leader is how we can understand the importance of the "human skills". This means that we understand if these skills are something that we need to continue to work on or are they something that we need to maintain.
The key "human skills" that I believe are important for someone who wants to be a people leader are;
Trust
Wellbeing
Leadership
People
Self awareness
Empathy
Authenticity
Vulnerability
Why do I believe these skills are key, ask or read what these people/authors have to say, Bob Chapman (Everybody Matters) or Brene Brown (Dare to Lead) or Susan Cain (Quiet) or Dr Harold Hillman (The Imposter Syndrome, EM-PA-THY) or read my thoughts through my first book People:People First People Always that I published late last year. Funny enough all of the authors I have listed above talk about these skills in some way or another. They are critical skills to create an environment where your people can thrive not just survive, they are also critical skills to move towards People First Leadership. None of our organisation or businesses could survive or be successful without our people however sadly, in too many organisations, we prioritise shareholders or profits over people or we work through change processes and talk about roles and numbers rather than impact we are going to make on another human being and their families.
These skills are not always easy to keep in the forefront of our world, whether that is with interactions with people or part of our decision making. However I am not sure that it is supposed to be easy. When you are given the privilege to influence someones life like we do as leaders, it should be hard because we are dealing with someones life. You may never know if you were that person who gave someone a chance, a chance that set them up to be successful.
In the end as Leaders there are some aspects to our role that means we need to do "manager stuff" however your main role as a leader is to be their for your people and use those key human skills to work out how you can support your team and wider organisation, create a positive working environment and set them up to be successful. Basically being a leader is all about people.
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