Management Mistakes You Don’t Know You’re Making

Emotional Proofreading

“Can we have a quick chat later today?”

Is there anything more terrifying than a message like this from your manager? In the absence of context it might be nothing, but it might be quite a large SOMETHING.

We’re liable to stew on it for the rest of the day before turning up – a bag of nerves – for the aforementioned chat and possibly a P45.

If you’re a manager or leader, are you accidentally guilty of sending messages that could be misinterpreted like this? Are you thinking about their impact or just cracking through the mountain of work?

Either way, here’s some great advice from the incomparable Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy: make sure you give your messages an emotional proof-read before hitting “send”. Simple, right?

The importance of purpose

Are you making the time and space to regularly reflect?

Just 20% of attendees to my last webinar felt they had adequate time for themselves as managers and leaders.

Perhaps this figure is not surprising, given how busy the PR and comms industry can be. It can feel like you’re wasting time pondering when you could be using it to actually DO things.

But making time and space for reflection opens you up to inspiration and inevitably leads to more ideas, leading to self-improvement and better results.

It can also offer clarity around longer-term challenges when short-term pressures are making things feel a bit woolly.

It doesn’t need to be a huge investment in time and I’m not suggesting you do too much navel-gazing but giving yourself some mental “breathing space” to look at the things you're doing will shore up your impact.

If you’re a manager or leader, reflection will undoubtedly benefit your team. Are you encouraging THEM to do it, too?

Delegation: dialogue not instruction

Are you inadvertently holding back your team?

Most people have a strong psychological need to be in control and the PR and comms industry attracts its fair share of self-confessed “control freaks”!

But problems can arise when it comes to delegating projects to others if you over-brief and micro-manage. It can prevent team members thinking for themselves. It stifles initiative and makes people feel like they aren’t trusted to make decisions.

(Under-delegating can also lead to problems but that’s an article for another day!)

So my advice is to make delegation a dialogue not an instruction.

As long as there is shared clarity around the desired end result, it could and should be down to your team members to think through how to get there.

By all means provide coaching and input depending on the person’s experience… but don’t assume they can’t work out a few things for themselves.

Gaps and gains

“I was haunted for years thinking I was a bad writer because it was what my line manager focused on. It took years to realise I wasn’t and I never want [my team] to feel that way.”

That was a contribution from one of the people who attended our lunch and learn webinar on management mistakes.🥹

That’s because – soooo often – managers and leaders focus on the gaps and not the gains when they’re giving feedback.

They spend all the feedback time talking, not about the 95% that was right, but about the 5% that was wrong.

The risk is that the person receiving the feedback hears the 5% and blows it up out of all proportion in their minds.

Try to remember to do the following:

• Consistently point out what is working well

• Help your team to understand what’s good about their work - be specific about what and why

You’ll accelerate the development of people in your team with any issues around confidence if you help them understand how good they really are as well as pointing out any small improvements they could make.