Tip Thursday With Tara - Managing or Coaching?

Speaker A: Foreign. Leadership and Tip Thursday with Tara. Your weekly dose of practical leadership tips and strategies you can apply immediately to your team or your work. I am, um, Tara Layman, founder and CEO at Amplifying Leadership. And each week I'll share insights and takeaways designed to help you build, enhance and grow your leadership skills. Actionable guidance that you can use right away. Visit us anytime at, uh, amplifyingleadership. Ca so have you ever felt like your team depended on you for everything? And we've talked a little bit about this before. It may be that you're answering the same questions over and over or every decision lands on you and you have to make a decision. Maybe you're wondering why your employees aren't taking more ownership of decisions or of tasks or things like that as well. If that's still happening for you, it doesn't necessarily mean the people are the wrong hires. It doesn't mean you have the wrong person in the wrong job. It could mean that you have slipped from coaching employees to back to the managing piece of employees. Now please don't get me wrong here. We do need to manage people and things. We have deadlines, we have expectations, there's performance to oversee and there's responsibilities. But if that was all we did, our employees actually will never develop the confidence to make decisions or think for themselves when we want to let them do that. So today I'm going to share a handful of signs or tips that you may be managing more than your coaching and maybe a couple of tips to help you with what you can do about that. So if you notice that you are giving answers before asking questions and sometimes this means you have to pay attention attention to what you're saying in a conversation. If that happens and someone comes to you with a problem and your first instinct is answer the question to give them the solution, tell them what to do. So it just gets off your desk. It's faster, there's less work, it's more efficient. However, every time we do that, when we immediately provide an answer or solution, we actually take the opportunity away for our employee to develop and grow and even have the space to be creative and have creative solutions for you. So instead when they come into you to you and ask, you know, you're thinking, oh, I just going to give them the answer here. Consider this instead ask what have you considered? Or what do you think the best option for us would be? Or if you've made this decision, what would you choose? Or what would you tell me that gets them to think a little differently so you don't have to leave them on their own. If they can't think of anything, that's fine, you can still help them, but you're simply helping them to think a little bit about what that solution could be before you step in. And a lot of times employers are going to come and say, well, I thought about this and you're going to say, perfect. Another thing is when you find that all the decisions are coming back to you. So if you are making every decision, large, medium and small, eventually you are the bottleneck stopping things from moving forward. So instead I want you to ask yourself a question. Which decisions truly need me to approve them or to make them? There are always decisions that you have to make as a leader and sometimes it's around budget or maybe it's a higher level decision that needs to be made around hiring or firing or something like that. But there are many other decisions that your employees can make with you giving them the right guidance or even boundaries. Start small. Give them the ownership of a decision where you know the budget is small and it's not a big deal if they take the risk. Discuss some outcomes afterwards, you know, having that one on one, how did it go? And help them learn from the experience or the risk that they took. That's coaching as well. And then of course I want to talk about the myth that development only happens for employees during uh, formal training. So this is where the training budget comes in. So you might invest in a workshop or an online course or a conference or something like that for your employees to help them grow. They absolutely are valuable. They can work, people can learn how to network, they can learn new skills. It's absolutely valuable. But that's not where your employee development stops. So a lot of the coaching can happen in five minute conversations, even after a meeting where you see somebody who is stuck or in one on one conversations. And it happens even when you ask for feedback and you provide feedback. It can be where you assign someone a piece of a project because you know they're ready to take on that piece or maybe giving them a decision. So development of your employees doesn't stop with those workshops you send them to. Again, that's important. It's a skill learning potential. And it uh, is, you know, it's more than an event though when you're coming to employee development. It's more than a workshop or an online course or a conference. It's a daily activity that you intentionally create space for. That again, could be that quick five minute conversation after a meeting, asking more about their input or their ideas. So there's something I'd like to, uh, for you to remember this week is that employees don't become capable because they gain experience. They become more capable when we intentionally help them learn from those experiences, help them with the understanding of the growth that comes from those experiences. So this week, I want you to choose just one conversation where maybe you ask more questions or you ask for their solutions, all before you give them an answer. You might be actually very surprised what your employee already thinks about or ideas they may have for solutions that maybe you didn't even know. So start with that conversation this week. Thank you for joining this week's Tip Thursday with Tara. Don't forget to follow Amplifying Leadership on your favorite social media Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn and where every month we will explore more practical leadership tips and topics to help you lead with confidence and build stronger teams. If you are looking to clarify your leadership priorities, build those strong teams or empower those around you, I'm, um, here to help explore our programs, coaching and more at amplifyingleadership CA because leadership is better when we do it together. Sam.