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Hello and welcome along to Management Matters. My name's Fiona. I'm your resident professional development coach, and I'm here week in, week out, helping you to figure out all the management and leadership and career development stuff. And today's episode I am recording indoors.
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Normally, if you're a regular listener, you'll know I'm normally out and about, but it's a bit windy, a bit rainy, so I'm just at my desk today. And this. episode is inspired by a coaching call I just had about an hour and a half ago with somebody who is quite new to the manager role.
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It's their first time line managing anyone, and they said, well, they asked me this great question, and so I thought I'd bring the answer to the podcast because it's quite common, I think, among people who are quite new to management and leadership.
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And the question was, how do I figure out what my leadership style is? Bum bum bum. And I think the answer, like the first answer is most people I think sort of stumble into their leadership style and they don't really either choose it intentionally or curate it intentionally.
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They just kind of do some stuff and see what lands, what doesn't land, what feels natural and comfortable for them. Now, that's obviously not that helpful for my client who asked this question, or for you listening if you are a new manager and leader and wondering the same thing.
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So here's what I told her as the longer answer. I think a lot of our leadership style comes down to identifying what our values are in the first instance, and I've actually created a worksheet to help clients with this.
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And I'm going to link it up in the show notes, and you can have it totally for free. Just give me your name and email email address, and I will send it over. I think values are really critical to leadership style because they will help us to know when we are doing things that feel, well, they don't help us to know.
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They are part of what's at the root of why some things feel good, healthy, aligned, right, and why some things don't, and I think for most people they have a much more satisfying experience of management and leadership if they can be aligned with their values.
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And I also think we can sometimes use values to unpick when management and leadership are not feeling so much like fun, and to you we can use values as well for understanding when we have a sense of inner conflict, actually, often the conflict is between our sense of ourselves and our values being part of that, and our sense of what we're supposed to be doing and, you know, if there's misalignment between, as we've talked about in the last couple of episodes, if there's misalignment between who we think we are and how we show up in the world, where values is a part of that, and what we're actually doing, then that can cause us some problems.
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And I think sometimes we also can find that our values can become overexpressed. And when they're overexpressed, what that means is it can tip us over into unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaving, and so I think values can be a really important part of this puzzle, particularly for new managers and leaders who are thinking about starting out on this journey and sort of setting themselves up well from the beginning, but also for mid-career managers and leaders who are thinking about curating their leadership more intentionally, I think spending some time to get to know what your values are is really helpful.
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And I ask, almost all of my clients at some point during our work together, I will ask them if they know what their values are, and it's so interesting because everyone goes, oh yeah, well, it's, I guess.
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And then they might offer up a few. Like normally there's something in there around honesty or transparency. Normally there's something in there around compassion or kindness. Often there's something in there around mission and feeling like we're doing something that's bigger than ourselves.
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And then some other more individualised or less common values or kind of you know flavours of of value. And the worksheet that I'm linking up in the show notes gives you a huge list.
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It's something like three pages long of values words. So there's some questions to lead us into the point of picking our values. And then there's just these three pages of words, values words for you to go through and be like, oh this, this, this, this.
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Some of them have an overlapping feeling about them. So, as you go through, if you choose to do the exercise, you might pick some that look very similar. Like you might pick honesty and transparency and truthfulness, and then, you know, you can sort of whittle it down to, well, which one of those actually is it really?
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And. I think a really helpful test once you know what your values are, I think it can be really helpful to give them a bit of a test and to see where your values are likely to tip over into that more unhelpful pattern by asking some questions about what you're likely to do in challenging situations.
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How are your responses to those challenging situations likely to line up with your values? So let's imagine you end up having to, you know, let's imagine you end up managing a larger team.
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So you've got six plus people in your team, and then, as a lot of senior leaders are having to do at the moment, they are told from the powers that be that they have to make a 30% saving on their headcount, so they are going to need to restructure and make some people redundant.
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When you're a manager faced with that sort of decision making, this is where being clear on what your values are can be so helpful, because it lets us then make those decisions aligned with your values, so that you can have peace of mind at the end of the process and throughout the process.
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But in our imaginary situation, where we are not actually in that, predicament of having to, choose some people in our team to restructure or make redundant, or roles to put at risk, it can be helpful to have a think about, okay, well, how can I stay aligned with my values and progress through this situation?
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So if your values are, let's say, compassion, kindness, hard work, something like that, then we want to be wary of things like the compassion value, where the definition that I work from for compassion is where you understand the person's, the other person's experience, you have a sense of their emotional state, so it's very similar to empathy in that way, but it goes a step further where it's about then feeling compelled to do something to alleviate suffering.
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If you're somebody who has a core value around compassion, that might cause you to overstep your scope of practice as a manager into rescuing type behaviours, or into things like sort of it might influence who it is in the team that you decide to make redundant, where that decision making is more based on people's personal circumstances than it truly is about their impact at work.
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Those kind of things can be really slippery. And so, what we want to do is then have some tools in our back pocket that we can deploy to keep us on the right side of our values and not tip over into those overexpressed value aligned behaviours.
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And that's some of the work that we typically do in coaching. so I think values is one of the puzzle pieces for how do I find my leadership style. How you imagine yourself showing up in tricky circumstances is another part of the leadership style.
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And then I also think it can be really helpful to think about how you characterise the distinction between management and leadership, and what that means for which part of your work or how you show up at work is to do with leadership.
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I maintain that a lot of management, so I characterise that as helping people to know what to do and potentially how, depending on their experience and background and you know, so how much they actually you don't have to tell people who are very experienced how to do their job, but you do have to tell them what it is that needs to get done.
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Versus leadership, which is more about helping people to know how to think, and I think there's this dimension where grounded management has to involve personal self leadership, and this is the bit where we create the grounded manager by having managers show up to do the managerial aspects of their roles, that might be giving feedback, setting boundaries, delegating well, all of those kind of things, from a place of sturdy, grounded leadership persona, and so that's where knowing what your values are can guide you to being a really effective manager by approaching those management experiences from your like healthy grounded leader persona.
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And I haven't mentioned this with a few different clients lately. I haven't actually done it yet, but let me know if this feels like it would be something that would be helpful. Part of me sort of imagines creating a bit of a map type of worksheet, so I'm thinking of it as like a one pager, where you would be able to capture what are your values, but also what is your vision if you have one, what is your why, like what is it that really motivates you, what is it that you want to achieve, so your, you know, kind of career ambitions, but also a sense of mission.
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Like, for example, I have a mission that is around helping people in the sector to find their healthy, grounded management and leadership selves and to be able to manage and lead from those places.
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Fundamentally, though, I don't really care that much about higher education. Like, I'm not interested in research. I don't particularly want to do anything working with students. If I'd grown up professionally in a different sector, I probably would still want to develop the people of that sector.
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And I also know, though, having worked at a variety of different types of Higher Education institutions, I feel much better aligned with modern universities than I do with small private providers or Russell Group.
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And you know, those kind of distinctions can be really helpful to capture. So tell me if that sounds interesting. It would be like a one pager of you and your leadership style and career directiony stuff.
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I would need to obviously come up with a better name for it than that because that sounds a bit rubbish. The other thing I would add is some of it is just created out of life experience. It is knowing that you've been through some stuff and actually then the process of reflecting back on what happened, how did you show up, what felt good about that or aligned about that, what felt bad or misaligned about that.
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And so the other activity that I might get a client to do who is considering this is a life map where you take a piece of paper, put it in horizontal, draw a line across the middle of the page, and then put above the line positive experiences, things that you know have felt good to you, career highlights, milestones, those kind of things.
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Below the line, things that have felt more challenging, difficult, like failure, all of that kind of stuff, and then to be able to use that map to identify what your personal patterns are. That can also then inform what your leadership style is, because you can see some of your sort of key significant life and career moments.
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Plot it out on a page and have a look at what's what's going on there. That is one that I would typically debrief with clients in coaching again. So, all of that stuff. Part of it is figuring out what your values are. Some of it's knowing what your kind of vision and mission are and your underlying why.
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And then, also it's about sometimes just doing a load of stuff and then reflecting on how you got there and like what what is the underlying flavour of your leadership as you've got there. So for example, I typically lead from the middle.
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Like I'm not somebody who is a type A sort of out there leading from the front. I'm much more likely to be in the middle because I get a lot of value from trial and error-y kind of just giving stuff a go and then going, oh, I did this, that worked. You might want to try that too. Okay, I'm waffling now, so I'm going to leave the episode there.
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Thanks so much for listening. If you want to grab the values exercise, I will put a link in the show notes for where you can find the link to download that. And do let me know if you give the values exercise a try.
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I'd love to know what you get as your values. What is it that you settle on? Take good care, and I will speak to you next time. Bye.
