Life is full of absurdities. Would we entrust an airplane to someone who’s had no flight training? Of course not. Would we ask a guy off the street to perform surgery on someone we love? Not a chance.
But in the daily workplace we’re not as circumspect. We hand people the job of manager and ask them to figure it out. Then they, and we, are perplexed when good intentions and hard work don’t produce the results we wanted.
Sound familiar? It does to elite executive coach Sabina Nawaz. She advises C-level executives and teams at Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, nonprofits, and academic institutions around the world. During her 14-year tenure at Microsoft, she advanced from managing software development teams to leading the company’s executive development and succession planning efforts for more than 11,000 managers and nearly a thousand executives—advising Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer directly.
Many of the golden nuggets of what she’s learning and teaching are found in her book You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need).
For example, some managers become superstars while others crash and burn. What seem to be the make-a-difference factors?
“One of the key differentiators is the capacity to stop and remove the blinders to recognize that the higher you go, the less you know,” Nawaz says. “Not because you’re wired for ignorance, not because you don’t want to know. But because the higher we go, the less people are inclined to give us the honest feedback we need.”
Nawaz says a common impediment to leadership excellence is the myth that business is not personal.
“We’re dealing with human beings, not automatons,” she says. “Human beings come bundled with all the stuff above the neck—intellect, curiosity, analysis, data, logic—and all that stuff below the neck that resides in your heart, in your guts, feelings, emotions, reactions. interpretations, assumptions, and fears. All of that is personal. A good boss must understand that.”
Nawaz says the riskiest time in a person’s life is when they get promoted. She offers advice on how to thrive instead of dive.
“When we get promoted, our perch in the organizational hierarchy has changed,” she says. “The things we considered as our strengths and what propelled us upward may now come across very differently and be regarded less charitably by those around us. Let’s say you’ve paid a lot of attention to detail. It’s a great trait. But if you continue with that attention to detail as a manager you’ll be perceived as micromanaging. Your people will regard you as a control freak. If you’ve been very strategic in your previous position and carry that tendency into your new job as manager, you may be regarded as manipulative. So, in a different situation our strengths might be perceived as problematic. A helpful exercise is to write down some of your superpowers. Then do your best to honestly look at those from the perspective of someone three levels down. From a different vantage point, those ‘superpowers’ may come across in ways you don’t intend.”
In today’s workplace, burnout is becoming increasingly more common. Nevertheless, some people seem to regard busyness as a badge of honor. What’s the key to avoiding that trap?
Nawaz says one way is to create what she calls a time portfolio. “We may say that time is our most valuable asset, but do we really treat it that way? Most of us have financial portfolios to help us decide how to save, invest, and spend our money. Time is no different. We can strategically budget and allocate our time by creating buckets for meetings or reviewing reports or for conferences or for physical exercise or for anything that’s truly important to us. Then you can get into the details.”
She provides an example. “If we’re spending 30% of our time on email and communications, we may decide to reduce that to 20%. But as with New Year’s resolutions, that’s not likely to happen. So, we can go for a micro step from 30% to 28% by turning off notifications so we’re not distracted every time a new message comes in. The key is intentionality.”
For managers who want to tap the ingenuity of their team members, Nawaz recommends use of what she calls the “Shut-up” exercise.
“If you come into a meeting and say, ‘this is just a brainstorm meeting, but I thought we’d be more efficient if I brought this first draft of a plan,’ you’re only going to get lipstick on the pig. You’ll get marginal comments at best. Everyone’s going to say that’s great. If you’re the first one to pipe up with ideas, no one else is going to argue with your ideas. So for the manager a key part of the shut-up exercise is to be the third or fourth or fifth one to speak, not the first or second.”
Nawaz offers a masterclass for leaders who are navigating the pressures of authority and the pitfalls of power.