Being able and knowing how to ask the right questions is a fundamental tool to obtain correct diagnoses of the state of our situation as a manager and encourage those who work with us to build meaningful and shared responses.
Often in our analyses, however, we have the tendency not to want to raise potentially “uncomfortable” issues or issues that can alter the balance: unfortunately are precisely these types that allow us to “disturb” the situation and move the team and ourselves to a situation of greater performance.
So what should we focus on?
Put diversity at work
Let’s first ask ourselves how we can work more effectively knowing that in any case we start from a situation of personal heterogeneity.
Each member of the team, including the manager, is the result of a specific professional history that has defined aspects and skills differently. This “functional diversity” if adequately valued is also what makes the team highly efficient.
However, valorisation is anything but obvious, being a very tricky task: it is very similar to a dance in which each movement must be calibrated to avoid disharmonies. The danger to always keep in mind is that of excessively amplifying one component compared to the others, shifting the balance in an uncontrolled manner.
Managing a team is walking on a razor hedge and we need to be aware of this.
Laser focus your energies
The second area of analysis is related to the ability to focus. No team or work group is able to tackle all the problems at the same time, it is therefore necessary to make choices to concentrate the available energies. Fully exploring the range of what can stimulate the different aspects of discussion is too vast an undertaking, but some of the questions on which it is useful to concentrate our efforts are:
A) Where are we directing our attention?
B) What should we say no to? This could be things that don’t add value, that serve as a distraction rather than work that we don’t consider important, …
C) What areas should we focus on to raise the bar on ongoing tasks or become more selective?
Manage the urgency and continuously plan
This leads to the third area of analysis which deals with priorities: let’s ask ourselves how we can improve the definition and management of the urgency of the tasks that await us. As managers we see a team that receives loto of internal and external inputs, most likely not organised. Our task is to put some order in this siege in order to have energies dealing with what is valuable rather than what is incoming.
Whether we are dealing with daily work, a project or a resource management activity, it is essential to plan what in the course of work becomes more or less urgent or functional to the optimisation of other activities. Improving the definition of priorities can be an antidote to being overwhelmed for some teams and, even for those who are not in this extreme situation, a way to start to recompose the pressures they are subjected to. Ask yourself and to the team: are there particularities in the sequence and levels of urgency of the tasks in your organisation? How do you compensate for the variable and unplanned component of each of your team members?
