Here we are – the final post of 2024.
A big welcome to the huge number of you who have signed up to my newsletter the last week or so. And a huge thank you to all of you for subscribing and helping me hit a huge personal milestone before the end of the year.
I’m also always open to suggestions for topics, just send me a message here and let me know what your key challenges are and I’d be happy to provide some advice.
As we head towards the end of 2024 and the final post of the year, it’s always a good time for reflection as many of us take a break over the holidays.
How to get quick, effective feedback from your team
It’s actually my favourite time of year to ask myself a few questions about how I can improve and make the next 12 months as effective and enjoyable as possible. When I was CEO of Aira, I used to ask my core team for their feedback and I used the start, stop, continue method for this which worked really well.
I’d highly recommend finding a few minutes over the next week before the holidays to ask your team these simple questions. In fact, I’ve made it super easy for you, here is a quick message that you can send them:
Hi [name],
As we head towards the end of the year, I’m going to take some time to think about how I can be a better manager for you and the team during 2025. Can you help me out and take 5-10 minutes before the holidays to send me answers to these questions:
- What should I start doing in order to be a more effective manager for you?
- What should I stop doing in order to be a more effective manager for you?
- What should I continue doing in order to be a more effective manager for you?
Don’t worry about writing loads, just a few lines or bullet points for each question would be really useful for me.
Thank you!
[your name]
That’s it – copy and paste the above, send it to your team and you’ll have a few ideas for how you can be a better manager when you come back in 2025.
Take the feedback, highlight any common themes and think about how you can take action on them.
Remember, some of the feedback may be quite specific to an individual team member. If this is the case, try to think about whether it’s also useful for other team members and if not, just make a plan to tweak how you work with that one individual. For example, one person may prefer for you to start delivering feedback in a more direct manner – this is totally fair and actionable for them. But this may not work for all team members, so it’s fine to just tweak your approach for that one person who would prefer this.
What if you don’t get much back? Or you don’t manage people yet and just want to learn more before you do?
I’ve got you covered.
When I’m lacking in actionable feedback from others, I try to think about what I can focus on which is least likely to be wrong or a mistake. What are the things that I can work on to improve myself that are enduring and likely to always be useful?
As a manager, there are a bunch of things that no matter how good or experienced you become, that you’ll always be able to improve.
Let’s look at a few of them and how you can be more effective in 2025 by focusing on them. The advice here is pretty holistic – meaning that if you can improve these areas, the positive effects will spread over pretty much every aspect of your management.
Put your own wellbeing first
I won’t lie, I failed miserably at this one over the last couple of years of running my own agency and it all caught up with me early in 2024 when I had a mental breakdown. So I speak from experience here and have learned the hard way how important this is.
I think this is especially important for managers because we can often absorb and internalise the stress and anxieties from our team members, adding to anything that is already there.
It’s difficult to draw boundaries here because on one hand, you want to be a supportive manager (and human being), but on the other hand, you need to preserve your own mental wellbeing so that you can actually be an effective manager to everyone.
Ensure that you’re drawing boundaries between professional and personal issues, helping to make sure that you don’t accidentally stray into conversations that may be better suited to qualified professionals.
Headspace is incredibly important and you need to preserve it as much as possible in order to be effective. Take time to learn how to manage the (finite) level of mental energy that you have each day and learn what the triggers may be that drain that energy.
Trust me, it’s worth taking the time to keep on top of your own wellbeing and if there is one thing that you take from this article, let it be this one.
Confront difficult conversations and situations head on
The chances are that 2025 will hold some hard conversations or some very challenging situations. Most managers will face things such as:
- Telling someone that they’re not getting a promotion or a pay rise that they really wanted.
- Letting someone go from their role.
- Stepping into a project when a member of your team has made a huge mistake and the client or stakeholder isn’t happy about it.
All of these situations have different ways to handle them.
But one thing is true for all of them: things get far worse when you avoid or delay dealing with them.
Another thing is true: every single ineffective manager who I’ve ever worked with has been prone to avoiding hard conversations.
If you’re faced with a difficult situation, it will take up a disproportionately high amount of your headspace, leading to it affecting other aspects of your day-to-day role. For example, you may find it hard to be present during other, unrelated meetings or find it hard to concentrate when working on someone’s personal development plan.
Obviously, not every single challenging situation can be dealt with instantly. But at least try to deal with things as quickly as possible and put in place a plan to deal with it. Even if a problem isn’t yet solved, having a plan in place can help you feel much better about everything and reduce the headspace that it’s taking up.
Normalise feedback into your daily role
It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that feedback (especially negative) needs to be delivered during planned meetings such as one-on-ones or reviews.
Whilst this is true, there is a danger here. If these meetings are the only time that you deliver feedback, then your team can become conditioned to only expect feedback during these times, making it harder to deliver smaller, more timely feedback in between these meetings.
For example if you’re working on a project with a team member and you observe some semi-serious (but not terrible) negative behaviours, it’s best to give them feedback as soon as you possibly can. This could be immediately or within an hour or two when you get to chat with them privately.
Instead, many managers will make a note of this and wait a few days or even a few weeks before delivering this feedback. Or worse, forget about it altogether because the behaviour wasn’t that bad.
So either the feedback doesn’t get delivered at all. Or it does get delivered but in a far less effective way.
It’s these “minor misbehaviours” that can often fall between the cracks of structured meetings and actually build up over time to bigger issues.
To avoid this, try to normalise quick, simple feedback over the course of your daily and weekly projects and avoid things escalating or being forgotten about.
If you can do this, it will help prevent a lot of small issues becoming bigger ones further down the line, helping you be a more effective manager and focusing more on the positive aspects of your role.
