The Knowledge Bites blog - grow your skills

As a leader, there are a number of internal relationships you should be aware of. It’s not just relationships with your team and your boss which are important – you now have impact and input across other teams and the organisation as a whole. Here’s an image to illustrate: Although to begin with, some of these relationships might be challenging or outside of your comfort zone, it's important to work on your skills to build these relationships to increase your confidence and the way you’re perceived in the organisation. Rights & responsibilities As you grow in your relationships with others in the organisation, it’s important to remember that you have rights in any working relationship, and also responsibilities. And, of course, the other person also has their own rights and responsibilities. If you find a relationship challenging, then it’s worth remember the rights that you have. These are things like: The right to be treated with respect. The right...

Although people are motivated by different things, there are 4 which apply to most people, although different people will attach different importance to these. Daniel Pink explains it as follows: Autonomy: People are happy to be given a goal, but would prefer to work towards it in their own way rather than being micro-managed. Mastery: People want the opportunity to become an expert at something, and to have that expertise recognised by others. Purpose: People want to understand the point behind their work, and what higher purpose they are contributing to. I also think money is in the mix as well. People need enough money to live a reasonable lifestyle. They might have different financial needs at different points in their life. As a leader, you need to motivate your team members. Although people have individual motivational needs, they are likely to respond to these generalisations. Good practice is to ask people what motivates them. Some leaders are uncomfortable asking that as t...

If you can understand the conditions which caused a problem to develop or an opportunity to come along, then you’ll be able to think about how you can replicate those conditions (for opportunities), or change them (for problems). For example, if you realise that an opportunity presented itself which you were only able to take advantage of because of your proactive recruitment strategy, you’ll want to continue that strategy in the future. 5 Whys The 5 Whys technique encourages you to look not at superficial causes, but to look deeper for root causes. For example, imagine you’re waiting for a train and an announcement comes over the loudspeaker saying: “Your train is delayed due to the late arrival of a preceding service.” You likely find this frustrating because it’s not a real reason for the delay – you want to know why the preceding service was running late. The idea with 5 Whys is that you keep asking “why?” until it feels like a daft question. This is likely to be around 5 times. Th...