First-Time Managers Leading Themselves with Strengths

Part 4 of First-Time Managers Leading Themselves with Strengths. You will not out-discipline your own talent themes. You can hand the job to a different one.

The last article ended with a room. The setting where your strongest theme stops paying you and starts costing you. If you did the work, you can now see it coming.

This article is about what to do with that. Not try harder in the room, which is what almost everybody attempts first and what almost nobody sustains. Something smaller. And a little embarrassing.

Catching yourself works right up until you are busy

The method in the last article is real, and it works. On a normal Tuesday.

Then comes the week where everybody is putting in long hours and nobody is getting to the bottom of their list. That is the week your themes are loudest, because pressure is the trigger. It is also the week you have nothing left over to police yourself with.

Busy is not the exception. Busy is the job.

So a plan that only works when you have spare attention is not a plan. It is a good intention with a scheduling problem.

Same meeting, same me, different theme in charge

In the second article I told you about the team meeting I ran the week of our biggest conference of the year. I spent it painting a picture of the vacation we would all take to rest and recover once it was over. My team needed to know what to do that week. They got a postcard from three months out.

For a long time I thought the fix was to catch my Futuristic® in the act and sit on my hands. Be more disciplined about it.

That has never once worked on a week like that one.

What actually worked was smaller.

I stopped asking my Futuristic® to run that meeting and gave the job to my Achiever®.

Same meeting. Same me. DIFFERENT theme in charge.

The meeting stopped being about what we were going to do next week and became what we are accomplishing today, before we walk out of this room. My Achiever® is very good at that. It is what it wants to do anyway.

Notice what did not happen. I did not adopt anybody's meeting template. I did not add a system. I did not get better at something I am bad at.

I moved one job from a theme that was hindering me in that setting to a theme that helps me in it.

And notice which theme did the rescuing. One article ago my Achiever® was the villain, standing in front of a guy who had worked a twelve hour day and calling him lazy in my head. Same theme. Here it is the fix. That is what it means when I say the setting decides.

You will not out-discipline your own talent themes

This is the sentence I wish somebody had handed me in my first year of managing people.

Willpower is a budget. Your themes are not. They do not need to be reminded and they do not run out. They show up whether you scheduled them or not, at full volume, and loudest under exactly the pressure that empties the budget.

So anything you are running on discipline is competing against something that runs on nothing.

You already know how that ends. You have watched it end that way before.

Stop trying to win that fight. Move the job instead.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People worked, for Stephen Covey

And it works for plenty of people who think the way he thinks. That is not a knock on the book. It is a knock on how the rest of us use it.

Most best practices get built the same way. Somebody succeeds, everybody else asks how they did it, and the answer that comes back is always the WHAT. Never the why.

So you get the habit. You do not get the wiring underneath it that made the habit easy for that one person.

Then you adopt it. Then you quit it faster than your New Year's resolutions (I have quit plenty of those), and you decide the problem was your discipline.

It was not your discipline. It was a system built out of somebody else's talent themes.

Here is the whole difference in one test.

A borrowed system: you have to remember to do it.

Your own rhythm: you have to remember NOT to do it.

That is the tell. If your week runs on something you keep having to force, it came from outside you. If it runs on something your brain was already trying to do, you just pointed it somewhere useful.

Five questions to find the job with the wrong theme on it

1. What do you keep promising yourself you will do better next week?
   That promise is the job. You have been trying to fix it with willpower for months. (Maybe years. I did years.)

2. Which recurring meeting do you quietly dread?
   Not the hard conversation. The one you keep rescheduling for no reason you can name.

3. When that meeting goes sideways, what does it turn into instead?
   Vision when people needed a task. Detail when people needed a decision. Whatever it keeps turning into is the theme currently in charge.

4. Which of your top five CliftonStrengths® themes is bored right now?
   You have a talent theme with nothing to do on a Tuesday. Usually it is the one you use everywhere except at work.

5. Could that bored theme do the job better than the one holding it?
   Not perfectly. BETTER. That is the whole bar. (Perfect was never on the table.)

Put it on the calendar on purpose

Take the list you wrote in the second article and the settings you added in the third. You now have your themes, what each one makes you do under pressure, and where it costs you.

Go one column further. For each setting, stop asking how you are going to stop doing it. Ask whether another theme in your top five, or your top ten, is better suited to that particular job.

Then actually move it. One job. Not your whole week.

That is smaller than it sounds, and it holds better than it sounds, because a rhythm built out of how you already work barely needs a second thought. Your brain wanted to do it that way anyway. You just pointed it somewhere useful.

One job. One meeting. One recurring thing on your calendar. Start there.

You do not have a discipline problem. You have a scheduling problem.

So stop trying to get better at a job your brain never wanted. Hand it to the part of you that already did.

---

More in this series

Part 1: What Nobody Tells You When You Become a Manager for the First Time

Part 2: Why Naming Your CliftonStrengths® Themes Is Not the Same as Knowing Them

Part 3: When Your Strongest CliftonStrengths® Theme Starts Costing You

Part 4: How to Build a Management Rhythm Around Your Own CliftonStrengths® Themes (this article)

Part 5: How to Tell Your Team the Way You Work, Before They Have to Guess

If you are planning a workshop

I facilitate CliftonStrengths®, team development, and first-time manager workshops. A new manager who can build their week out of their own themes is one you stop having to rescue six months later. If your company is moving people into their first management role this year, connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me about it. 

Social Media

Watch some free videos online via my social media accounts!