First-Time Managers Leading Themselves with Strengths

Part 5 of First-Time Managers Leading Themselves with Strengths. Your team already has a theory about how you work. It is mostly right, and it is wrong in exactly the places that cost them.

The last article ended with a job moved off one theme and onto another. A management rhythm built out of how you already work instead of how somebody else works.

This article is about the problem with all of it. You can build every bit of that and the people who report to you will still have no idea it is happening. A rhythm nobody knows about is just a secret. So this one is about saying the quiet part out loud.

Your team has been reading you the whole time

Every person who reports to you already has a theory about how you work. They built it without being asked to, out of what they can see: what makes you lean forward in a meeting, which questions get an answer in four minutes and which ones sit for a week, what you do when a deadline moves.

Their theory is mostly right. It is wrong in exactly the places that cost them. The why.

Picture the person on your team who used to bring you half-finished ideas and stopped. They did not stop because you told them to. They ran your reaction through their theory of you, decided it was not worth it, and went back to their desk. They are now managing around a version of you that they invented, and they are pretty good at it, which is the part that should worry you.

From your side, none of that looks like a problem. It looks like a quiet week.

That is what happens when you keep this work private. Not silence. A guess.

An open door tells them where, not what

This is the point where most management advice hands you an open door policy. My door is always open. Come to me with anything.

Every first-time manager gets told to have one. Almost nobody gets told why it is not enough.

An open door tells a person WHERE to bring a problem. They already knew where you sit. It never tells them which problems they are allowed to bring, and it certainly never tells them they are allowed to bring one about you. So they stand in the hallway doing the math, come up with an answer they do not like, and go back to their desk.

My door really was always open. Nobody ever walked through it to tell me my Competition® had taken over a meeting. Not once.

An open door is a location. What that person in the hallway needed was a subject.

What I actually said to my team

Years ago I walked my own team through Helps and Hinders, the same exercise I gave you two articles ago. Everybody's themes went up. People talked about them. Good session.

Then I did the part that actually did the work.

I gave them explicit permission to tell me when MY themes were hindering me, or hindering my ability to lead them.

The sentence I used is still the one I model in workshops:

"My Competition® means I will turn almost anything into a scoreboard where it's me vs you, so tell me when that is not helping."

Read it again and notice everything that is in there. A theme, named. The specific behavior it produces. Who it happens to. And then the half that does all the work: tell me when.

That last part is not a courtesy tacked onto the end of a confession. It is the entire mechanism. Leave it off and you have handed your team an interesting fact about yourself while leaving them exactly where they already were, which is standing in the hallway doing the math.

The permission is the mechanism, the vocabulary is not

Everyone on my team could already tell I was competitive. That was not news to a single one of them.

What they could not tell, until I said it out loud, was whether I wanted to hear about it.

This is the part that surprises most first-time managers, and it is why this article is not asking you to run a session. You do not have to teach your team the language of CliftonStrengths® for this to work. No reports to hand out, no room to book, nobody has to know their top five. Your team can already see the behavior. They have been watching it since your first week.

What is missing was never vocabulary. It was permission.

The permission is the mechanism. The vocabulary is not.

If your team does happen to know the language, good, it makes the conversation faster and more precise. But a manager who says one true thing about themselves in plain English and then says "tell me when" has done more for their team than a manager who taught everybody their top five and never went first.

Three sentences, and that is the whole assignment

This one is smaller than the last four. No session to run, no report to hand out, no worksheet. After four articles of homework you have earned that.

In your next one-on-one or your next team meeting, say three sentences out loud.

1. Here is my top talent theme.
   Can you name it without opening the report? If you have to go look it up first, your team has been guessing for longer than you think.

2. Here is where it helps you.
   Notice who the you is in that sentence. Not where the theme helps you, where it helps the person sitting across from you. If you cannot finish it, you have been carrying your theme around as a personality fact instead of something the people who work for you get to USE.

3. Here is where it costs you, and I want you to tell me when it does.
   That second half is the whole thing. The first half is a confession, and a confession is just information. The second half is a door with a name on it.

The part I had backwards

For years I thought naming my hinder out loud was the victory lap. Do the real work in private, get yourself sorted, then report the finished result to the team.

It was the work.

Everything I did in private, my team experienced as a guess. That is the honest reason the four articles before this one were all about you and none of them were about your team. Your themes, your hinder, your rhythm. It went in that order because you cannot ask somebody to do a thing you have not done yourself. But not one bit of it reaches the people you manage until you read some of it aloud.

Not everybody will take you up on it. Some people never will, and that is fine. They are usually the same ones who would not have walked through the open door either.

It only takes one. One person willing to say it in the moment, out loud, in front of everybody. Then the whole team finds out what happens next by watching what you do the first time somebody actually does.

So the question was never whether your team has a theory about how you work.

What is your team currently guessing about you?

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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

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

If you are planning a workshop

I facilitate CliftonStrengths®, team development, and first-time manager workshops. A manager who tells their team how they work gets corrected in the meeting instead of in the exit interview. If your company is moving people into their first management role this year, connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me about it.

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