Episode 208 Transcript:

0:00:00 Ramona Shaw: This is episode 208. We’re going to talk about the topic of being unable to keep up. Here’s the question.

0:00:09 Ramona Shaw: How do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role, build the confidence and competence to lead your team successfully and establish yourself as a respected and trusted leader across the organization? That’s the question, and this show provides the answers. Welcome to The Manager Track podcast. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw, and I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is not seen as source of stress and dread, but as a source of contribution, connection and fulfillment.

0:00:36 Ramona Shaw: And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead so everyone wins and grows. In the show, you learn how to think, communicate, and act as the confident and competent leader you know you can be.

0:00:52 Ramona Shaw: Welcome to this episode of The Manager Track podcast. I want to share with you a topic today that comes up quite often in conversations with leaders that I coach or that we support at Archova. It also comes up when having conversations with organizations at large. One of the challenges that many of us face as we professionally grow is we may get. Many of us is that many of us get to the point where we feel that we’re unable to keep up.

0:01:23 Ramona Shaw: Sometimes it’s being unable to keep up with the changes that are coming our way that we’re confronted with. Sometimes it’s being unable to keep up with the inflow of information or the work that’s coming our way. And sometimes it’s just being unable to keep up with the amount of emails and messages and different communication channels that you’re exposed to and all the requests or prompts or updates that you’re receiving.

0:01:51 Ramona Shaw: And this is very common. And I want to talk about how to navigate these types of situations. When you are at a point in your career, in your life, sometimes it’s just one week versus another or a day versus another. But when you get this feeling, oh man, I just cannot keep up. Let’s talk about what to do in such situations. I want to specifically focus on five challenges that I see are pretty common with professionals that are, who are growing and are expanding their responsibilities or are working in companies that are just hit by a lot of changes.

0:02:29 Ramona Shaw: One thing, though, before we dive in, is that this kind of progress, this kind of evolution for each of us, and us all as humans, is very normal. The problem is not that it’s happening. The problem is not that you feel, oh my gosh, I can’t keep up. The problem is if you think that you can grow and change and you can’t handle it. And then you either get yourself out of the position by quitting or by asking for a different role, or you just disengage and no longer fully show up.

0:03:06 Ramona Shaw: It could also be that because you feel like I’m unable to keep up, but you’re really, really trying to keep up, that this ultimately leads to a more severe situation that could be burnout. That with more severe situations such as burnout, when we grow, let’s say, on our leadership journeys, it is very similar to snakes that shed their skin in order to grow as an animal. And when the old skin starts to flake, become a little flaky and break, that’s uncomfortable, we’d imagine. We don’t know for sure, but we’d imagine that’s somewhat uncomfortable. And it feels like, oh, my gosh, I can’t be like this anymore.

0:03:47 Ramona Shaw: But then the snake sheds that skin. It’s like letting go of something that was actually really, really helpful and protected them and served them as an organ really well up until that moment. But they realize or don’t, but that’s how nature does it, that they have to grow new skin. Now, for us in leadership journeys or growth journeys, professional personal growth, it is very similar to this process of shedding this old skin.

0:04:16 Ramona Shaw: But we have a choice. So we can choose to grow or not to grow. It’s just different from the snake. If I feel like, oh my, this is uncomfortable, like, I don’t want to shed this skin that has helped me and got me where I am today, I might just, like, suck it in and stay where I’m at. Or again, like I said earlier, we may take ourselves out of it, but in order to grow and expand our influence, our responsibilities, our impact in terms of career progression, that’s more trackable, more measurable, we have to let that old skin go, and that can be very uncomfortable.

0:04:56 Ramona Shaw: In fact, in the vast majority of times that I work with leaders in coaching engagement, it is about identifying what are those habits that got you where you are today, but it will no longer serve you to get you to the next place. And it’s not just behaviors, by the way, although we’re going to talk about this, it is also mindsets, beliefs that we have about ourselves, how we see ourselves, how we think about work, how we identify as an employee or as a professional, as an expert.

0:05:28 Ramona Shaw: There are lots of these things that are going on internally that we have to let go, to adopt a new mindset that allows us to grow into this next version that is this bigger version of the snake. So it’s practical things, behaviors, but it’s a lot of it is also internal. I’m going to talk about some of the symptoms that I identify with, working with leaders that are very common. And I hope to a degree that some of these resonate with you. And you can see, oh, this is not just me. This is actually very common. It just means my skin is stretching and I have to let some stuff go in order to get to the next level in order to grow.

0:06:10 Ramona Shaw: And as much as it feels uncomfortable or that you might feel insecure about it, know that that’s the path forward. Retracting and shrinking back or staying where you’re at, trying to cope, persevering for the sake of perseverance is not going to help you grow. This snake can just be like, oh, it’s stretchy, it’s uncomfortable. But you know what? I’m such a strong animal. I’m going to persevere through this discomfort.

0:06:39 Ramona Shaw: No, this skin is going to fall off. Now, as humans, we have this ability to just continue to persevere because skin is not falling off. That’s not the solution, though. So embrace the fact that things will be uncomfortable. Embrace the mindset of experimenting with new behaviors or new sort of frames of mind in those particular areas. Okay, let’s dive in. As I prepared for this episode, I wrote down five specific challenges that I see quite often.

0:07:08 Ramona Shaw: Okay, challenge number one is that desire or that sense of need to be responding to every single person. So if you feel compelled to respond to every email, every message, every request that’s coming your way, there is a moment in your career where that is just not feasible anymore. When on day one, you know, your fresh grad, your first job, you can probably respond to every single, single thing that’s coming your way.

0:07:39 Ramona Shaw: And some of us are pretty good. It also depends on the job and the position, but some of us are pretty good on keeping up for quite a long time. But then, especially when you move into a leadership role where your scope of responsibilities is starting to grow exponentially, because if you have one job and as an individual contributors in IC, and then you take on a team of four people, now you have to oversee and think about, and you’re having to navigate through challenges spanning across all four different rules.

0:08:11 Ramona Shaw: So the growth is exponential. And in those situations, when we continue to want to respond to everyone and we think that’s what a good leader does, or that’s what a good professional does, or that’s your sense of value and work, ethic, you might be holding yourself back. It’s at some point simply no longer possible. Now some people, and this is not how I suggest to navigate, is that they just kind of give up. They say like, you know, I don’t respond to emails, I don’t read emails, I don’t care what people send or what they do. You know, if they really need me, they either will find a way to contact me or they’ll resolve it on their own. That works for some people, especially those who’ve been in the same kind of work environment with very similar work relationships for a long time. But people get used to it and so they will adjust.

0:09:00 Ramona Shaw: But if you’re someone who is new ish to a role or you work with a lot of new people, or people are changing in your work environment, ever so often that can be really difficult because people may rely on you or assume that you’re reading your emails. They haven’t learned yet that that’s not the way to communicate. So there’s a lot of inefficiencies that will happen if that is not communicated. What I do suggest, if you realize, hey, I just cannot keep up with the requests and the emails and the messages and the things here and there that are coming my way is for you to decide first, how do I want to handle this?

0:09:38 Ramona Shaw: Where do and how do I want to be accessible? For what do I want to be accessible? Do I need people to cc me? Or do I tell people stop, cc me on all these types of emails or please take me out of loop on these projects or only report back to me in this one way or this one channel. Decide what will work best for you and then communicate this. The same with are you available on slack and people count for you to be on slack and to respond, or teams or whatever collaboration tool that you’re using?

0:10:13 Ramona Shaw: Or do you appreciate when people call you when something is urgent? Do you like that people text you if something is going on? What is the best way for other people to communicate with you in order to get your attention? Also knowing that there are channels or days or formats in which you’re not going to respond to. So the more you can share this with others and manage expectations, the easier this will be. Now, this is not a bulletproof, 100% accurate list that you can share that will 100% hold true, but you can send out or you can provide some parameters or guidelines that you will abide by for yourself because it will take some discipline. You might still be inclined to respond to all the things, but also, for other people to know how to best work with you and get your intention or your input.

0:11:07 Ramona Shaw: As a caring and driven manager, I know you want to strengthen your leadership skills, advance your career, and lead a hyper forming, engaged team. And in order to do that, as a leader, you need to lead with a system, not by shooting from your hips or reacting to everyone else around you. To do so, you need to first learn what should go into your leadership system, and second, develop your own. But here’s the good news.

0:11:33 Ramona Shaw: I created a concise, actionable, and yet comprehensive course on one component of the leadership system, and this is about how to successfully run one on one meetings with your direct reports. It includes over 67 minutes of tactical leadership training, plus a set of resources to make this as easy and immediately applicable for you as possible. You can get your hands on this course, which I want every single manager to have for a nominal $19 at ramonashaw.com

0:12:03 Ramona Shaw: one one. That’s two times the number one. You can check the show notes for the details or head on over to ramonashaw.com/11 and get started right away. So that’s challenge number one. Challenge number two is when we feel the need to prove our value, specifically our expertise. There is a moment in time where people just assume that you’re good at what you’re doing. You don’t have to prove yourself anymore.

0:12:34 Ramona Shaw: But our mindset, our internal dialogue hasn’t quite caught up with that yet. And so we find ourselves in situations where we’re still trying to prove to people that we’re working with stakeholders. Maybe you’re at a new company, your new boss, new coworkers, new peers, and you’re trying to demonstrate to them that you’re an expert, that you know what you’re talking about. They don’t challenge that anymore.

0:13:00 Ramona Shaw: Early on in career, yes, you have to prove it. But then the higher up that you go, the more people assume that you know. And the reason why you’re in these positions is because you’re an expert, because you’re good at it. I’m not saying there’s none of that. Credibility still needs to be seen and recognized, but it’s way less than what it used to be. So out of 100%. Just to simplify this, if it was 70% about five year into your career, it might be 30 or 20% 1520 years into your career.

0:13:34 Ramona Shaw: That part is way smaller. What does matter is how effective are you in communicating and leading and motivating and engaging teams and creating alignment in hitting targets through strategic thinking and planning, that will all become a lot more important. But when we get caught up in this idea that we need to prove our value, and you’ll hear this internally, like when you think, oh, I have to explain myself, or I have to make sure they know that I know.

0:14:07 Ramona Shaw: We tend to over communicate in meetings. We over share details, and the feedback that then usually comes back to you, either through performance reviews or working with a coach or in a leadership development program, is, I wish this person was more concise. I think for them to be a more effective leader, they need to hone in on their communication. They need to be less verbose, they need to be more, they need to bring it to the point.

0:14:35 Ramona Shaw: You may add a lot of content and a lot of context because you think it matters. You think it matters, doesn’t matter for other people, but you think it matters. And again, because you want to make sure they know that you know those things will hold you back. This is the inner dialogue of, like, I don’t need to prove myself. People are already assuming that I know. And with that mindset, how would you go about your work differently?

0:15:04 Ramona Shaw: So if this is one that resonates with you, ask yourself this question. If everyone else that I work with already knew that I’m great at this, already knew that I have deep expertise, what would I stop doing? What would I start doing? What would I do differently? So that’s the second challenge. Now, the third challenge is about people pleasing. There is, again, early on in our careers, we do have some capacity to people please meaning to do things, not for. Not because we think we should do them or because we want to do them, but because we do things for other people, so that the chances for them liking us, for them to be pleased by us.

0:15:45 Ramona Shaw: Hence, people pleasing is increasing. And when you have extra capacity, you can do all kinds of people pleasing things in your personal life and in your professional lives. When you add responsibilities in professional lives, this is usually when you start taking on a team or taking on a bigger team, taking on big projects in your personal lives, it might be building a house, going through a phase of transition, having kids.

0:16:14 Ramona Shaw: All of a sudden you don’t have that extra capacity anymore, and you realize, I’m wearing myself out, trying to please other people and have nothing left for me. So identifying where am I doing things? Not because I think I should be doing them or because I want to do them should, meaning because it’s creating the result that I want, but I do them mainly to please other people. That is holding you back.

0:16:42 Ramona Shaw: That’s preventing you from growing into the best version and the highest version of you. So look really carefully and honestly at the things that you do when it comes to people pleasing. And what I find with people who tend to people please is it’s not a light switch that we turn on and off or some aha moment in a conversation, and from then on, they stop being people pleasers. It usually is a gradual sort of retraction from these people pleasing behaviors, and it starts with identifying what’s one relationship where I definitely fall into this trap most often.

0:17:20 Ramona Shaw: What are specific, recurring things that I tend to do, and how do I, ahead of time, practice and internalize saying no to these things? How will I say it? When will I say it? So when it actually then happens, I’m already prepared. And we’re taking one step at a time, one behavior or one pattern at a time, one relationship at a time to hone that in. So that’s challenge number three. Challenge number four is not having structures. So when we’re. Again, I’m going to go back when we’re sort of our older version, let’s say, 510 years ago, things that you could memorize, things that you could do reactively throughout the day or the week.

0:18:02 Ramona Shaw: The ability to be present with people and to respond to quick questions and to attend meetings, even if you don’t really need to be there, you have the capacity for all of that. So it’s fine. You’re like, okay, it was kind of interesting. Maybe not the best use of my time, but fine. Not too bad, either. You know, these quick questions, sure, I can get to them throughout the day, and I can still get to all my to dos, but there is a moment in your progression where that skin gets too tight and you’ll have to rely a lot more on structure.

0:18:39 Ramona Shaw: There’s this great quote by James Clear, who says, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. And again, for many people, they can do fine without a system up until this moment in time, where it’s just no longer fine, and then they will fall back down to whatever level of system they do have in place, even if that system is minimal. So things such as how you obviously track your to dos, how you plan your days, plan your weeks, when you’re available for team members to connect with you, or is it like an open door policy, which that could be a whole episode on its own, the fallacy of the open door policy?

0:19:22 Ramona Shaw: Or do you have some kind of structure to share with your team? Members on when and how to connect with you, where you are going to be able to fully present and support them without you trying to multitask and keeping up with a number of different things coming your way. At the same time, it also goes down to how you track the commitments or things that other people owe you. It comes down to tracking the decisions that were made, how you track performance goals, development goals, and the list goes on.

0:19:54 Ramona Shaw: Again. Not thinking systematically about the responsibilities that you have and how to manage them well is a way to keep your skin really tight and prohibit your growth. Now, the last of the five challenges is trying to keep up with everything, or in other words, dealing with FOMO. The fear of missing out and therefore trying to attend too many meetings. Ask for updates that are kind of irrelevant, be involved in certain decisions you don’t really need to be part of, to read a bunch of emails, asked to be cc’D or included in email communication or processes to review things you don’t need to review. There’s so many examples of how FOMO shows up in the workplace, and it usually boils down to some kind of underlying fear or insecurity about letting go of control and what would happen if they either didn’t know something or if something didn’t go well.

0:20:59 Ramona Shaw: And then they that is, we would look bad and we don’t want to look bad. That’s another thing that’s ingrained in us humans. And so in order to navigate this insecurity or this worry and need for control, we are like an octopus trying to get ourselves entangled in a bunch of things unnecessarily. It actually not only makes it ineffective for us and keeps us tight, but it also prevents your team members from taking on full ownership responsibilities, feeling empowered, and actually growing through the process.

0:21:32 Ramona Shaw: So FOMO, just like some of the other challenges here, is not something that you can identify diagnose, because you see the symptom, and it’s always the same symptom, and it leads to this one diagnosis. It is very dependent on you, on where FOMO might come up, but you will notice it when you start paying attention to what your inner dialogue is telling you. If you say, oh my gosh, I need to stay in a loop, because what if it doesn’t go well? What if I’m being asked about it and I don’t have an answer, then I’m going to look bad?

0:22:04 Ramona Shaw: What if someone does something that makes a mistake and then I have to be the one who takes the blame for it? So what? Like answer that question, what if? What is the concern? We all have huge amount of information that we know is somewhere out there, but we actually don’t have it. So it’s the known unknown piece of the pie of information and we all are exposed to it. So we all deal with this risk. But when I come from a somewhat insecure place, then I’ll be more likely to have this need to control and to fear missing out.

0:22:40 Ramona Shaw: And again, we get entangled in different ways. If this resonates with you, just start paying attention. Yeah. Where is it that I don’t actually, if I’m honest with myself, there isn’t really a good reason for me to be included in the conversation, to join the meeting, to involve myself in the review process because it holds you back and it holds other people back. It takes time away from you and it shows other people that you don’t trust them fully and you don’t let them own it and maybe even let them fail to a degree that will show up and that will hinder your growth and will hinder their growth.

0:23:17 Ramona Shaw: There is a lot more to uncover here, and I’m keeping these five challenges short. I’m going to recap them quickly here. So challenge one was the need to respond to everyone. Challenge two is the need to prove our value. Challenge three was people pleasing. Four was the lack of a system or structure. And five was trying to not miss anything. That sense of FOMO. If any of those resonate with you, or if you have team members that you notice, oh, this might be going on with them, investigate further. And coaching can obviously be a really great way to identify them and then to shed the skin that’s letting that go and adapting new mindsets, new behaviors that will support your growth.

0:24:01 Ramona Shaw: If you’re interested in coaching or leadership development programs for you or for the managers that you’re supporting or other leaders you’re supporting, check out the show notes. There’s a link to schedule a strategy session to learn more what executive or leadership coaching or our development programs could look like for you. And with that, I’m going to wrap. I enjoyed preparing this episode and I hope you found it insightful or helpful to listen to it. And again, as I said in the beginning, although I hope you’re all doing great, I also do hope that there was something in here that resonated with you and inspires you to have a closer look at what’s going on.

0:24:38 Ramona Shaw: If you have colleagues or friends that would appreciate hearing this too, or benefit from hearing this too, please share it along this would mean a lot to me. Thank you so much, and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye for now.

0:24:50 Ramona Shaw: If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes my best selling book, the confident and competent new manager, which you can find on Amazon or amonashaw.com book, and a free training on how to successfully lead as a new manager. You can check it out@ramonashaw.com masterclass these resources and a couple more you’ll find in the show notes down below.