By Kasey Dean, Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Accounts.
In the financial industry, and any business, managers and leaders tend to be the first ones called upon when a mistake or error occurs. Whether it’s internally or externally, they are always looked on as the problem-solvers and are expected to drop everything to address the issue no matter how big or small.
But what toll does that take on their day-to-day work, and ultimately their team’s ability to grow? The answer is simple… it can be time consuming which adds to business inefficiency, and it can be physically and emotionally draining which leads good leaders and teams to burn out.
As a leader, how can you and your team course-correct?
In my experience, as Senior Director of Accounts at Simplicity Lone Beacon (and my various leadership roles in sports) I’ve learned that the solution is not always cut and dry, so I use these guiding principles to help me navigate unique problems and empower my team to take a productive course of action.
Guiding Principle #1: Emotions vs. Facts
Both emotions and facts play a role in understanding the context of a situation, but you must have a system in place to properly address issues when they arise. Ask yourself this: “Am I or the person who alerted me of this issue responding because of an emotional reaction?” We are all human, so it is impossible to not have emotional reactions when things go wrong. That said, one of the most important skills for any leader is to be able to manage your emotions and help manage your team’s emotions so that you can collectively find an effective solution. At the end of the day, no one wants to make mistakes so responding emotionally will only amplify a negative situation and likely cause more harm than good.
When adverse situations occur in the workplace, the best first step is to gather all the facts about the situation and the process before assuming you know the answer or can provide a solution. This may sound trivial, but what this means is knowing when to take the extra time reach out to a team member for more information or solve it yourself. Sometimes, a mistake may be glaring but the actual problem may be started much earlier in the process, and without taking the time to address the whole problem the likelihood that it will occur again is high.
Guiding Principle #2: Know Your Personnel
I learned this principle in my collegiate basketball career. Essentially, this means you have to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and expectations of the people around you in order to make the right decisions and evaluate success. Back in college, my teammates and I would reference this principle when we reacted emotionally to a mistake or an opponent’s success. When we said this to each other or ourselves, it helped us to keep ourselves in check for our expectations of people and hold each other accountable for our actions in a realistic way.
Let’s get into some basketball for this next example. If we were playing an opponent who struggled to handle very tight man-to-man defense, we would want to avoid situations where one of our teammates wasn’t a good on-ball defender to be matched up with that opponent. If for some reason, our teammate ended up guarding that person, it was on all of us as a team to recognize that we all contributed to that situation and did not set our teammate or us up for success.
While this example is very rudimentary and seems logical, think about how you can apply that to your work settings. What facts do you know about your team and your clients that can help you match the right people for success? As a leader, if you are not able to identify your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and personalities, then you can’t expect everything will run efficiently.
Guiding Principle #3: Create a Teaching Environment
As a leader, I continue to learn that mistakes can be the best way for people to grow. It’s my job to create a learning environment with my team, so they know it’s okay to make mistakes if we learn from them. This also means I make sure I identify where I might be causing my team harm by stepping in to address the problem, instead of guiding them to navigate the situation themselves.
In my opinion, this is one of the hardest parts of being a manager and a leader, knowing when you need to step back and allow your team to course-correct on their own. Of course, there will always be situations where a more senior person is needed to step in but does every situation require my immediate attention? How might I empower my team to step into action and grow their abilities?
Some basic questions I ask myself when a new situation arises are:
- What is the impact of this issue?
- Has this been a common issue?
- Is this a chance for someone to solve it themselves, or does this need extra assistance?
- How do we as a team make sure this doesn’t happen moving forward?
At the end of the day, every leader, team, and situation can be different, but if you’re able to take the time to use these guiding principles, you might spend less time trying to put out fires yourself, and your team can grow instead. The result is that you can focus your time on forward-thinking tasks, not backward-looking ones. It can be difficult to give up the reins on certain things, but ultimately effective delegation can help your organization become more efficient and scale effectively.
About the Author: Kasey joined Simplicity Lone Beacon from the sportswear industry where she was a marketing manager overseeing the strategy, content creation, execution and analysis for New Balance Athletics’ first-ever customer rewards program. She has also managed a million-dollar media budget, creating content and measuring performance for paid and organic marketing campaigns. Kasey graduated from Brandeis University with a double major in Business & American Studies, where she was also two-year captain of the Varsity Women’s Basketball team. In her free time, Kasey enjoys being active and traveling as much as possible.
