Welcome to Backing your Leadership. I'm Chris and Lorenzo, and welcome to this
week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking your Leadership
and leave us a review on iTunes. On this s Thoughtful Thursday, I
want to go over something. You know, we've been talking about the some
dysfunctional team elements and you know, the things that would lead to a team
being dysfunctional versus high performing. Starting on Monday, and we had some people
reach out to us on Instagram and LinkedIn on a specific element they wanted to
hear more about. And I thought it was a it's something that we touched
on, and I didn't think it was going to be something that people wanted
to hear more about. But but you know, our our listeners speak.
Something I specifically said around one of the things that could lead to a team
lacking trust is that when team members don't have their strengths leveraged, but in
actuality, you're really more putting people doing things in line with their interests.
And that seemed to strike a chord with some people who are working on teams
where it might seem that their coworkers are being put in roles or doing things
that they want to do more so than in roles and in spaces where they
are good at doing something. And this is a tough one because you know,
I'm a big believer in putting people, you know, increasing the number
of hours people have every week that that have them doing things they enjoy doing.
But sometimes the things that we enjoy doing and sometimes and the things that
we are good at doing, they don't always line up. What are your
thoughts about this? Yeah, I agree, I think it's a it's a
tough one because in the perfect world and how we look at things is like,
not only are you like enjoying the things you're doing, but you're also
really good at it. Right. But if that's the case, right,
like, um, then it's kind of like you should have that is like
your life, your life's body of work, whatever that thing is. Right.
I think in a lot of instances, what ends up happening, and
I've seen myself as well, is that you have somebody who is like,
I am really focused, I am really productive when I get to do this
thing because this is actually all I want to do. And and again it's
not that it's a natural strength it's just that they really enjoy doing it,
so they put much more effort into it, which then from a leadership standpoint,
you're like, well, like why would I move them or why would
I add something different to their plate? Or I know that they part of
their jobs like do this other thing, but I'm just going to have them
focus on that, because like that just makes my life easier, you know.
And so I think that that kind of that lens of looking at things,
I think when we're talking about building trust through a team, that is
where it can start to break down a little bit, as if you start
to see or feel the sense of like, well, it's because you don't
want to have like a healthy amount of dialogue with this person about it.
It's because you're not having the same standard across the board. Just because somebody
has an interest in that, it doesn't mean they should just be able to
do it. And then vice versa. Though sometimes there's people that have a
strength to something, they're naturally really really good at it, and they actually
don't want to do it, and so you have to have the same kind
of conversation in the other side of things to be like no, but I
understand, but it's also a part of your job. So it's like it's
one of those situations where I think we mix up the idea of strength and
interest, and we say that somebody's interested in something and that's a strength of
theirs versus truly taking an assessment of what the strengths naturally are and then having
conversation with everyone involved around how do we align best what works well for our
team, bringing them into that dialogue and conversation, but then making sure that
you have consistency across the expectations of the job. I have found that in
a lot of instances, when a person is really interested in something, they
enjoy doing it and they're not good at it, that in a lot of
cases is they don't have a accurate understanding of what that thing is, meaning
they're interested in it because they believe it to be something different than it actually
is. You have people out there who say I love coaching people. I
love you know, giving people feedback on what they're doing. Okay, let's
let's see how you do that well. If they're not doing it very well,
then and then you tell them what the right way is to do that,
what that entails to be able to give feedback to somebody to able to
coach them on doing something, and the reaction is I don't, I don't,
I don't want to do that. Well that that doesn't mean that they
are interested in doing something and they're not good at it. It means they're
not actually interested in doing that thing. You know, they think it's something
different than what it actually is. And a lot of times people will,
I don't want to say, lie to themselves. They just have an inaccurate
understanding of what it is. They think it's something different than what it is.
So as a leader, oftentimes you can kind of, you know,
get people more in line with the things they like doing and the things that
they are good at doing by by having these kind of clarity sessions, you
know, kind of figuring out why people want to do something if they're not
good at it, and making sure they're very clear on what that thing is.
Because if you want to leverage somebody's strengths, nothing feels better than having
a strength of your as leveraged to do something that you enjoy doing. And
by allowing people to do things poorly simply because they enjoy doing it, you're
not you're not benefiting them because one they're not building up their their resume,
they're not actually doing the thing that will help their career. And two you're
absolutely hurting the trust of your team, which says you, as a leader
put a stronger or a higher value on people doing what they want to do
versus what actually has to get done in or to get the results you want
to get done. And so what I'll ask you, Lorenzo, is have
you ever to have a conversation with an employee around this exact thing, around
making sure that they, you know, understood what something really was and then
getting a kind of a response from them that led you to believe that,
you know what, maybe they weren't quite as interested in doing that thing as
they thought they were interested in doing it. And so I want to ask
you that, but first I want to give it up towards one of our
sponsors. All Right, Lorenzo, have you ever had an employee say they
were really wanted to do something and you let them do it and it wasn't
getting done the correct way and you had to kind of level set with what
that thing actually was and then they kind of maybe backtracked a little bit and
said, Okay, this might not be for me, Yes, multiple times.
I think two times stick out to me specifically. I think in the
development space, it's typically when you have somebody who is a high performing individual
contributor that has a lot of thoughts and opinions around everyone else around them and
their ability to perform, and then providing them with an opportunity to lead,
you know, in a kind of maybe a formal way or sometimes type of
a you know, an assignment that's temporary, but say like okay, cool,
So like now what I'm gonna have you do is step back and lead
the team and be responsible for the greater productivity of everyone. And because you're
a great individual contributor to do a great job, you should be able to
teach them how to do it. And then what you find out a lot
of times it's like, oh wow, I didn't realize that was actually the
responsibility. I didn't realize how many people have so many questions about different things.
I didn't realize that when you ask people to do something a certain way,
they tend to do it the way that they want to. And so
you kind of have these aha moments where it's like okay, Like the leadership
element and the ability to lead a team is very different than being the person
who's doing the work to produce a certain outcome. I think. So that's
the first thing, and the second one is also kind of being in retail
my entire career is you always kind of have this element of like the kind
of the merchandizing, visual kind of responsibility, stocking of inventory, responsibilities that
are a part of retail stores. And sometimes there's this um maybe lack of
understanding that like when you when you work in an industry like retail, like
everybody should be able to and should always focus on helping customers, and sometimes
the tasks that you have or the role that you have is one that requires
a good amount of focus around certain tasks. With those tasks are never to
supersed taking care of a customer, um one way or another one you can,
and of course you have resources, you have peers, you can point
to them. But I think sometimes people go into those roles with this idea
of like, well, I'm just gonna like be so much more productive and
so much more efficient, and like we're just going to be responsible for what
we're responsible for, which is this thing, this pricing, this merchandising,
this this down stocking, this this fronting of product, whatever you want to
call it, these tasks, and then they get a role like that,
and you sprinkling the fact that you still have to you know, help customers
that have questions and you know, be involved with your peers around teaching them
what you're doing and what you're learning. And sometimes that becomes a thing where
it's like, well, that's a very different job or different level of responsibility
than I thought it was. Initially. I only saw it in this very
kind of small lens of the responsibility to think that I really wanted to do,
and it's like, well, yeah, that's a part of it,
but the job is much bigger than that, right right. I think there
that can be a pretty common occurrence in the retail and service industry where people
don't actually want to be in the retailer service industry and they find this kind
of like little tiny element of the job that they that they like doing that
has nothing to do with why the organization exists to begin with, which is
because there are customers who want to to talk to you or clients who want
to talk to you, and it is a retail or a service oriented job.
Every job in a retail or industry, job is a customer service job,
every single one of them. That is customer facing of course everyone.
And so if you have employees who don't want to do that, that's kind
of a cost of admission. And if you can have people who are good
at other things too, and you can put them in spaces where they can
do more of those things, but at some point in time there will there
will be a time or multiple times where everybody has to come together and do
why the business exists to begin with, which is to help customers. And
if you have people who don't like doing that, it's a disservice to your
team and to the building of trust of the team to kind of allow those
people to kind of hang on those little elements they like doing and to not
do well at that core thing. The core thing is the cake. The
other thing is the icing. And so if you're a leader and you and
you're finding people who are good at these other things, be very careful about
this. Be careful that you're not giving them or an out or looking for
a way to keep them away from the core part of your business because they're
not very good at it. By by filling their day with these other things,
because eventually those other things will run out and it will be glaringly obvious
that they are not good at the whole reason their job exists to begin with.
So definitely a reason that a lot of a lot of teams lack trust
is when leaders kind of find these different spaces for people to play that have
nothing to do with why they're supposed to be there. Absolutely and with that
it brings us to the end of this episode. This is hacking leadership.
I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have a great day.