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Setting your Out of Office is often the last thing you do before you shut the laptop for your vacation. It’s that satisfying final click of the mouse which signifies it’s time to relax. It also might be something which undermines a lot of the other good work you’re doing as a manager.
Perhaps it looks a bit like this.
‘Thank you for your message. I am out of the office until [date]. I will be checking my emails periodically but for anything urgent please contact [team member] or [team member].’
It’s probably the one that you’ve reactivated from the last holiday you took. Or something you copied and pasted from your boss.
It’s also not great.
Here’s some of the potential issues:
To be clear, there are a small number of roles and/or circumstances which require leaders to be online when they’re on vacation. But these are pretty specific. The vast majority of people working whilst on vacation do so due to either a poor working culture, lack of adequate delegation, or a misguided sense of their own importance. Or all of the above.
So when you’re heading out on vacation this summer, just pause to think about what your out-of-office arrangements say about you as a manager. They may matter more than you think.
When giving feedback, you may have been told to ‘Praise in Public and Criticize in Private’. This isn’t bad advice, it’s just not the whole story.
To quickly recap, the reason for this advice is:
*Some people hate being praised in public and find it deeply awkward. If you don’t know this about each of your team members, talk to them about how they like to receive recognition for good work in your next one-on-one.
So far, so good. But we wanted to talk about the importance of also praising in private.
When you credit someone in public, there’s often not the opportunity to go in-depth into the reasons why their performance was so impressive. If it’s in a team meeting, there’s other things to discuss, and/or it can also feel excessive to focus on one person for too long. This often leads to praise like:
‘“Congratulations on closing that big new client!”
“Thanks for jumping in and helping Lisa with her question on Slack this morning.”
“I saw that you shipped Feature X on time - way to go!”
It’s general, which provides team members with recognition for their work but doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to build on it.
This is why we’d encourage you to also praise in private. Here you can get into the details of someone’s impact, and what you can do in the future to build on that strength. This makes sure your team members get the most out of the learning opportunity.
This practice is particularly important for high-performers, where you’ll spend far more time honing their strengths rather than discussing their weaknesses.
If you’re interested in learning more on this topic, those examples above are from a similar piece on Positive Feedback by engineering leader Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
You might be fortunate enough to live in a country where it feels like the worst of the health crisis is over. Vaccination rates are improving, public spaces are opening up, and you’re able to live and work with greater freedom again.
In this context, a recent column by Alexandra Samuel on ‘How Working From Home has Changed Employees’ argues for managers having reflective conversations with their team members on what they’ve learned.
The pandemic affected people’s relationships with their work in profound and unexpected ways. It’s part of what’s led to the incredible increase in employees now looking to switch jobs. But even if your team members aren’t looking to do something that drastic, they have likely realised things about their working lives, both positive and negative, which you should be aware of as their manager.
You might already cover these topics in your one-on-one meetings, but if not, it may be worth thinking about how you can organise a conversation to relect on the past 18 months.
Some of the areas Samuel mentions are:
‘There really is a silver bullet to running a culture of high performance and high development. It's always the manager.’
So said Gallup recently, after decades of work and over 100 million employee interviews.
Aw, thanks guys.
We raise this for two reasons.
First, because if you don’t work in a place which values people management, it can be easy to forget that you do one of the most important and impactful roles in your organisation. We just wanted to remind you of that, and encourage you to keep working at it. Your team and your company (eventually, maybe) will thank you.
Second, the article doesn’t go into much detail on why, but the specific attribute that Gallup found in the most effective managers was a style which focussed on coaching, rather than direction or administration. It’s another reminder to make sure your team members are receiving regular feedback and broader guidance on developing their careers.
Gallup recommends that team members should be receiving at least one coaching opportunity a week. One opportunity where they receive some advice and guidance on how to improve.
This sounds like the bare minimum to us. Are your team members getting that?
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