Clearview® Performance Systems brings you ... ® ... a Culture of Results & Engagement®
Here's the next in our series of weekly managerial TIPS (Techniques, Insights, and Practical Solutions)
to help you better engage your team in the activities that lead to higher performance.
CORE Bites Issue #46
With all the consulting we do in succession practices to help align and accelerate the growth of high-potentials, I've come to discover that many people believe "help" is a 4-letter word. Putting aside the fact that—technically—it is, what I'm referring to is many aspiring high-potentials in the contemporary workplace have this notion that asking for help is tantamount to admitting a limitation; a weakness; even failure.
The irony here is most (all) wise managers don't expect their employees to know everything. But, and here's the irony, somehow these same employees have come to the conclusion that they always need to project—with confidence and certainty—that they are fully competent and, by consequence, that they shouldn't ask questions for fear that someone might interpret that as a sign of weakness.
I'm going to start this issue of CORE Bites with a guiding principle I believe we could all value from and it's a quote attributed to Confucius, but re-quoted by dozens of others:
"If you're the smartest person in the room ...
you're in the wrong room."
If you take this literally (and you should!), you should always be on the lookout for those "rooms" where you'll find wiser and more experienced people in some area where you need Breadth or Depth Learning (BDL). I know many organizations have formal mentoring programs, but what that typically conjures up is some formal, long-term arrangement with a solitary individual. Instead, I'd like to introduce you to Competency-Explicit Mentoring. This form of mentoring is surgically-precise because it focuses on a single competency that you need to learn and is designed to be a short-term, Grow-and-Go, learning model.
The HVAs listed below focus on your career-enhancing Breadth Learning and on your productivity-enhancing Depth Learning. Each email template is crafted for a specific type of competency-explicit learning. The scripts give you access to a greater number of SMEs because not everyone has the bandwidth (or appetite) for a long-term commitment while (almost) everyone will help you if they know it's short-term and specific.
There's no shame in admitting "Hey! I need help." In fact, there's real VALUE derived from saying these words to some of the Sages around you!
I'd love to hear how these HVAs work for you!
Neil Dempster, PhD, MBA
RESULTant™ and Behavioral Engineer
"We’re here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark."
— Whoopi Goldberg —