Manager TL;DR Newsletter 📩
Get management tips, interviews, and best practices directly into your inbox – and become a better leader.
Hey fellow managers and leaders 😁
In today’s newsletter, we’re covering…
- 5 topics to cover in your next Town Hall meeting
- How to achieve “buy-in” and sell your boss on a new idea
- The C.O.R.E. template for sharing feedback
- How to navigate the “Great Resignation”
- and more…
Let’s get into it!
🚀 5 Game-changing topics for effective Town Hall meetings (16 min), “The Art of The Meeting” YouTube Series
TLDR: Town Hall meetings are a great tool for leaders to engage and motivate employees. At Fellow, Aydin Mirzaee (CEO) hosts Town Hall meetings with our entire team weekly to discuss organizational goals, recent wins, and cross-functional initiatives. In episode 1 of our new YouTube Show – The Art of the Meeting – Aydin walks us through the ONLY 5 topics you need to run engaging Town Halls. Here are the first 3
- Celebrations and good news: To ensure high energy right from the start of each meeting, we start Town Halls by introducing new team members, sharing positive customer feedback, or celebrating milestones!
- Announcements and FYIs: During this time, team members share news that affect all, or most, employees, such as product or feature changes, upcoming initiatives, and recent insights or trends.
- Presentations: Next up on the agenda is time for teams to showcase their work. Not only does this give due recognition to the presenting team members by highlighting the importance of their work, but it also helps to inform everyone in the company and facilitate company-wide support.
“Town Halls are a really great way to get people informed and also create a lot of engagement and cross chatter. But most importantly, also get the team pumped. So it should be a high energy meeting that people walk away from feeling informed, but also feeling very excited about the company mission.”
👀 With so many people quitting, don’t overlook those who stay (7 min read), Harvard Business Review
TLDR: The U.S. Department of Labor reported that during Q2 2021 a total of 11.5 million workers quit their jobs. This means that, as leaders, we’re faced with two challenges: hiring to backfill people who have left and hiring new people to support business growth. This article is a great reminder to find ways to reward and engage the folks who stay (instead of focusing all our time and attention in recruiting more people). Here are 3 steps leaders can take to best navigate the “Great Resignation”:
- Re-recruit them: Spend time to understand your teammate’s motivations and ambitions. With so much new hiring happening, identify where opportunities might exist inside the organization (even if it is outside of your team) to help them fulfill unrealized dreams.
- Reward them: This may ignite the need for a systemic look at how and what is recognized and rewarded in your company. Remember that this is not just about paying people more — research tells us the motivational effect of pay raises is short-lived. Just as important as money is how you recognize and value the contributions and impact of your people.
- Engage them: Create space for employees to step up, participate and inform the way forward. This sends the crucial message that they are trusted and valued.
“Daring to be vulnerable and to not to know it all paves the path to creating deeper engagement and loyalty from all your stakeholders: teammates, peers, colleagues, and direct reports. You lead the way by opening the door.”
✅ 8 Meeting Roles You Can Assign to Inspire Delightful Meetings (5 💡 Change management: 5 tips to achieve “buy-in” and create sustained change (6 min read), Fellow Blog
TLDR: Believe it or not, research in change management shows that 70% of all projects that seek to bring about some kind of change inside an organization fail. 70%! That’s a lot of time and money being wasted! So, what’s the solution? Before initiating any kind of change – no matter how big or small – work to ensure you have solid buy-in first, that you understand all perspectives, and that you’ve created an environment for real change to take place and last over the long term. Here are 3 practical tips to make change happen
- Secure a change sponsor: As the ResultsMap change management process teaches, long-term and sustained change inside a company requires someone at the top to “sponsor” the change, not just be its cheerleader. A sponsor is someone inside the company, usually a manager or executive, who helps communicate, manage, and be accountable for the change.
- Have an implementation plan: Remember the old adage: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. At the very least, you should be thinking about the following components and asking the following questions: Who do I need to tell about this? What are the precise details of the rollout? What are the intended results? How will we measure success?
- Seek feedback and measure results: If you start down the path of changing work tools, spaces, teams or processes, it is vital to collect feedback and measure results fairly continuously. Depending on the change you are trying to implement, this can be done in a multitude of ways including employee satisfaction surveys or even just good ol’ face-to-face feedback!
“If you take away one thing from this article, make sure it’s this: The problem you are trying to solve needs to be a real problem, felt by many people inside your organization in order for your suggested solution to have any legs. In the words of one of my favourite change management leaders and my former professor, Caroline Kealey: Everyone needs to feel the pain to buy into the solution.”
📌 [Free Template] C.O.R.E. Feedback Meeting Template
When it’s time to share positive or constructive feedback with a teammate, consider using the C.O.R.E. framework:
- Context
- Observation
- Result
- Expected next steps.
🎙 New on the Supermanagers podcast
We interview leaders from all walks of life to tease out the habits, thought patterns, and experiences that help them be extraordinary at the fine craft of management.
Episode 68: Sarah Gretczko (Executive Vice President, Chief Learning & Insights Officer at Mastercard) dives into positive reframing and explains why this skill can be used with anyone, from toddlers to business professionals.
Episode 69: David Robinson (former Commanding Officer at the United States Marine Corps) shares why managers must get laser-focused on their standards and what a leadership triad consists of.
… and that’s a wrap! We hope that the content we curated inspires you to continue growing as a leader!
If you enjoyed this issue, please share the newsletter with a colleague or friend.
👉 You can also share this newsletter on Twitter
Thanks for being part of our community,
Manuela & the Fellow.app team
