Hey fellow managers and leaders,
Welcome to Issue 21 of the Manager TLDR.
Here are four articles to help you start the week feeling energized and inspired to be a positive influence for your team:
🧘♀️ 4 ways you can support your team’s mental health right now
TLDR: According to a recent study, 69% of employees say that the COVID-19 crisis has been the most stressful time of their career. Here are four things you can do to support your team’s wellbeing:
- Reduce the stigma around mental health by talking about it openly.
- Encourage your team to maintain work-life balance and take days off.
- Have conversations around productivity and expectations.
- Create psychological safety by asking your team for feedback.
👀 9 types of meetings every manager needs (and how to get them right)
TLDR: As a team lead, you run a variety of meetings to check-in with your team, make progress on projects, and brainstorm ideas. If you’re spending so much time on meetings already, why not spend a couple of minutes learning how to improve them? This post summarizes best practices to run project kickoffs, retrospective meetings, one-on-ones, and more.
👏 You’re the manager! Here’s how to spend your first 30 days
TLDR: Whether you got a promotion or joined a completely new organization, this is a list of things you should do in order to make a great first impression:
- Understand the business mission.
- Read recent meeting minutes.
- Build relationships with your counterparts.
- Get to know your direct reports through weekly 1-on-1s.
🎙 How to coach your team to success
TLDR: In this episode of the Supermanagers podcast, Lara Hogan (author of Resilient Management) shares best practices to understand your team’s core needs and create predictability in times of uncertainty. Here are some of our favourite takeaways from this interview:
1 The difference between mentorship and coaching
“Mentorship is sharing your perspective, sharing what you’ve seen work or not work, suggesting if there is something that they could try. Weirdly, that doesn’t help people grow at all, it helps people get unblocked, and it helps people get onboarded.”
“Coaching is all about giving, creating the space and the environment for this other person to connect their own dots, helping them figure out what they should do.”
2 Understanding what motivates each employee
“The biggest mistake for me was assuming that everybody was like me. Obviously, we’re all different humans with unique personalities and ideas and needs. And a hard lesson learned was not just to apply what I would want on to other people.”
3 The psychological importance of visible progress
“One thing that I’ve learned since I wrote Resilient Management is that our brains are wired to need socially visible progress, in order to feel any sense of success. But so much of management work is behind closed doors. I try to help folks figure out: How can I take the work that I’m doing and make it slightly more socially visible, in a safe way?’”
