Insights: What It Takes to Manage Well

What It Takes to Manage Well

Episode Highlights:
Delve into the three essential categories for effective management and self-regulation, differentiation, and high-level thought integrated throughout and responsive to operations.

Three Essential Categories for Effective Management

Self-Regulation:
Self-regulation is crucial for good decision-making. It involves recognizing and accepting your feelings. It means being aware of your feelings and thoughts and choosing not to act on them impulsively. Self-governance enables you to consider the impact of your actions leading to more thoughtful and beneficial outcomes. 

• Self-awareness and self-governance: This results in the ability to manage and release unpleasant emotions safely, interpret reality accurately, and maintain a sense of calm and peace. 
• Other awareness and empathy: With genuine self-awareness, you'll have heightened empathy and notice and understand others' feelings and experiences. Increased other awareness and empathy in the workplace is a sign of effective management.
• The ability to change and sustain one's habits for elevated thought and action: True self-regulation means not defining yourself by routines or limitations but continuously expanding your sense of self through learning and applying new insights to work habits. 

Differentiation:
Differentiation is the ability to see the separate within the whole and the whole within separate and to bring them together. It's the ability to do analysis and synthesis. 

• Separation of identity from in-group and out-group bias: The ability to separate your identity from the groups you belong to is crucial in management. A strong in-group and out-group identity is necessary for a sense of belonging and security. However, it's essential to maintain a balance and not let these identities define you entirely.
• Being able to hold multiple points of view without attaching yourself to them: This is a sign of effective management, allowing you to make decisions based on what's best for the collective rather than your personal biases.
• Capacity to inspire others and be inspired: If you are inspired by others, you're likely to be more inspiring yourself.
• Ability to balance encouragement and challenge: It means when people are not feeling strong, you can encourage them and build them up. When they're feeling strong but not showing their best selves, you can challenge them to step up to the plate. 
• Being able to read reality without becoming hopeless in the face of difficulty: There are a lot of challenging realities in the workplace, and people go through many difficulties. If you can read and understand these difficulties without losing hope, it's a sign of great leadership.

High-level Thought Integrated Throughout and Responsive to Operations:
It's not enough to have great ideas if no one can act on them. Frequent conflicts between departments occur when high-level thought is not integrated, usually due to lack of consultation.

• Have principle-based discussions that respect individual inputs: Listen with interest without getting defensive or allowing anyone to dominate.
• Collective decision-making that promotes honest and kind participation: Making decisions as a group where everyone is both honest and kind leads to agreed-upon solutions benefiting the whole without excluding individuals or groups.
• Ability to translate thought into action, reflect on the outcomes, and make adjustments: Changing your mind isn't a sign of weakness, but constantly changing it is. Making a decision and sticking to it despite negative outcomes is not a sign of strength.