CAREER-VIEW MIRROR - biographies of colleagues in the automotive and mobility industries.
CAREER-VIEW MIRROR - biographies of colleagues in the automotive and mobility industries.
Side Mirror: Leverage one to ones to enable Fulfilling Performance
In this Side Mirror I address the topic of one to ones and demonstrate how by looking at them through the lens of Fulfilling Performance we can make them valuable and effective for the individual, their manager and the organisation which is, let’s not forget, paying their salaries.
I refer to the following additional resources:
Release the handbrake! The Fulfilling Performance Hub.
Our weekly newsletter where I write about how to enable Fulfilling Performance for yourself and those you lead and care about.
Previous CAREER-VIEW MIRROR episodes
#074 The hidden costs of hybrid working.
#129 Leading from behind.
#132 Purpose and Paradigms of Effective Delegation
#133 Delegating with the Guiding Principles of Fulfilling Performance
#134 Coaching for Managers
Specific posts from Release the handbrake! relevant to this episode.
Four Diagnostic Questions
About Andy
I'm an experienced business leader and a passionate developer of people in the automotive finance industry, internationally.
During over twenty five years, I have played a key role in developing businesses including Alphabet UK, BMW Corporate Finance UK, BMW Financial Services Singapore, BMW Financial Services New Zealand and Tesla Financial Services UK.
At the same time, I have coached individuals and delivered leadership development programmes in 17 countries across Asia, Europe and North America.
I started Aquilae in 2016 to enable “Fulfilling Performance” in the mobility industry, internationally.
Connect with Andy
LinkedIn: Andy Follows
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk
Join a guided peer mentoring team: Aquilae Academy
Thank you to our sponsors:
ASKE Consulting
Email: hello@askeconsulting.co.uk
Aquilae
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk
Episode Directory on Instagram @careerviewmirror
If you enjoy listening to our guests career stories, please follow CAREER-VIEW MIRROR in your podcast app.
Episode recorded on 2 July, 2024.
I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key Florida.
Sherene Redelinghuys:I'm coming from Bangkok in Thailand,
Daniel van Treeck:Prague in the Czech Republic,
Osman Abdelmoneim:Cairo in Egypt,
Holger Drott:Auckland, New Zealand,
Shannon Faulkner:London, England.
Andy Follows:Welcome to CAREER-VIEW MIRROR, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host, Andy Follows. Hello, listeners, and welcome to this Side Mirror episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR. If you're a regular listener, thank you and welcome back. You'll be aware that most of our episodes feature interviews with people with a link to the automotive industry who kindly share their life and career journeys with us. We celebrate their careers, listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. From time to time, we also publish these Side Mirror episodes to introduce concepts, tools and experts to help you enable Fulfilling Performance. If you're listening for the first time, Hello, I'm Andy Follows. I help business owners and executives to enable Fulfilling Performance for themselves and those they lead and care about. If you'd like to know more about Fulfilling Performance, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. In it you'll find easily digestible ideas on how to increase levels of performance and fulfillment for yourself and those you lead and care about. Go to Andyfollows.substack.com, or use the link in the show notes to this episode. If you listen to podcasts like CAREER-VIEW MIRROR, I'm guessing that you recognize you're gonna learn from other people. When I'm not recording these conversations with inspiring individuals, you'll find me facilitating guided peer mentoring teams in our Aquilae Academy, we'd bring together small groups of business owners and senior leaders from non competing organizations and create a virtual environment in which they can get to know and trust each other and share and support each other with their current challenges. If that sounds interesting, email academy@aquilae.co.uk and we'll send you more details. You'll find that address in the show notes to this episode. During one of our recent Academy sessions, a CEO shared a challenge he is facing. Some of his second line leaders are not having regular one to ones with the team members who report to them. We discussed their stated reasons for this and also some of the potential underlying causes which included pressure for all hours to be billable to a client, the lack of appreciation of the need for and value of one to ones, and differing personality types, leadership styles and skill sets that lend themselves or don't to these types of conversations. It got me thinking how the Fulfilling Performance framework could help them and these leaders to better understand why one to ones are so important, and provide them with a practical methodology with which to approach them. Let me take a moment to tell you about our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by ASKE Consulting who are experts in Executive Search, Resourcing Solutions and Talent Management across all sectors of the automotive industry in the UK and Europe. I’ve known them for almost 20 years, and I can think of no more fitting sponsor for CAREER-VIEW MIRROR. They're the business we go to at Aquilae when we're looking for talent for our clients and for projects that we're working on. ASKE was founded by Andrew McMillan whose own automotive career includes board level positions with car brands and leasing companies. All ASKE consultants have extensive client-side experience which means they bring valuable insight and perspective for both their employer and candidate customers. My earliest experience of working with Andrew was in 2004 when he helped me hire Regional Managers for my leasing sales team at Alphabet. More recently, when Aquilae was helping a US client to establish a car subscription business, ASKE Consulting was alongside us helping us to develop our people strategy and identify and bring on board suitable talent. Clients we've referred to ASKE have had an equally positive experience. Andrew and the team at ASKE are genuinely interested in the long-term outcomes for you and the people they place with you. They even offer the reassurance of a 2-year performance guarantee which means they have‘skin in the game’ when working with you. If you're keen to secure the most talented and high potential people to accelerate your business and gain competitive advantage, do get in touch with them and let them know I sent you. You can email Andrew and the team at hello@askeconsulting.co.uk or check out their website for more details and more client feedback at www.askeconsulting.co.uk . ASKE is spelt A S K E You’ll find these contact details in the shownotes for this episode. Ok, let’s get back to our episode. I recognize that not everyone loves one to ones like I do. You might be thinking, I hire good people, I shouldn't have to micromanage them. And I don't want to. At one relatively early stage of my career, I was leading a rapidly growing sales team, I found myself responsible for 13 direct reports all field based, and eight of them were brand new to the organization. My recent guest, Paul Flitter, said, "Experience is something you get just after you need it." I realized later than was ideal that I had assumed that because they'd come from doing similar roles in competitor organizations in the industry, that they'd know what to do in their new jobs without me having to get too involved. I underestimated the extent of the knowledge, experience and understanding of the organizational culture that I'd picked up during the years I'd already been with the company. This was context they simply didn't have. I've spoken about my preference for empowering individuals and leading with a light touch before in Episode 129, Leading from behind. At this time, as a result of my misconceptions, I took that approach too far. As a result, some potentially good performers who would have benefited from closer attention missed out on additional support, and some let's call them less good hires were able to go undetected for longer than they should have done. My mistake. and this past experience taught me how much people learn from working closely alongside others in an organization, it may be why I'm cautious about our current swing towards more people working from home more of the time, I talk more about that in Episode 74, The hidden costs of hybrid working. Coming back to the topic of one to ones, I've met managers who just treat them as an opportunity to check progress on work projects, and others who deliberately don't talk about work projects at all during these sessions. I've met team members who are frustrated that they don't get consistent one to one time with their manager, and others who don't see the point in them and claim they don't need them, and will prefer not to have them at all. I've met fewer people who've been given a really good explanation of why we have one to ones and how leaders and team members might go about them to make sure they are the mutually beneficial exchange that they should and can be. In this Side Mirror. I want to address the topic of one to ones and demonstrate how by looking at them through the lens of Fulfilling Performance, we can make them valuable and effective for the individual, their manager and the organization, which is let's not forget paying their salaries. I've spoken before about Fulfilling Performance. So I now write about it weekly at Andy follows.substack.com. In case this is the first time you've heard about it, I'll give you a very quick summary here so that the rest of this episode makes sense. And I encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter to learn more. Fulfilling performance describes the outcome when people get to use as much of their talent, intelligence, creativity, capability and resourcefulness as possible. They perform at their highest level, they continue to grow, and they experience a sense of fulfillment from doing so that energizes them to be great partners, parents and human beings. The way we enable it is to pay attention to each of the four fundamental factors that when combined with our effort contribute to us performing at a high level and experiencing fulfillment from doing so. The four fundamental factors are Clarity, Capability, Culture, and Purpose so that you and I both thinking along the same lines, when I use those labels, we have a question for each that clarifies what it means in the context of Fulfilling Performance. We call those questions are Four Diagnostic Questions and they are as
follows: Clarity:How clear are you about what you're supposed to be doing and how you're performing against those
expectations? Capability:How well equipped are you in terms of knowledge, skills, experience, mindset and resources to perform at a high level? Culture: How is the behavior of the people around you at work and at home supporting you to perform at a high level? Purpose: How much does it mean to you what you're doing? The questions help us to identify the handbrakes that are causing friction and preventing us or those we lead and care about from performing at a higher level. When we strengthen each of these four fundamentals, we're taking steps to enable Fulfilling Performance. One to ones are one of the tools we have to strengthen these fundamentals. When we look at them from this perspective, one to ones are not optional. They're one of our most effective interventions for paying attention to too, and developing team members so that we produce the results we're aiming for in a way that also grows the people. When we keep in mind the four fundamental factors that contribute to
Fulfilling Performance:Clarity, Capability, Culture and Purpose, and the four diagnostic questions, they guide us to include and explore topics that relate to the performance of the individual. Next time you have a one to one, I encourage you to approach it with the four diagnostic questions front of mind. I'll put a link to my post about them in the show notes to this episode. Fulfilling Performance recognizes that an individual's results depend on more than how good they are at something and how hard they try. There are factors outside of their control and potentially within yours that will determine the ultimate level of their success in any given endeavor. Explore your team members current situation with regard to each of the diagnostic questions, they will help you to consider all the elements that affect your team members ability to perform well in their role. Identify the factors that appear to be causing the most friction, and that are potentially acting as handbrakes to performance. Prioritize those that are within the control of you and your team member, and which, if addressed are likely to deliver the greatest uplift in performance and agree a plan for addressing them. Where the agreed actions fall more appropriately to your team member to tackle rather than you, you'll find useful practical guidance in Episode 132 Purpose and paradigms of effective delegation, Episode 133, Delegating with the guiding principles of Fulfilling Performance, and episode 134 Coaching for managers. We'll put links to all three of those episodes in the show notes to this episode, along with the link to Release the handbrake! where I write all about how to enable Fulfilling Performance for yourself and those you lead and care about. You've been listening to CAREER-VIEW MIRROR with me, Andy Follows. If you're not already a fan of one to ones, I hope that I may have given you some cause to reconsider their value and the part they play in leadership. If you can see the benefit of one to ones, and were looking for a more structured way to approach them. I hope that you find the Four Diagnostic Questions give you just that. If you find this helpful do take a look at Release the handbrake! - the Fulfilling Performance Hub is a resource and virtual community designed to help you enable Fulfilling Performance. Go to Andyfollows.substack.com, or use the link in the show notes to this episode. If you enjoy listening to our episodes, please could you do me a huge favor and share them with someone you lead parent or mentor or a friend do you think will also appreciate them? Thank you to our sponsors for this episode ASKE Consulting and Aquilae. And thank you to the CAREER-VIEW MIRROR team without whom we would not be able to share our guests' life and career stories and publish these Side Mirror episodes. And above all, thank you to you for listening.
Osman:No matter how hard you try. No matter how hard working you are, you're never going to be able to do it on your own. It's just not possible.
Paul Harris:You know, at the end of the day, you're steering your own destiny. So if it's not happening for you, and you're not seeing what you want out there, then go out there and connect.
Sherene Redelinghuys:Don't rely on others. You you have to do it yourself. You have to take control.
Rupert Pontin:If you've got an idea if you've got a thought about something that might be successful, if you've got a passion to do something yourself, but you just haven't quite got there, do it.
Tom Stepanchak:Take a risk. Take a chance stick your neck out what's the worst that can happen? You fall down? Okay, you pick yourself up and you try again.