Bonus Episode 14: Becoming People Focused

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Hi, this is Stephen McLain of the finance leader podcast. This is bonus episode number 14. This week I am sharing an encore episode from Season number two, Episode Number 16. about becoming more people focused adapting to a people focus leadership style will create a dynamic environment where you develop and empower your team. Instead of only trying to complete items off your to do list. There are three significant reasons to change your leadership style from being task focused to becoming people focused. Number one, you cannot do the work alone, you need a well developed team. Number two productivity effectiveness will increase as your team feels more appreciated and involved. And number three, the business of leadership is always to make others better.

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Next week I am sharing Episode 34 which is about how we as finance and accounting professionals can best support the strategy how are we discussing metrics, allocation of resources, achieving results and communication? Have a great week. Please enjoy this encore episode. Thank you.

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Today we are talking about becoming a more people oriented leader.

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We can usually take two approaches either be task oriented or people oriented. In the finance and accounting profession, we tend to be more task focused because we usually buried in requirements always struggling to keep up with everything we are being asked to do. Becoming people oriented is a long term strategy that can definitely pay huge for you and your team in the long run. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. This is episode number 16. And today we're going to talk about becoming more people oriented instead of just task oriented.

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Bill Bradley, who is a former NBA player, and senator from New Jersey said, leadership is unlocking people's potential to become better, I believe we tend to be a little more task oriented in finance and accounting, instead of people focused now I'm asking you all as managers, future managers, those who are in senior leadership positions, to start to change your focus around just the tasks, but also to become more people focused to be more focused around the development of your team, we talked about tasks. Every day, all day long.

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We talked about what needs to get done what needs to get done today, what needs to get done tomorrow, what needs to get done at the end of the week, and at the end of the month, we get tied around our monthly closed process. And then we continue to get more requirements, even during monthly close. Well, we still have all of our usual requirements reports that we do on a continual basis, the tasks never end. And they're not going to end. However, I want you to change your focus, instead of just thinking about that task.

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And the importance of that task.

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Is that how do you train your team? How do you train your team to be better? How do you train your team to take on a greater responsibility. That's the responsibility of leaders. Now it comes from a few techniques that we can use, of course, and we need to buy time for ourselves. As we are continuing to deal with all the tasks that come in. And all the requests for information that come in, it comes down to his task prioritization and protecting the team at the same time, we need to focus on the most important tasks first, and then push off all the other ones that are good to know, you know, great to know if we need it. But sometimes when tasks come down, we have a hard time to distinguish between what is important right now. And what can wait. And that's when ever that I work on tasks. And if somebody asked me to do something, I always ask when do you need to get it done, how important it is, I always ask a few leading questions to kind of feel out how important this task that I'm being asked to do or something that needs to get done, and kind of gauge it to the other tasks that I have that I'm working on. To make sure that I'm prioritizing the most important tasks. My most important effort comes first in everything else that can wait. I put it at the bottom of the list and I don't waste my time with it until it becomes important again. Now sometimes the task or request for information that comes to you may be very important to a particular person, but maybe not very important to the overall organization and when we're working on our tasks. in finance and accounting for the organization, we need to continue to focus on the most important tasks to get done today. That's, of course, a discussion around task prioritization, that helps you by a little time, so you're not continually focused on things that are not important because you have to get the most important tasks done. But I'm also asking you build in some time to develop your team, because we want to make our teams better, we want to make our teammates better, we want to grow them, and get them ready for bigger and greater responsibility. This is a long term strategy. We are continually focused with tasks that need to be done today and tomorrow. And by the end of the week, I know that I've been there, I completely understand the struggle that all of you as managers, as finance and accounting leaders have out there, because the tasks and requests for information never stop. However, we need to continually try to find time to have discussions that lead to development to lead to making our teammates better. And part of that is getting our own time and our own tasks in order and the things that we do in order.

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As leaders, you need to be deliberate about scheduling, training time and development time, and talking with your teammates, and seeing how you can find a way to grow them to be a little bit better person, tomorrow, and next week and several months from now, and to see the training gaps that they have in the skill gaps that they have, and start to build a training plan in a developmental plan that fits to their needs.

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Now let's go back again, with the struggle of our workload.

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Now I talked again, about monthly close, which can of course take half of each month away, along with, you know, multiple requests of information that come from leadership every day. Now, I know the monthly close is literally the Mount Everest of challenges, because you're trying to figure out what happened, and explain to senior leaders what happened. And it really never ends, and often creates more requirements for you, because something may have happened in the business cycle last month, or even the previous month. And that, of course, creates a need to know from the senior leaders. And of course, it's there every right to know or ask that question about what happened within the business. So you continually get these requests. And you have to battle it with your own scheduling and timeline and your own personal life and your own need for development. But once you as manager, and as leader of your team, start to prioritize your own tasks, start clearing out things that you don't need to do, start delegating a little bit more clearing up your space, and start to build in some time for you to start thinking and start planning. And start focusing how and how you can make each one of your teammates just a little bit better, it will help you in the long run.

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Now building trust is key. We talked about prioritizing tasks and issuing out tasks. And one of the things about building trust is you start to give up a little bit of control, you can still keep people accountable.

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But you start to give out a little bit more of the things that you're doing, you may be holding on to a lot of very important tasks yourself. That means you're busy, you're an intern, which means you're not focused on your team start to delegate out some of those very important tasks that you have that you've been keeping close hold to yourself. And then that way, you can use one of these very important tasks, to develop someone who's ready, who's ready to go to that next step, who's ready to take on a little bit more responsibility, prioritize and issue out tasks. And then you let your team get it done, always be available, and give very clear and very direct guidance and clear communication in order to help them complete their task and be available when they have questions. Now let's talk a little bit about communication.

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It's about giving clear, very concise direction to your team and never leaving any kind of ambiguity becoming more transparent. And also want you to take a little bit more risk in understanding and knowing your teammates a little bit more. You know, don't be afraid to ask about their families.

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Don't be afraid to ask what they do in their off time. I think that it's essential and important to become a little bit more involved in our teammates lives, even when they leave the office. Now some people may be very uncomfortable doing this.

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Some people may be very uncomfortable asking these kind of questions and then your team members may be very you're uncomfortable because they really don't know about what you're going to do with this information. But this really comes back to my military background for those of you who don't be very well showing that genuine concern for your teammates when they leave the office, because it's not just about the tasks that we're doing today and tomorrow, and the rest of the week. And everything that affects them outside of the office is going to affect them inside the office. Now let's talk about training and developing our team. Now, some people are very concerned that when they start training and developing their team members, that they may go find now some additional opportunities outside the team outside the organization. But that doesn't matter. Our job is to train and develop our team, train and develop our team members to become better today and better tomorrow, and be able to take on more responsibility to another team or to another organization.

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Our job is to make our teammates better. Now, expectations are still important. And we need to make sure when we become more people oriented, that we don't blur that line between leader and team member or subordinate if you want to use that term.

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Sometimes managers when they change their focus around becoming more task oriented to becoming more people oriented, they may actually go a little too far. And then they become too chummy. And then when you become too chummy, then you can't really hold your teammates accountable anymore. So we need to continue have that focus of development, growing, holding people accountable, still holding them accountable for those tasks. But give them a little bit more control. Give clear and concise guidance become make sure you are available for when questions come up. And we also want to make sure that we have this very long term approach to getting our team members prepared and trained and ready to take on even more challenging tasks down the road. I want you to continue. empower your team to do great things, we still give of course great direction, and we become available to our team, when you do start to embrace and start to work on becoming a more people oriented leader. It's really about energizing your team members, and you make them feel more appreciated for the work that they do. You kind of highlight that the benefits of becoming more people oriented, then you bridge that relationship between your team members and the company. And it becomes a more effective relationship more effective effort once we start to see more successful than the company because that your team members have been taken on more that greater responsibility for the company's success. Now that I've given you an introduction as to why I believe that you need to be more people oriented versus task oriented. I want to give you three solid reasons of why becoming people oriented is best. And this will be your big takeaway for this episode.

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Number one is that you can't get the work done alone, you need a well developed team, you need a team to make a positive impact for the organization. And then as you bring your team into more, you can accomplish bigger tasks to for the organization.

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Number two is that the productivity and effectiveness will increase as your team feels more appreciated and more involved, you will grow loyalty and a greater commitment to the work, your team skills and confidence will continue to grow and your team will accomplish more. And then the third reason is that the business of leadership is to make others better. Our primary job is to develop our team, alright for when that I want you to focus on today, I would love to inspire at least one team manager that's out there to take a bold move to look at the long term and start to change the focus away from being task oriented to people oriented.

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We're definitely task oriented in finance and accounting. And I understand that we get lots of tasks. And we have to manage those and we have to meet requirements and we have to meet deadlines wants you to continue to prioritize tasks and get control around those requests.

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Start to hand off higher level tasks to team members. Instead of you holding on to them. Start to take a little bit off your plate and give it to some team members that you can trust that you can get it done. And it'll make them even better and you have to change your risk aversion needs to improve a little Can you deal with less than perfect performance in the short term on a tough task.

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While your team members are being trained to take on those tough tasks. Continue to communicate with your boss about what you are doing. Get by him, talk to them about what you're doing. Talk to them that you are being focused on development and getting your teammates better and then maybe Your boss can give you a little bit of room.

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So that in case that the performance isn't ideal, or if there's some rework that needs to be done, then it's okay. Now continue to work and continue to get that buy in from your boss so that in the long run, your team will improve, communicate with your team on what you're trying to do tell them that you want to develop them. And we're going to be investing some time and some effort into giving them some additional opportunities to grow and to develop, I want you to develop some training during the week. And during the month around critical skills, focus on some higher level skills, relationship building influence public speaking how to brief a senior leader communication, all these tasks are important as you grow in the ranks as you go and develop. And as you rise from individual contributor to manager up to a director and to a VP level and beyond push your team to improve the much needed skills for the next level. And I want you to put all of these training and all of these opportunities on each person's individual development plan wants you to build out some goals and objectives around the higher level tasks that you're asking them to do. And then to record progress and record additional training and additional development that you would like your team to do. And it's a continuous cycle, you identify you assess what needs to be done, you train, you continue to work on the things you need to work on, you schedule additional training you continually assess, and then you add in additional training as required to keep working on those skills. All right, in this episode, we talked about becoming a more people oriented leader, I want to leave you with a few statistics. Now the predictive index conducted a survey in 2019, around managers and employee expectations. And there's a few things I want to talk about around the question that they asked How frequently do employees meet with their managers. And by the way, the survey was to a little over 1000 employees across 13 different industries. 14% of employees said that they meet with their manager daily 38% of employees said that they meet with their manager weekly, and just a little over 20% of employees meet with their manager monthly.

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So I would take from this is that we are not meeting and speaking and talking with our teammates enough, I would like to see you meeting with your teammates at least twice a month, once a week is great. If you can do that, I think once a week would really set your teammates up with success. And you can talk about the things that they're trying to do some guidance that they may need. You can even talk about those personal things that they may want to bring up. Or you may want to talk a little bit about if they feel comfortable. If you feel comfortable. I think it's a win win. Some people don't like to share that information. But the point is from this from the results from the predictive index is that we need to be meeting with our teammates just a little bit more than what the statistics have shown and what the study have shown. All right, next week's episode, we're gonna talk about taking a little bit more risk in our career and with our team.

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And I believe this is a good fit in with developing our teammates. Because as you develop your teammates, and you think about the long term, you need to be taking a little bit more risk with your team, we're also going to be talking about taking a little bit more risk in our own careers. That means that we got to step out of our comfort zone and do something that maybe we're not quite comfortable doing. We might take on a project or develop a skill that we need to develop, we need to talk about communication, we need to do a little bit more public speaking, or we need to work on our presentation skills, or some kind of other skill that grows us because we need to be thinking about the next level for us to as leaders and what's our career going to be. So we're going to talk about risk risk aversion, and trying to build and develop a little bit more risk into our leadership and a little bit more risk into our own career. All right, hope you enjoyed the finance leader Podcast. I am dedicated to helping you grow your leadership. Hope you enjoyed the show today. You can get this episode wherever you find podcasts. Until next time, you can check out more resources at Stephen McLain calm and sign up for my updates so you don't miss an episode of the show. I'll go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you

Bonus Episode 14: Becoming People Focused

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