I Don’t Have Time for This!

Be honest, how many times have you muttered “I don’t have time for this!” under your breath, or even said it directly to someone on your team as you were showing them how to perform a task one more time? To be completely transparent with you, I’m not even going to try to count the times I’ve said. For that matter, I don’t think I can count high even to reach the number of times I’ve been responsible for someone else saying it…

And in most of the cases where we’ve each felt that way, how often would it have been easier to have that person we’re training step aside and watch while we get the job done ourselves? If you’ve read more than a few of these posts, you know that’s one of those rhetorical questions! It’s almost always easier to have the team member step aside, or in some cases gently nudge them aside, so we can get the task knocked out and get back to what we were involved in. If they’d only just pay attention, right?

In the last post, I asked you “Why is leadership development important?” If the scenario I just walked you through struck even the slightest cord with you, I’m guessing you’re tracking with me on the first reason I’ll share in response to that question.

As outstanding individual contributors, we accomplished great results by working hard, doing whatever was required, and making things happen when others wouldn’t. That kind of drive and initiative likely played a large part in earning promotions to supervise and manage those same tasks we had performed so well! But the challenge that comes with moving from a role where we’re high performing individual contributors into a role where we need to achieve similar results through a team of people is that it’s a bit unreasonable to expect every single team member to perform at that same level or even do things just how we’d always done them… 

Forgive me here as I insert a word that can be a form of profanity to many of my DRIVEN friends: PATIENCE…

Why is leadership development important? Being a great doer doesn’t always require much patience! In fact, we often get praised and rewarded for not being patient as we push through any barrier in front of us in order to get things done! But that same drive that earned us praise as an individual contributor can quickly alienate the team we’re responsible for leading if we don’t learn how to use it appropriately, and include a healthy dose of patience! And this almost always requires a change in how we think.

It also requires us to be very intentional about the way we communicate and interact with the team we’re leading. We’ll dig into that in the next post. But until then, I’ll share that this idea of patience isn’t something just me or you have to fight through. In fact, we’ve seen so many people struggle with it, and in so many different industries, it’s one of the issues we address in Navigating Leadership Roadblocks as well as in our Emerging Leader Development course. If you’re not familiar with either, you can catch a complimentary webinar on Navigating Leadership Roadblocks this Friday at 2:30p EST...