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Flex your approach
Ask and adjust is what impact players do when targets are moving, when the situation’s changing, the environment’s changing, budgets are changing, goals are changing, needs are changing around them. While other people kind of lock on to a target and kind of keep firing away at it, the impact players are stepping back. They’re recalibrating, they’re adjusting their aim which means they hit the target over and over even when those targets are changing around them. They’re people who are adapting. They’re like the chameleons of the workplace. Rather than just operating purely from grit and focus, they’re sensing what’s going on in the environment and they’re changing their approach themselves to be able to fit in to the needs of those environments.
When we ask managers, what is it that your team members do that make your job easy, that make you actually love being a leader inside of an organization? One of the things that comes up really high on this list are learning behaviors. They’re adaptive behaviors. Asking for feedback, admitting mistakes, fixing it fast, letting go of old issues rather than, you know, continuing to debate things that they’ve already decided. It’s the kind of behavior that allows people to flex, to move forward, to be light on their feet. They want people who are learning and changing rather than who are locking on. It’s a mindset and that is to assume that you’re off target. The way that the impact players think, they finish a day of work, they wake up the next morning, and they wake up with this assumption the world changed, something shifted.
Seek guidance, not validation
When you go to get feedback or maybe better yet to think of it as guidance, thinking of it as intel that will help you recalibrate, refocus to get feedback and not about you, but about your work. So rather than saying, “How am I doing?” “Is this work getting us what we need?” Focus on your work rather than you because it’s easy to take criticism of your work, but a lot harder to take criticism about you.
Ask questions that force feedback. So rather than questions that are binary, yes/no, ask questions that are fill-in-the-blank, that really require someone to give a specific answer. “What part of this could be improved?” “What is it that you need that you’re not getting?” However, you don’t want to be that kind of colleague that is constantly needing feedback and validation: “Hey, how am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing now?” Most managers don’t want to feed somebody’s ego and this constant need for praise. However, they do have vital information that will help people improve and to calibrate and recalibrate their work. So ask for guidance on your work rather than validation on yourself.