| When it's working well, leadership is a partnership between two people (manager and direct report) who work together to achieve common goals. When that occurs, both leader and follower influence each other. Leadership shifts back and forth between them, depending on the task at hand. Both people play a role in determining how things get done and both people have a responsibility to make the relationship strong and successful.
But what do you do if your manager—despite his or her best intentions—is still not meeting your needs? What if you need more from him or her in terms of direction and support to do your job well? Is there anything that you can do? The answer is yes. You can become a self-leader—and it's not as subversive as it sounds. Self-leadership, when it is applied within the context of The Ken Blanchard Companies Situational Leadership® II Model, is simply the direct report's half of the model. Becoming a Situational Self Leader means meeting your immediate manager at least halfway in your relationship to establish the type of productive partnership that gets work done in a way that is satisfying to both of you. It means understanding your role in asking for what you need, correctly identifying it, and developing a way to ask for direction and support that maintains trust and esteem.
The Direct Reports' Role in Asking for What They Need
The old days of command-and-control managers are no longer effective. One person doing all of the thinking for 7, 10, or 15 direct reports does not meet the needs of customers the way it once did. One brain directing 15 pairs of hands is simply not enough brains to get the job done.
The truth is that most bosses today can no longer play the traditional role of telling people what, when, and how to do everything. Managers just don't have time, and in many cases, their people know more about the work than they do. More than ever before, companies today are relying on empowered individuals to get the job done.
Today everyone needs to be engaged in serving the customer. That's because customers do not want to hear that people need to “check with their manager.” Customers are more demanding than that. They want the frontline person standing in front of them to meet their needs—and meet them now.
That requires a whole different mind set on the part of frontline employees. Instead of delaying service by checking with a manager, frontline service personnel need to be able to act on behalf of the company to get the job done. They also have to identify what they need and be able to ask for it in a non-threatening way.
Identifying What You Need
For organizations to thrive, everyone in the organization needs to be able to identify what they need from their immediate manager. The only problem is if you don't have a model for expressing this need in a way that both you and your manager understand, asking for help can seem a little bit like whining or even worse, incompetence.
This, of course, gets in the way of asking for help because an employee certainly doesn't want to be known as an incompetent whiner. To address this, both employees and their managers need to create a way to talk about direction and support needs in a way that avoids both of these situations. That's where Situational Leadership® II training comes in handy. Because Situational Leadership® II is a research-based model that explains the development needs that all people go through—it elevates direction and support conversations to a level beyond just an individual's immediate needs. It creates a framework where employees can feel safe asking for the help they need. Direct reports are not seen as needy when this is understood. Instead, they are seen as proactive employees taking the initiative to get the direction and support they need to better serve customers and achieve the goals they have at work. Let's review the model quickly to see how it helps managers and employees be more effective.
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