#032 Leadership Challenges

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I am sharing three of the most common challenges new leaders will face when taking over a new leadership position. It is my experience that very little people talk about these three management tasks but better understanding of these will lead to better control and ability to harness your best strengths. I hope through this episode, you will better at identifying these leadership struggles, in yourself or others, and be able to correct course. The management of these three vital aspects are crucial in allowing you to do your very best work.

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Key Takeaways

• New leaders face three common challenges when taking over a position that few people talk about openly.
• Learn to spot these leadership struggles in yourself and others so you can correct course early.
• Managing these areas well is what lets you do your best work and play to your strengths.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport Science, Strength and Conditioning, High Performance Coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show.

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[00:02:20] Hey everybody, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. On this episode, I want to discuss some of the hidden things that people don't necessarily inform you about when it comes to taking over a leadership position. And I want to discuss three challenges that I think's new hires, whether it's your first head coaching position or you're moving up in an organization or whatever it might be. The three challenges that you must successfully navigate in order to do your very best work within the organization. So I think you're going to get a lot of value away from listening to these

[00:02:55] Three challenges. So without further ado, let's get straight to the show. Hey everybody, this is Adam Ringler and welcome back or welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show, where it is my mission, my project, my hope to really understand sort of the tactics, the tools, the techniques, the behaviors and the mindsets that go into excellent performers. And we have done that over the course of some 31 episodes of the past where many of them being interviews with high performance coaches, sports scientists, nutritionalists, sleep experts, the list can go on

[00:03:37] And on and on. But much like the intro described today, this is a mini episode. This is just a collection of thoughts that I have through my given day that I thought rather than just keeping to myself and some of them I do, some of them just live and die in my notebook, never to see the breath of day, the light of day. But some of them I feel like as I go through my own reflection that I can do it in this sort of medium so that maybe somebody else in a similar position who has the answers can provide them. Or if somebody else is in a position like myself that's thinking these thoughts,

[00:04:19] Maybe we can collaborate, get together and try to figure out some solutions. And if at the bare minimum, maybe it just helps somebody else. That's the whole idea of this Decoding Excellence Show is to provide some value to the listening audience out here. So that's my hopes with this one. But so today I wanted to quickly discuss three of the things that I don't necessarily think leaders or people that are put in a leadership position, whether it's your first head coaching job ever. You've risen from the ranks of assistance ranking conditioning coaches to now you're managing

[00:05:02] Department or you are head coach or your director or whatever it might be. The three challenges that nobody really ever advises you on, right, or gives you some some direction to. And I think these challenges are sometimes they are, they're hidden certainly. But without the proper management of these three things, what happens is you just get chewed up, you get burned out, you get you get ate up in it. And and hopefully just by identifying what these three things are that you, if you're in this position, you can hopefully manage those things and you can manage your ability to effectively

[00:05:50] Lead the department and the people that that you do lead. So the very first thing I want to discuss was principle one, which is just simply managing your own energy. So whenever you're in a leadership position, it is a lot of, you know, it's a lot of that responsibility, a lot of that role is just simply providing energy and direction to the people around you. So what can with doing so, right, providing that energy, providing that direction, providing the guidance, managing your unit, what ends up happening is that that is your energy is a finite resource. It can't go to everywhere,

[00:06:33] It can't go to every project or everything. So becoming even better at delegation is a really important aspect to managing your own energy. You may want to be involved in every single project or every single, you know, a strategy that you guys are formulating. But what ends up happening if you try to do so, so often is that with poor energy management or poor focus, what ends up happening is you just end up wasting time or the projects that you do actually get to do end up simply not being your best work. So without that delegation or if you're trying to

[00:07:17] Micromanage everything, it's just it's a poor strategy and I think what ends up happening is that you become drained very, very quickly just by simply trying to put yourself in every position across the unit. And you know, when I have had conversations, whether it's on the Decoding Excellence Show or with, you know, peers that are in these positions, what ends up happening is that, you know, like much like if you start a business, like you are every role within that business organization. You're not only the CEO, you're the CFO, you're the marketing director, you're the

[00:07:55] Janitor, you're everything, right? So really what I try to advocate for is that understand what your key strengths are, understand what makes you happy, understand what only you can do and what you can do better than anybody else, and then position yourself to really harness what your strengths are, and then try to delegate or hire for maybe what those other tasks that need to be done, that you're not necessarily maybe best equipped to do. Secondly, managing the relationships within the organization, right? And that is both up and out, or that is top to bottom of the

[00:08:42] Organization. So a lot of it is just, you know, building these relationships with people, right? Both above you, below you, everywhere around. And what that can also mean is that, you know, everyone in the organization in your unit need to understand what you're doing, what our strategies are, what your mission is, and what we're trying to do as department. And then we also need to develop the fundamental understanding of what those strategies are so we can deliver on those strategies. And I think one of the things that leaders do really, really well and should do really well

[00:09:20] Is to manage those expectations, to delicate what they need from the other people. But they also need to create an environment where everybody can do their best work. So it is about necessarily managing the people within your organization, managing the personnel. But you also need to be able to understand what other people do incredibly well. So much of strength conditioning is not always just necessarily the sets and reps in the weight room. It's managing athletes, it's building relationships with athletes to get them to understand why we do what we do, why nutrition is

[00:10:03] Important, why sleep is important, why we need to do a particular warm up or this mobility exercise. And we can continue to, you know, have athletes come in and just wrote repetition through all these things. Or we can try to build that relationship not only with the athletes, but with the coaching staff, with the athletic trainers, with the massage therapists that might come in, with everybody from top to bottom in the organization, why XYZ is important not only for the athletes development or the teams development. But for everybody in the organization, for the very

[00:10:43] Bottom line of how, you know, delivering in one domain can affect the bottom line or the financial security of the athletic department or for coaching staffs or the increased likelihood of winning, you know, conference championship, whatever it might be, to continue to develop those relationships. Not only within our internal circle, which might start with your coaching staff or your department staff, but then expand to the athletes, but then also expand outside of your own domain. That is incredibly important. And something that I think, you know, when you take over

[00:11:25] The reins from a head coaching position and you're leading a department now, not many people, you know, discuss how important it is to build those bridges between departments, between people, between the office floor where administration is and where you're at. That's vitally, vitally important so that everybody understands from top to bottom what you're doing, why you're doing it. And then it's also helping you along the way in whatever capacity that they can see and touch and physically or emotionally or from a communication standpoint help deliver the understanding

[00:12:06] Or the reasoning behind what we're doing. And I think the third piece as well that is, is rarely communicated when people take over the reins from these leadership positions is managing information. And not just because I'm a data guy, and this is where I sort of live and breathe, but managing the information flow of what's important, what's not important, what can we, what's the information that key managers need to know, and what are some information that assistance staff, you know, doesn't necessarily need to communicate upwards. How can we avoid

[00:12:47] Micro-managing, but how can we also avoid having so much noise that it's hard to distinguish what the actual real signal is so that those in those leadership positions or in the decision-making decision positions can use and act upon that information. So a lot of the times, right, it's important to have a day-to-day briefing or a week-to-week briefing, right? And the idea of these things is just so that some information flows in, but you're not bogged down with every single piece of information from every single department for every single athlete where that can sort of

[00:13:27] Really make the signal a little bit more fuzzy. So it's really important, I think, to have a information flow or a funnel that allows for key stakeholders, whether it's your first coaching position or your head first head coaching position that allows you to get information from your sports science staff, your analysts, maybe your assistant coaches, gets funneled up and gets filtered through, or if it's, you know, anybody else that's might be facilitating sort of the direction of the department. So, you know, I think a lot of the times

[00:14:07] What happens is, and you know, I'm just sort of visualizing this, right? You take over a new head coaching position. You try to micromanage everything, right? And you're in it, and you're so what you're essentially decaying some of the relationships because you're taking some of the autonomy away from others that are already doing that. Now, you're micromanaging so much that your own emotional energy is starting to decay and decrease because your spread's so thin, and then you go through, and because of that energy loss, you're no longer managing the

[00:14:44] Relationships in and outside of your own department and those key bridges. And then you're also trying to seek out more and more and more information about what we're doing and the athletes and the department that you have a very low chance of effectively filtering that information, and then it just becomes a snowball. One thing leads into the next thing, which leads into the last thing. So, you know, I think it's really so vitally important to have a way of filtering and funneling information. And that might just be a key assistant in your organization or in your

[00:15:20] Department that can deliver, sort of, act as that funnel, that human AI funnel, although it would be real intelligence, right? Human intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. But to have some type of filtering mechanisms to say, hey, you know what? I'm going to take care of that so you can focus on your strategic tasks that you need to do. I think you're spending too much time on the day-to-day management. I'll handle that. I'll handle the facility. I'll handle the assistant coaching staff or the volunteer staff so you can do XYZ. And ultimately, I think it just comes down

[00:15:57] To understanding what you're incredibly great at, what you're perfect at, what you're meant to do on this earth, positioning yourself to do it, and then finding the other people around you to help facilitate what you're great at. And that might be, you know, if you're building a staff is, that might be as simple as hiring people to do things that you're not good at. And, you know, if I'm great at X and you're great at Y and we hire another assistant coach who's great at Z, then when we compile each other in our little department of three people, we got XYZ covered,

[00:16:37] Which is ultimately what we want. I should understand, if I'm sort of the X guy and that's my task, I should understand what Y and Z tasks are. I should know a little bit about it. But if that pops up on my radar, I'm going to defer it to the right people, the people that are meant to do those things, the people that love to do those things, and position them in their greatest likelihood or possibility of doing their best work. And I think when you do that, you can manage your energy, you can manage your relationships, and then you can manage that flow of information to you,

[00:17:14] You're equipped to run an effective department that can do their best work as well. And those are just a few of my thoughts when it comes to maybe the three hidden challenges, the three tasks that new leaders, new head coaches or assistant coaches or anyone in an organization taking over a leadership position needs to be able to successfully navigate, to be able to manage and to harness those strengths. So just again, as a little bit of a refresher, I think it's really important to manage your energy. And I know in many shows, we talked about different strategies,

[00:17:56] Different ways that you can manage your energy outside of just positioning yourself in the company or in the organization, from advising or management style, things you can do outside of the office to be able to manage your energy. And that could be as simple as mindfulness, meditation, getting away, doing activities that you like. There's been a lot of research in flow producing sports and activities. So whether that's rock climbing or extreme sports or martial arts or things like that, that's a great strategy for being able to manage your own energy. As sometimes

[00:18:36] Thinks that when you start to feel run down, you need to get out of your head and get into your body and do something that actually helps with the physical aspects of it. And then also managing your relationships, both in the organization outside of your organization. And that is making sure that you effectively lead people, right? So that you don't get bogged down with the micro management of different people. You position others in the best possible chances for them to be successful, for them to harness their own strengths. And for them to essentially do their very best work.

[00:19:12] And then lastly, managing that information flow, right? You can't be provided or act upon every single shred or piece of information. It's just going to be paralysis by analysis at that point. So you need to be able to set up filters in your own day to day to be able to filter that information, get the right signal via the through the noise and be able to act upon that information in a meaningful way. So whether that means safeguards or stand-up meetings, I use Slack quite a bit so that I am keyed into specific channels within our organization. And you know, I know we talked

[00:19:51] About Slack as a productivity killer in the last episode. But I continued to harness that and use that as a resource to be able to get the right information to me while minimizing information that is non-relevant to my day to day. So these are just some of my thoughts. But more importantly, to wrap up this show, I want to hear from you guys. I want to hear from people who are listening to this show, whether it's on Twitter and Instagram. Let's use the, let's see, hashtag called three leadership challenges, right? Three leadership challenges. And let's tag me in it if you happen

[00:20:31] To be listening to this show. And let's talk about what is going on. Have you navigated the challenges of managing your energy, managing relationships or managing the information flow across your day to day. And have you found some strategies that actually allow you to do those things? I would be curious because this is something I think we all need to work on. Whether you're in strength conditioning, whether you're in high performance sport, whether you're in collegiate athletics, or you're just in a marketing department and you're in a leadership position there, a

[00:21:06] Management position there, and you need to develop these skill sets. So let's reach out to me on Twitter at AdamRingler.com. And like always, I always appreciate every single listener of the Decoding Excellence Show. So if you are listening to this very moment in the show, I appreciate you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you so much. Hey, everybody, that is going to be it for this week's episode of the Decoding Excellence Show. Like I've talked about in the last episode, I want to bring more of these shows to you every single week. So I hope you got some value from it. A lot of

[00:21:52] These are just some of the thoughts that are in my head that I'm thinking about day to day week to week that I just want to share with you because I want to invoke some thoughts. But I also want to start a conversation surrounding some of these week to week topics. So if any of the material in today's sort of three challenge or three leadership challenges, if any of this have resonated with you, reach out to me on social media. I'd love to continue a conversation with you about these things. And better understand some of the strategies that you are using to navigate some of these

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