A new way to think about breaking up your goals
Jacob here. Welcome back to Working Better with Charter, a weekly newsletter featuring our best advice for managing yourself and your team.?
Here are five things to try this week:
Don’t make your subgoals too granular. A recent paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology adds a twist to the idea that you should break your big goals up into smaller pieces: The results suggest that making those pieces too small may weaken goal commitment over time. When researchers reframed a goal of 200 hours of volunteering a year as “four hours every week” or “eight hours every two weeks,” people volunteered more. But the boost in volunteering was more durable when researchers used the less granular, more flexible subgoal of “eight hours every two weeks.”
Take a script to your next meeting. Especially for newer managers looking to cultivate trust with their teams, being over-prepared for what you want to communicate—down to the level of having it written out in front of you—can only help, S. Mitra Kalita notes in her latest column for Charter. In fact, it conveys a level of care and intentionality. “I bring prepared notes. I used to hide them, but now I am more upfront,” she writes. “There’s absolutely no shame in preparing to be a boss.”
Extend your one-on-ones to encourage candid conversations. In the wake of a stressful event, like layoffs, managers can signal that they’re making space for reports to process, ask questions, and express concerns by adding 15 minutes to their regular check-ins.
Map how decisions are made. To check how inclusive your team is, start documenting whose input is included and valued while making decisions. Who got to weigh in? Which voices were most influential? Who was the ultimate decider?
Use DESC to give difficult feedback. When approaching a feedback conversation that has the potential to become heated or emotional, try planning out what you will say using the acronym “DESC,” which stands for description (what’s the situation or issue you want to address?), emotion (how did the other person’s behavior make you feel?), solution (how do you wish it had been handled?), and consequence (what would happen if this was left unaddressed?).
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