E55 - How Managers Can Effectively Lead a Shrinking Workforce with Huge Generational Gaps | 7 Skills

Every manager, I meet tells me how overwhelmed they are, but with a shrinking workforce, a growing skills gap, and an even bigger generational gap.

There's a critical question that every manager needs to ask themselves right now. That question is this.

Do you have the right skills to effectively lead your team through today's dynamically shifting landscape?

If you're not sure, then stay tuned because in this episode, we're going to be tackling three major issues that are fundamentally transforming the landscape for managers and leaders in every industry. Then we're going to take a look at the critical skills you need to effectively build and lead teams through today's dynamic environment.

But for those of you who are new to the channel, let me quickly introduce myself. I'm Doug Howard and I'm a leadership coach and consultant. I use this YouTube channel to give you free insights, tools, and techniques for helping leaders like you, increase your impact at every level of your organization. To make sure you don't miss out on any of these insights, hit that subscribe button.

Shrinking Workforce Creates New Challenges for Managers

In this episode, let's start by taking a look at the first major issue of the three, which is the shrinking workforce.

The current talent pool is shrinking rapidly and it's making it even harder to find qualified professionals. This is not just an anecdotal hunch. It's backed by data. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects, that there's going to be a staggering 1.2 million unfulfilled engineering jobs next year.

Just think about that. This scarcity is creating a challenging environment for hiring teams because it leads to longer hiring cycles and increased competition for top talent. It also means that managers are often left with less experienced or less qualified candidates, which obviously can have a negative impact on team performance and team morale.

Hiring Freezes For Managers to Produce More with Less People and Resources

The second issue is budget constraints and increased pressure. Adding to the pressure I just talked about, many companies are also facing economic uncertainty and they're starting to implement hiring freezers.

This just means that engineering managers and middle managers, you're going to be asked to do more with less resources, not just in terms of people, but in terms of just overall budget. This increased pressure is taking a toll on you as a manager, but it's also taking a toll on your team too.

The need to constantly produce more with limited resources is overwhelming and it leads to burnout. In fact, a recent Harvard business review found that 70% of engineering managers are feeling stressed and over work, 70%. That's nearly three out of four.

It's a big problem. It's a growing problem and managers just aren't equipped to navigate these situations.

Bridging Huge Generational Gaps Requires Advanced Leadership Skills

The third problem is bridging the generational gap. Leaders essentially need to be translators today because today's workforce is more diverse than ever before.

With four generations in it, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Gen Z. Each of them make up a sizable portion of the workforce today.

This presents a unique challenge for leaders because as each generation has its own communication preferences, along with their own core values and working styles and expectations, it creates a bigger gap among preferred styles of engaging with each other on your team. This generational gap leads to misunderstandings, conflicts, and just a general lack of cohesion within your team.

As a leader, you need to act as a translator and bridge the communication gap by fostering a collaborative environment where everyone feels valued and heard. This requires understanding the unique characteristics of each generation and then adapting your communication and leadership style accordingly.

To quickly recap all that. The three major challenges are a shrinking workforce, budget constraints, and bridging the generational gaps. I go a lot deeper into each of those problems and the impacts they're having on your team in my episode called 3 Growing Problems that Today's Managers Are Not Equipped to Handle.

7 Essential Leadership Skills that Managers Need for Navigating These Challenges

But the main point that I want to reiterate in this episode is that all of this increased pressure is taking a heavy toll on you as the manager and on your team.

The missing piece is leadership skills. This is the real problem. A staggering 40 to 50% of managers enter their first leadership position without any prior training or experience in leadership. This means that they're left to figure things out on their own.

You're basically thrown into the deep end and expected to figure out how to swim. This is going to lead to ineffective leadership, frustrated teams, and the negative impact on the overall culture and success of your team and your organization. But there are essential skills that every manager needs to thrive in this demanding environment.

We're going to thoroughly walk through each one of these skills and give you practical tips and tools on how to develop each one of these skills as well.

1 - Self-Awareness on Your Natural Strengths, Weaknesses, and Blindspots

The first one is self-awareness. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses is crucial for leading authentically.

You're also setting a positive example for your team by recognizing your biases when making decisions. When you're not, self-aware, you're at risk of overestimating your abilities and your knowledge, which leads to micromanagement, and it leads to unrealistic expectations for yourself and for your team. Obviously this will cause frustration throughout your team members and it is going to hinder the development of a collaborative and supportive work environment. So I don't need to go down that path.

I'll admit I was guilty of this early in my management career because I was pretty good with dealing with my team, but I had no idea how it was coming off to other department leaders on cross-functional teams.

Without realizing it, they were perceiving me as being openly dismissive to their ideas in just what happened in team meetings, where, you know, they would propose an idea and I would just quickly say, well, it won't work because of X, Y, and Z. In my head, you know, I'm just being the engineer. I'm supposed to be the voice of logic and reason in these meetings. I'm supposed to be the one that's explaining, can we, or can't we do something. I wasn't viewing myself as a salesman, trying to make everyone feel comfortable and warm and fuzzy in these meetings. I looked at it as my job to just be direct and to the point and say, can we do it or not? Or what will it cost?

Well apparently everyone else was taking this as me being cold and callous and unsupportive of their ideas and being dismissive of their intelligence. I didn't see it that way because I was just used to having a very direct communication style with my team, with my engineers that was okay. I get straight to the point they got it. We moved on.

This was a huge blind spot for me and I didn't discover this until someone else gave me feedback on it, which is why my first tip for improving your self-awareness is seeking feedback from trusted colleagues and mentors.

What I did was I had someone that I was really close with that worked in the sales department and our company. I was the head of engineering and he was one of the salesman. After a meeting that I had with sales, I would call him and ask, Hey, how did I come off in that meeting? Did I come off as aggressive that I come off as this? He would just tell me, honestly, dude, yeah it sounded a little cold when you said this to so-and-so or when you did this and when you presented that, it didn't really make sense.

Him and I would just schedule these routine check-in meetings with each other after meetings that I led with his cross-functional team. He'd basically be my blind spot detector because I needed that. It's impossible for you to detect blind spots on your own. I mean, the nature of the definition of a blind spot is you can't see it. So schedule routine feedback with people that you trust, whether it's mentors or just peers in other departments.

The next tip I have is, you know, you should look at taking personality assessments or leadership style assessments because it gives you more insights into your strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, and your leadership style.

I'll let you figure out which ones are best for what you're trying to learn about yourself, but I've used the Clifton strengths finder ones, and I found that one to be really helpful.

What I did was, when I started having these blind spot check in feedback meetings with that sales person, I was talking about. He helped me realize some of the things I wasn't doing and one of them was, I wasn't actively listening to the feedback I was getting from other people in the meeting. I was presenting my ideas and really wasn't hearing what they were saying in response, whether it was questions or concerns or they weren't understanding it. I wasn't hearing any of this.

When I took one of these StrengthsFinders, I realized that. I'm naturally not good at active listening. I'll say that again. I was not naturally good at active listening. But this was good for me to be aware of because this meant, okay, it's a blind spot. It's something I need to actively work on if I want to improve on this.

So I actually took a few courses on active listening and it helped me build this skill and it helped me create more awareness about how I was not listening in these moments and how I was coming off as not understanding other people's ideas and I was coming off like, I didn't care about what they had to say. This is very eyeopening for me as a leader. When you take these things, you're gonna discover different things, each person's is different. But that's one of the impacts that had on me.

One more tip on increasing your self-awareness is to practice mindfulness and reflection. Try to make that part of your daily exercise or your daily routine because this helps you become more aware of your thoughts and your emotions.

I actually did this with one of my clients. He's an engineering director and on the topic of sales, he was telling me how most of his interactions with the sales team at his company are negative. It's because they're always coming to him for you a hair on fire, urgent issue, that's going on with one of their projects for their customers. So when they call him, it's usually not a good thing. It's because they need urgent help. So there's a lot of tension between his interactions, with anyone on the sales team.

This was from his previous experience, I should have explained. That was at a company he worked at for five years prior to working at his current environment. In his current environment, he hadn't had too much interactions with sales. But in coaching him and helping him recognize his blind spots through mindfulness and giving him self-reflection prompts. He realized that he carried over this bad habit of this stressful environment relationship he had with sales. He was kind of having that same type of response to interactions with sales at his new environment.

If someone from sales reached out to him, he almost had this reactionary effect where he was assuming that they are reaching out to him for something not good. He would enter the situation, enter the conversation with them with a negative mindset, assuming that, they were coming in with a problem. When we talked to this, he realized that he really was not giving his sales team the benefit of the doubt. He was just kind of being short with them and he really didn't look forward to having interactions with them.

So the exercise I gave him to do was to keep a journal and to track every interaction you had with sales. After a phone call, after a meeting and email, anytime he had an interaction with sales, I had them do this for a month straight. He just kept the journal and what he did was he wrote down, how was this interaction? Was it good? Was it bad? Was it neutral? How did it go? Just quick notes, you know, spend a minute or two, just capturing how it went. But the main thing we were looking for is how did he expect to go before that meeting versus how did it actually go after the meeting? What was the difference between those two? Just by pausing to pay attention to these things, it brought a whole new self-awareness to him where he realized that, he had to break this habit of assuming the sales team was coming to him with something negative.

2 - Delegating to Empower Your Team and Increase Team Efficiency

The second critical skill is delegation. When you're managing a diverse workforce, delegation is a critical skill because when you're delegating tasks to different team members, it allows for diverse perspectives and approaches to problem solving.

If you have the same ideas working on the same problems, you're going to get the same solutions. And sometimes that's a good thing. But we work in an environment where change is the only constant, which means you need new ideas and you need creative and innovative solutions. That means you need to involve various team members to bring their unique ideas and insights to the table.

By delegating you gain that, but more importantly, it builds more team resilience too, because when you're delegating, you're diversifying where the knowledge is in your team. It's not just with one person. There's some bench support on your team. There's backup support. You're actually creating more resilience because you're pre-planning for succession planning.

When you do delegation, throughout your team and you create a culture where everyone expects delegation to happen and where you feel comfortable with delegating and you build your process around it, and make it more systematic and automatic. It ensures that the tasks on your team are not going to be solely dependent on one person, which is a common mistake that engineering departments make. Once someone's good at something, you just kind of keep that work with that person and nobody else learns how to do it as well as them. That becomes a bottleneck. You probably have this on your team right now.

Instead when you're delegating, it creates redundancy within the team and it's allowing the work to continue moving smoothly, even if someone is absent, even if someone gets sick for a long time, even if someone retires. So you might look at the short-term of delegation as, I don't have time for this, but really you can't afford to not delegate when you look at it this way.

It also facilitates the succession planning by grooming potential future leaders within your team too. When you give people more diverse perspective, they end up seeing the bigger picture and they see how they belong in the bigger picture. They figure out ways to increase their impact by taking on more ownership of things on their own versus waiting for you to delegate it to them.

Now if delegation is something you struggle with and a lot of managers and leaders do struggle with this because this skill is not taught before you move into your leadership position. If that's you, you should check out my free mini masterclass on How to Multiply Your Time Through Delegation. This free 60 minute training has helped hundreds of engineering managers and tech leaders rip off the bandaid when it comes to delegating, because it provides you with step-by-step frameworks for figuring out what should, and shouldn't be delegated. It helps you identify the right person to delegate, to and it helps you create an actionable plan for shifting the work to the other person. Basically that shift from I do to you do. I also included tips in this training for how to adapt these techniques for delegating to Gen Z, as well as remote teams.

Now this mini masterclass was actually a webinar program that I sell to companies for a few thousand dollars, but I'm going to give you a recording of it for free. All you have to do is click on the link in the episode description.

3 - Navigating Difficult Conversations With Your Team

The third critical skill is navigating difficult conversations. If you avoid difficult conversations as a manager it allows problems to fester and escalate, which has a much bigger, negative impact on team dynamics and productivity.

Today's manager needs to be a master of navigating difficult conversations for a few key reasons. The first one is managing expectations. When budgets are shrinking, managers need to have a lot of tough discussions about resource limitations, changes in project scope and revised target deadlines, and due dates.

Navigating these conversations helps you manage expectations and align your teams efforts with realistic goals. If you don't know how to manage this, you're just going to have a team that's constantly pushing back or quiet quitting, because they don't understand why they're being asked to do these things.

The second reason is so that you can effectively address generational differences on your team. One of the biggest things that causes misunderstandings and conflicts on teams today is the generational gaps. There's a diversity in the way people have expectations and work styles and communication preferences. When there's disconnects between the generations and the age groups, it's hard to facilitate discussions that foster mutual understanding and bridge the gap. This all kind of revolves around navigating difficult conversations and knowing how to have those conversations in a way that's constructive and conducive to creating that mutual understanding.

The third key reason is retention and talent management. With a shrinking workforce and hiring freezes, retaining your existing people becomes even more crucial than ever. To do that, you need to have discussions about career growth, skill development, and advancement opportunities in order to keep your employees engaged and committed.

Now a few tips for improving in this area are preparing for difficult conversations beforehand by identifying the key issues and potential outcomes. You want to make sure that you're taking the other person's perspective into account too. You want to truly put yourself in their shoes to consider how would they like to be told the information you're going to share with them? So instead of leading with the negative news or the problem you want to start by focusing on finding solutions and common ground.

Another big key here is actively listening. You want to make sure that you're actively listening to the other person's perspective without interrupting. You need to make sure each person on your team feels heard and understood in these situations. Otherwise, they're not going to be open to listening to what you have to say, which means they're not going to be open to resolving the conflict, wherever that problem is.

If you want to learn how to develop this skill, you should check out my episode called 5 Keys to Navigating Difficult Conversations at Work. I included a link to that episode in the description.

4 - Delivering Effective Constructive Feedback

The fourth critical skill is delivering constructive feedback. Effective feedback is obviously essential for helping your team members grow and improve their performance both individually and as a collective unit. But you need to know how to deliver the feedback the right way because if you don't, the other person is not going to receive it and they're not going to take action on them either.

Or even worse if you provide feedback the wrong way, or maybe it's too vague or maybe it's not helpful, or maybe it's too much feedback, and they couldn't handle it. Any of these things, if you do it the wrong way, it could de-motivate the other person and it could hinder their development and push them away.

A few quick tips on this are first, you want to make sure you're focusing on specific behaviors and actions rather than personal attacks. So you want to say, what is it that they did? When did they do it? What was the impact it had?

For example, in last week Tuesday's meeting, when you interrupted people, it created a lot of confusion. That's very objective. You can't really argue that. You want to make sure that it doesn't feel like a personal attack on their character or anything like that because even if you do feel that way about the thing they did, they're not going to want to hear it. They're not going to hear it the same way. So you need to keep it objective and depersonalize it.

The next tip is you want to make sure you're offering suggestions for improvement, and you also want to offer resources for them to develop in the area where you're asking them to make changes.

One more thing is you want to make sure that the feedback you're giving them is timely. Make sure you're providing feedback in a private setting to. Again, it's all about making them feel comfortable with receiving the feedback versus just blurting it out to them and expecting them to understand it and take action on it right away.

Now I can't do constructive feedback justice in this video because honestly, navigating difficult conversations and delivering effective constructive feedback. They're both areas that have some overlap and almost every engineering manager and tech leader struggles in these areas. It's because it requires skills that don't come natural to your logical way of thinking. But if you're tired of stumbling through ineffective, constructive feedback, conversations that yield little to no progress with your team, you should watch my free mini masterclass on Mastering Constructive Feedback.

The short training removes all the guesswork and stress by teaching you a proven framework for providing constructive feedback that drives real growth and empowers your engineering team. Just like the delegation masterclass I mentioned earlier in this video. The constructive feedback masterclass is 100% free and you can watch it on demand.

And I also sell this one, the companies too, but if you want to build this critical skill, All you have to do is click on the link in the episode description.

5 - Coaching and Mentoring Your Team

The fifth critical skill that you need as a manager is coaching and mentoring. What I mean is you need to know how to coach people and mentor them the right way, because this is a skill. It's a little bit of an art, but there is a science to it.

Coaching is a great tool for fostering, a culture of continuous learning and adaptability. This is critical in today's environment because your team needs to be adaptable and they need to be constantly growing and changing and managing stress and all these things. The way you do that is through coaching. Your team and you, you're facing various challenges, such as budget constraints, freeze hiring, and all these things we've been talking about and these generational gaps. Coaching is the best way for you to encourage innovation and creative problem solving with each of your team members, as well as in a collective environment, too, you know, in group group coaching settings with your team.

This is the difference between an environment where people are rolling up their sleeves to figure out solutions to all these unique problems you're facing versus an environment where everyone is just complaining about the problem over and over again each day without doing anything to change it or fix it.

When you're coaching people, most managers make this mistake of following the golden rule versus the platinum rule. To clarify, you know, the golden rule is treat others the way you want to be treated. Well, that rule is terrible because nobody wants to be treated the way you like to be treated.

Instead follow the platinum rule, which is, treat others the way they to be treated. How that applies to coaching and mentoring your team, that means, coaching them the way they want to be coached and mentoring them the way they want to be mentored versus the way you want to be mentored.

The reason I'm explaining this is, I hear engineering managers say this to me all the time. Well, I don't understand why that person doesn't take it upon themselves to, to learn this or to figure it out. Or I don't understand why they don't do things the way I did it when I was their age or when I was in their position.

I hear this all the time. They get engineering managers get frustrated with the younger generation, because those people aren't doing it the way they like to do it. They're following the golden rule. They're frustrated because people aren't doing things the way they like things to be done or the way that they did it when they were in their situation.

But the platinum rule is okay how does that person like to learn? How does that person like to receive feedback? How does that learn person like to be coached? With a wide range of generations on your team this means you need to take it upon yourself to understand each person's unique learning style so that you can tailor your coaching approach accordingly versus coaching them the way you want to be coached.

Now understanding diverse learning styles and tailoring your coaching approach dramatically improves employee engagement, motivation, and personal and professional growth.

A few more tips on how to do this effectively. When you're coaching, you know, you want to meet regularly with each of your team members to provide personalized feedback and guidance. You don't want to do these one size fits all messages in boiler plate emails to your team. You want to make sure you're dedicating that personalized attention with each person. Making sure that they feel heard and understood, but also, making sure they're hearing your message straight from the source when you have feedback for them.

You also want to make sure you're creating opportunities for your team members to learn and grow, such as assigning them challenging projects and encouraging participation in professional development programs.

Another part of this with coaching is, you know, you want to invest in training resources to learn about different coaching styles and methodologies. There's actually a great book on this topic called Coactive Coaching. I recommend that all managers read this book because it changes the way you look at how mentoring and coaching should work. It gives you a step by step frameworks for how to develop a coaching style that works for you.

If you want a few more book recommendations on leadership and coaching and mentoring, you should check out my episode called 10 Books every leader Must Read. I'll include a link to that episode in the description of this one.

6 - Interviewing Skills and Finding the Right Fit for Your Team

The sixth critical skill you need is knowing how to interview to find the right fit for your team. In short, interviewing.

With a shrinking talent pool and hiring freezes each new hire on your team becomes critical. Skilled interviewing helps you make strategic hiring decisions versus having to rely on gut feel and not really knowing if this person is going to be a good fit in your team. This helps you with making sure that you can identify what are the key aspects you're looking for so that you can know this person's going to be a seamless fit on your team. This means going beyond technical skills and evaluating more of those hard to quantify things like cultural fit, soft skills, learning, agility, adaptability.

Now here's something that most managers aren't thinking about right now. You're going to be asking a lot from each person on your team, in your current environment, which means you should be seeking candidates who possess a diverse skillset. But you need to be an effective interviewer to identify candidates who have adaptable skills and identify candidates who are capable of handling various responsibilities in lean teams. But if you focus solely on technical skills during interviews, you're going to miss out on a valuable candidate who possesses the right attitude, work ethic and cultural fit for your team.

Some quick tips on interviewing for you. First you want to make sure you have a structured interview process. That includes a variety of go-to questions and assessments that you're looking to make throughout the interview. You should be asking each question with the intention of figuring out a specific thing about this person. You only have an hour or so with this person. So you don't want to waste any time.

The second thing is I encourage managers to involve team members in the interviewing process, because that's going to give you more diverse perspectives. I would do this back when I was a hiring manager, I would include someone from each level in the company, in a group interview at some point in the process. They're going to look at things a different way and I would learn a lot of things. They would point out things to me like, oh, I thought it was kind of odd that this person shared all this information or it seems like this person doesn't have too much experience with that, do you think that's going to be a concern, Doug? Sometimes their points weren't valid, but it was still just good to get their perspective on the matter, because they're working at the ground level. They're going to be working with this person. So it's good to make sure that they just have a good feel about this person or that they can give me perspective that I'm not noticing that I wouldn't be thinking about at the ground level.

One more tip on this is you want to look for candidates who are not only technically qualified, but also enthusiastic, collaborative and adaptable, so pay attention to their energy in the interview. They don't have to be bubbly and like telling jokes and they don't have to be like prince charming or anything like that, but do they seem like they're actually interested in the job? Are they asking good questions? Do they use terms like we and us, or are they saying words like I, and you? You want to look for these hidden qualities to just see are they excited about this opportunity? Do they seem interested in this? Because if they don't seem interested in the interview, they're definitely not going to be interested in the job when they're there.

If you want more tips on interviewing skills, you should check out my episode called How to Find the Perfect Job Candidate, because I walk you through simple interviewing strategy that helps you figure out the right qualities to look for and I explain how to draw that information out of the candidate during the interview.

7 - Excellent Communication Skills to Mitigate Misunderstandings

The seventh and last critical skill is communication skills. Clear and concise communication is essential for building trust. Keeping your team informed, driving results and fostering a positive work environment. This is critical because you're going to need to adapt your communication style to cater to different generations in the workforce today.

With all these generational gaps and diverse communication preferences and limited resources. Effective communication is what helps you mitigate all these misunderstandings that come up from this environment. Managers who communicate clearly and adapt their communication styles, bridge gaps and avoid potential conflicts by making sure your messages are effectively received and understood by everyone.

Here's some quick tips on improving your communication skills. First you want to make sure that you're clear and concise in your communication, both verbally and in writing. Next, do you want to be transparent about decisions? You want to provide timely updates on project progress too. Don't leave them wondering. Last, actively listen to your team members. Encourage them to share their interests and their ideas and their concerns. Make sure you're listening to it and showing them that you understand this.

Active listening is a critical skill and it's so important that it came up a few times throughout this episode. I couldn't help but share it because I want to emphasize active listening and the importance of it. If you're looking for help with improving your active listening skills you should check out the two episodes that just popped up on your screen right now. They teach you how to make sure other people listen to you by changing the way you deliver your message to them but it also teaches you how to refocus your attention on them so that you're hearing what they're saying and retaining it. So you want to check out both those videos.

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