Are you old school in anything?
I love to say I’m old school when it comes to music that I’m talking about with my teenagers, or definitely old school when it comes to group exercise. I’ll have a new member in class and they’ll say, “Where has group exercise been my whole life?” I tell them, “Oh, I’m old school! 30 plus years.” We’re talking Jazzercize, Step Aerobics.
But where does staking your claim of being old school become no longer cool? Well, this happens all the time in our professional environment. I was just leading a workshop and posed a difficult conversation scenario. I asked the group for feedback on how they might handle this situation, and one of the attendees said, “Oh, I would use the feedback sandwich.”
Now, for those of you who’ve been following me for a while, you know I’ve got a video that says, put the sandwich down! Feedback sandwich is an old school practice, it is an old school theory. It has been disproven, it is not optimal. It is not the way that I would train you or recommend that you deliver hard feedback, those crucial conversations as I call it. So when or where is old school no longer cool?
It’s in your actual skill set.
So hang your hat that you’ve maybe been a leader for a decade or decades plus. That’s fantastic! We love having that seniority, we love having that experience. But how are your skills? If you are still leading with the same exact skill sets that you learned when you were a manager or first became promoted a decade plus ago, that old school skillset is no longer serving you.
In fact, if you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to mobilize a team, why you haven’t been able to really engage or develop your employees, or why you yourself have been stuck in that promotional pipeline and haven’t gotten to the next level, I’m going to challenge you to evaluate where you may be old school on your skillset.
We want to make sure that we stay fresh, and I know this takes time. So it’s not about revamping everything. Find one or two specific areas where it would be time for you to go “new school” on those skill sets.