I’m a new manager and having difficulty coaching my associates and peers to practice proactive problem solving. I’ve had a few cases of very smart associates who were used to order taking and were very uncomfortable dealing with ambiguity and driving a workstream themselves. Anyone has tips and advices?

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I really struggled as a second year analyst when I was expected to “own my work stream” but not exactly empowered to do so. I would go take a pass, and then leadership would want something totally different. Which made it tough to feel ownership.
So not saying just let the associate do whatever, but maybe raise the bar for your feedback? If it’s a stylistic thing, just let it go and save your comments for what matters?

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Help me become more proactive as well! Haha.. I also hate the ambiguity and prefer strong leads form others.. what I’ve noticed helps me is giving an ownership of a deliverable and deliverable component. Start as small as needed. Help them by showing how to set up the cadence or introductions and step back. Have to Touchpoints with this individhal where they need to report their progress and daily/weekly goals.. set the expectaion that you want to hear what’s outstanding and what they are doing to close it out. Just build from there to deliverables and then a workstream

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They didn’t say step away. They said step back and frequently check in.

Your coachees’ problem resonates with me. I don’t like ambiguity because I feel that I don’t have the experience/knowledge just yet to fully take the wheel and make decisions I can fully back. I’m just not at that point in my career yet. But I do want to be! I know that being thrown in the deep end is one way to learn, but I feel that I’d learn better if I had a solid example set for me. I think for those of us in the scenario, we need to start by practicing taking initiative in lower risk scenarios, knowing we have a managers time to support us.

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At least for me, there are a few things that really enable me to take ownership:

1) Understanding why we're doing the workstream and how it fits in. This helps me make the trade-offs and adjustments I need to and make sure the communication is tied to the objectives

2) Feeling empowered to make choices and move forward. This one is a bit harder to express, but it's really frustrating when I need to check with several layers and approvals before I contact a client for a minor question or make a minor pivot to the workstream (e.g. changing the metric on a chart based on data availability or clarity). I'm not saying associates should be allowed to go rogue, just that it can be a big bottleneck if there is too much review with multiple layers at every step

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What helped for me was my lead giving me opportunities to step up with her support. It started off small, like creating UAT documentation and leading UAT sessions, and gradually worked up to owning requirements for a completely new process. It helped that I was given specific tasks/processes to own in the beginning and knowing I could bounce ideas off of her. From that, I knew she was subtly pushing me to take more responsibilities, even if not explicitly mentioned.

As I gained more experience and understood how all the pieces fit into the overall project, I was able to start looking ahead to know what needed to be done. I knew my lead was supportive of me taking more ownership so I would start discussing future work with her and keep her in the loop on what I was doing and why.

Sent you a DM with a video and tips

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