What manager traits make your team feel supported?

Feeling off-balance in your career can manifest as a sense of dissatisfaction and longing for work that better aligns with your strengths, writes career consultant Joseph Liu. You can rediscover your "center of gravity" by identifying skills and interests that move you toward "the work you would find truly fulfilling," Liu writes.

Put it into practice: Liu traces his career path from working in a lab to becoming a career consultant after realizing his love for talking to people about their challenges and helping them find their purpose. "However, finding your center of gravity takes time, especially if you have many different interests."

Asking powerful questions, actively listening and praising your team members for a job well done are essential skills that can enhance management effectiveness, write Dominic Ashley-Timms and Laura Ashley-Timms, the CEO and COO of performance consultancy company Notion. "Employees want to trust that their manager cares about their growth and development. They also want to be trusted by their managers to find solutions to problems themselves and do a good job," they write.

Put it into practice: Your team feels your support when you celebrate their success, but instead of one-offs like bonuses or a simple "well done," create a culture of recognition on the team or within the company as a whole, write the Ashley-Timms. "People who feel valued and recognized will feel less like a 'cog in a wheel' and more likely to be productive and driven."

Workers spend about a third of their time in meetings, many of which are unproductive, write Frances Frei, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Anne Morriss, a founder of The Leadership Consortium, who suggest leaders treat employees' time as a strategic resource and focus on fewer and better meetings. They recommend creating meeting agendas, using AI for note-taking and sharing audio recordings with people who weren't in the meeting.

Put it into practice: Use a "check-out" at the end of meetings by asking team members to describe in a few words what they're thinking, such as a feeling, topic or idea, suggest Frei and Morriss. "Make sure everyone knows what they're responsible for delivering and the deadlines they need to hit."

Neiman Marcus Group CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck discusses his "leading with love" leadership philosophy, which focuses on diversity and building emotional connections with customers and vendors. "When you have diversity in your organization, a diversity of thought with people in the room who disagree, who challenge the truth and then unite behind it, it makes you stronger," van Raemdonck said.

Chimpanzees, like humans, perform differently when observed by an audience, according to a study published in iScience that found chimps improved on complex tasks when more peers were present, but their performance on simpler tasks declined with larger audiences. This suggests that the "audience effect" is not unique to humans and may have evolutionary roots predating human societal norms.

Joseph Liu's article about feeling off-center in your career really resonated with me. There have been many times I have experienced what he describes: "Being off-center in your career creates a feeling of longing. Almost like you're going through the motions of your day job, but your mind is elsewhere."

It was that longing that led me into a journalism career. It was that longing that led me to seminary. It was that longing that led me out of my job as a working journalist and into ministry. It's that longing that led me out of ministry.

I am still searching for whatever it is that comes next. Don't get me wrong. I love the job I am in now and find no longing to leave it. But, like the concept of "halftime" that we explored last Thursday, feeling off-center can mean that you want to do something of significance with your life. For me, it's not about leaving this job for another one but about finding something outside of this job that is also fulfilling and significant.

So far, that feeling has led me to get back into writing songs and performing them. Right now, it's just open mics and occasional singer/songwriter nights and small shows. I'm also working on recording an album that I hope to have out next year. That's something that feels significant, even if it's never heard beyond my small community.

I have believed that "success" means being famous or at least wealthy. But throughout my life, I have achieved success of some kind, especially if you define success as doing something that matters to others, even if it's on a relatively small scale. By that definition, I have been successful. But there are still other skills to explore, hone and offer to the world. That's what being "off-center" feels like. It feels like you have more to give this world (as opposed to feeling like you need to get more).

If you're feeling that way, I invite you to follow your heart and whether you're feeling off-center or want to explore what would feel significant to you as a halftime career move. That next step may not be obvious, as Liu writes, so you'll need to pay attention to what arises around you for clues on what to do next.

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