It’s one thing to think about being a good manager, it’s another to actually be one
Shifting from internal to external
In the follow-up to my previous post about How To Be a Good Manager People Appreciate Working For, I want to transition from a focus on things you can work on personally to how you interact with your team. The interactions with your team are just as, if not more, important than the personal characteristics described in Part 1. As the saying goes, words mean nothing without action. Those familiar with the concept may recognize some of these points as aspects of being a servant leader.
Focus on enabling your team
I’ve always viewed the number one priority for anyone in a leadership / management position is to enable their team to perform. I always tell my teams that they should never worry about reaching out to me for approvals or anything else they need to perform their jobs as efficiently as possible. You’re probably thinking that this is obvious but you’d be surprised how often those in management forget this very important aspect of their job. When you’re dealing with your own pile of work from up top or focusing on “big picture” stuff for your team it can be easy to justify ignoring or delaying responses to outreaches from your team just so you can get what you need to do done. By prioritizing things that enable members of your team you are giving the message that their success and ability to do their job is very important to you.
Simple things like flagging emails from members of your team differently in your inbox so you can identify and respond to them easier or checking in on the team chat channel / group to ask how things are going and if there is anything they need help with once a day can help deliver that message. I’m a firm believer that a manager is only as good as how well their team functions and able to do their job. Think of it this way, the more efficient and enabled your team is able to run, the more they’ll be able to get done, which in turn helps you by making you look like a star at running teams.
Don’t ask your team to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself
This goes along with being authentic as explained in Part 1. I always tell members of my teams that I would never ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I then back that up by digging into the weeds, taking on “mundane” tasks, and staying late when there are issues despite there being sufficient coverage from the team as examples. This helps build a stronger relationship with your team because it helps break down the “management vs us” divide as it shows you are just as willing to get your hands dirty. The other benefit of this is that it can create opportunities for coaching and providing guidance based on real-time work. A point of caution when doing this is to ensure you explain why you’re going into the trenches with them. You don’t want it to be perceived as micro managing. Doing this can also provide you deeper insights into how your team is actually working. I get it, you’re in management and “earned” the right to step away from needing to get your hands dirty. I assure you that by avoiding that mentality you can help establish a stronger bond with your teams and motivate them to support you.
Actually trust your team, don’t just say it
Ask yourself, how much do you trust your team? You’ll likely say that you trust them a lot. That’s great! Now ask yourself, do the members of your team know that? What have you done to show the level of trust you have in them? Those were likely slower questions to answer wasn’t it? It’s always easy to say we trust those on our teams but to actually do something to “walk the walk” is a slightly different story because it involves you taking on some personal risk. If something doesn’t go well then you’re accountable and your job may potentially be at risk as a result. It’s human nature then to want to manage or control the factors that can contribute to something going wrong. In order to do that you’ll likely want to have things done a certain way. By wanting things done a certain way you can unconsciously erode the trust that your team thinks you have in them to do the right thing.
There will be a number of times when your team may not take the same approach you would to achieve what you’ve ask of them. In some cases it may be uncomfortable for you because it is so different then how you would have done and lead you to “teach them” how it should be done. In order to show you truly trust your team you have to resist such urges even when it may cause you some discomfort. You have to “give in” or “let them fall” from time to time as tangible evidence of your trust in them to do the right thing. I admit it is a balance because there are times when you do need to be prescriptive but the key word is balance. In some cases, by actually trusting your team you may end up learning from them as they feel more comfortable innovating or leveraging alternative solutions.
Be open to adapting the way you organize and allow the team to run
There are a number of models and methodologies out there prescribing how to best organize your teams and/or execute on work to achieve results. In a growing number of companies you’ve likely been exposed to words like agile and scrum and how they can help your team and organization achieve great things. You have companies extolling the benefits and how their legion of scrum masters and coaches can transform your team into being agile and create happy stakeholders. Someone up top buys into it and then proceeds to mandate the methodology’s use throughout the organization. What a number of people don’t realize is that taking such an approach is the equivalent to mandating everyone only use hammers despite the fact that some of them really need a saw instead.
You have to understand that every team is unique. The uniqueness comes from the type of work that they are tasked to work on as well as the personalities and experience of the individuals. This uniqueness means that you can’t just blindly apply models like scrum and expect consistent and positive results. Good examples of how this approach can fail is most commonly seen in the world of sports. How many times have you heard about a winning coach with a “winning system” get fired because that system didn’t produce the same results when they tried to apply it to a different team? Don’t be afraid to adjust and explore different ways of organizing your team to get the best out of them. What happens if there is an organizational mandate? Well, as I mentioned in Part 1, embrace walking grey areas and try to push the limits. As the saying goes, “what they don’t know won’t hurt them”.
In one of my previous roles I discouraged the labelling of how we approached development as “scrum” or “kanban”. I had assessed the type of work and personalities of those on the team and determined that the best approach is actually to take selective aspects of scrum and kanban and come up with our own way that was primarily focused on outcomes instead of sprints and capacity planning exercises. It greatly reduced time spent in scrum ceremonies and figuring out sprint capacity and better enabled the teams as it was more focused on building stuff rather than fitting things into a set of ceremonies. A current approach I’m trying is to give one of my teams more free reign by simply stating the objectives I want to achieve in the next coming weeks and let them self-organize and execute.
People are loyal to good managers, not companies
I hope the points I’ve shared can help people be better managers to their teams. The points are ones that I’ve consistently used in my management style and so far it has only brought positives in the form of connections I’ve made and career developments. Based on observations I’ve made over my career, people are loyal not to the companies they work for but the good managers they may have had while working at a company. This means that more often then not, managers that people appreciate working for are able to convince people to leave a company to join them at another without too much effort. From my perspective, that’s an ability worth investing in to develop because you never know when that can come in handy.
Originally published at http://realtimerevisions.com.
