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by
Julie Zhuo
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December 13, 2019 - January 18, 2020
build a team that works well together, support members in reaching their career goals, and create processes to get work done smoothly and efficiently.
“Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have,” he says. “That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration.”
If I spend all my time personally selling lemonade, then I’m contributing an additive amount to my business, not a multiplicative one. My performance as a manager would be considered poor because I’m actually operating as an individual contributor.
while the role of a manager can be given to someone (or taken away), leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned. People must want to follow you.
This is perfectly true
And despite having a sense of what that entails, most successors are surprised by the extent of what they’ve inherited. “I had no idea the lengths my former manager went to to shield us from the many requests from other teams,” a colleague told me in amazement after she became the successor. “I’m getting contacted left and right every day, and I realize now how much work he did behind the scenes to take care of things.”
A manager’s job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together through influencing purpose, people, and process.
What gets in the way of good work? There are only two possibilities. The first is that people don’t know how to do good work. The second is that they know how, but they aren’t motivated.
First, discuss whether your expectations are aligned—does “great work” mean the same thing for both of you? Then discuss whether it’s a matter of motivation. If both of those don’t resolve your concerns, then dive in to whether the issue is with skills.
This means that the responsibility of building a trusting relationship lies more with you than with them.
If your report does work that you don’t think is great, are you comfortable saying that directly? Similarly, would your report tell you if he thinks you’ve made a mistake?
strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward. Why? Because the most important and meaningful conversations have that characteristic.
Discuss top priorities: What are the one, two, or three most critical outcomes for your report and how can you help her tackle these challenges? Calibrate what “great” looks like: Do you have a shared vision of what you’re working toward? Are you in sync about goals or expectations? Share feedback: What feedback can you give that will help your report, and what can your report tell you that will make you more effective as a manager? Reflect on how things are going: Once in a while, it’s useful to zoom out and talk about your report’s general state of mind—how is he feeling on the whole? What’s
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“There is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it,” says Buckingham, the renowned management consultant who has studied hundreds of organizations and leaders. “The job of a manager . . . is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance.”
“What I think is brutal and ‘false kindness’ is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late in their careers that they don’t belong.” You have two options at this point: help someone find a new role in your organization or let him or her go.
“If the first time he hears that he’s not meeting expectations is during his performance review, it’s going to feel terrible,” she said. She went on to explain that because our reviews are meant to summarize performance from the past six months, if Albert was indeed not meeting expectations for most of that time, I should have told him that much earlier.
Don’t start with a long preamble. Don’t try to sugarcoat a tough message or pad it with “softer” points. As a new manager, I read advice that the best way to deliver critical feedback was in a “compliment sandwich,” where you start out with a positive observation, then slide in your suggestion for improvement, then close with another pat on the back, as if the only way veggies can be palatable is if they’re surrounded by a bunch of marshmallows. I find this ineffective—lobbing over a few superficial words of praise to temper a hard message comes off as insincere. Plus, the thing you actually
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Ultimately, what I’ve learned about giving feedback—even the most difficult feedback—is that people are not fragile flowers. No report has ever said to me, “Please treat me with kid gloves.”
There are some useful frameworks for understanding your strengths, like StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath or StandOut by Marcus Buckingham.
It’s like stressing out more about your exam grade than about whether you’re actually learning the concepts being taught.
In her influential book Mindset, pioneering psychologist Carol Dweck describes how the two different mindsets—which she calls fixed and growth—make a huge difference in our performance and personal happiness. Observe the difference: SCENARIO: After completing an assignment, your manager gives you a few suggestions for improvement. FIXED MINDSET: Ugh, I really messed that up. My manager must think I’m an idiot. GROWTH MINDSET: I’m thankful my manager gave me those tips. Now all my future assignments are going to go better. — SCENARIO: You’re asked if you’d like to take the lead on a risky and
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Who have I met that I’ve immediately been wary of? What made me feel that way?
What’s an example of a time when I’ve overreacted and later regretted it? What made me so worked up in that moment?
Inspired by that conversation, I started a journal called Little Wins. Every day, I’d jot down something I did that I was proud of, even if it was small. Sometimes, I’d celebrate a 1:1 where I gave someone helpful advice. Other days, I gave myself credit for running a productive meeting. Once, on a particularly tough day, I wrote down that I had managed to respond promptly to a few emails.
ask for feedback from other people all the time. The only hurdle you need to overcome is yourself—can you remember to ask frequently enough? Can you be humble and self-aware enough to hear it openly and then respond with real change?
The vision was razor sharp. Nobody could misunderstand what we were going after. We weren’t just trying to “grow and improve the service.” We weren’t even aiming to be the number one player in social networking. We held the idea in our minds that, one day, we’d build something useful enough that everyone—all
It doesn’t describe the how—your team will figure that out—it simply describes what the outcome will be.
I tell my team that I’ll know they did a good job describing their vision if I randomly ask five people who’ve heard it to repeat it to me and they all say the exact same thing.
As a manager, it’s important to define and share a concrete vision for your team that describes what you’re ...
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A good strategy understands the crux of the problem it’s trying to solve. It focuses a team’s unique strengths, resources, and energy on what matters the most in achieving its goals.
a fine goal to set, but don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s an approximation of what you really care about, which is providing the best customer service. If your team focuses too much on this specific goal, you might end up with customer service representatives making hasty calls that go against what the customer wants. If speed of resolution goes up but quality of service goes down, then you’re not really getting closer to your vision.
Resilient processes also try to create repeatable best practices.
Instead, any feat of complexity—whether it’s getting an airplane into the sky, delivering a premature baby, or trying to advance the football down the field—requires a playbook that lays out in clear detail what all the right steps are given the current variables.
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, once said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
People trump projects—a great team is a prerequisite for great work.
For example, if you’re responsible for solving Problem X and you can find or train someone to do it as well as you (or, ideally, better than you), then your team as a whole becomes more capable and you personally can take on more. A friend of mine states it as a simple rule of thumb: “Try to double your leadership capacity every year.”
The rule of thumb for delegation goes like this: spend your time and energy on the intersection of 1) what’s most important to the organization and 2) what you’re uniquely able to do better than anyone else.
Culture describes the norms and values that govern how things get done. A manager I was mentoring once shared with me his epiphany about the job three years in. “At first, I thought management was about supporting the individuals who reported to me,” he said. “I focused on creating the best one-on-one relationships I could. But now I realize that isn’t enough. Because it’s not just about my relationship to the team. It’s also about their relationships with each other, and with the group as a whole.”
