Best practices for a new manager - Part 2
Here are a few more tips that worked for me when I became a manager
Last time, I wrote about the best practices that helped me when I became a manager. The initial few months of the transition were challenging, and I wish I had known these best practices early on. Nevertheless, that sore struggle encouraged me to read and research more and listen to interviews and podcasts. More than that, learning from doing the job was like drinking from the firehouse.
I started progressing slowly, and it has been an ongoing process until now. I say that because a person never achieves a finite state of what is required to be a manager(or, for that matter, any role we play in our professional and personal settings). We are always a work in progress. Every year has been a blessing, as I work with great people and learn new things daily. I am grateful for that!
This post is the second in a series of best practices for new managers (read Part 1). I might have a few more tips that have helped me, and I will follow up with Part 3. Now, on to Part 2. Read on.
Know thyself
Know thyself is a philosophical maxim from the great people of Greece. It is helpful for anyone, especially if they are taking on the people manager role. Until we reach the individual contributor level, our actions may or may not impact the careers of other team members. Once we reach the people manager role, our actions have a far-reaching impact. When people's jobs are at stake, it is essential to ‘know thyself’ better.
Knowing thyself is a vast topic, and it is easy to get lost. One can start to focus the inward search by trying to frame the approach on the following topics(not an exhaustive list, but a great start)
Communication style
There are several communication styles, and each individual brings a different flavour to it. Over time, one would have picked a unique tone in the career. You should stick to that but also look for ways to get better. Also, in the role, you will have three levels of communication.
Upwards—Understanding how your manager and skip-level manager expect information sharing and collaboration is an important step. What has helped me is sharing information on time, setting expectations, not surprising them, and asking for help before it's too late.
Peers and cross-organisational relationships—These are equal relationships where information sharing and learning are the goals. Such relationships often come to the fore when you and your peer need to collaborate on a new project.
Direct reports and larger team - Being authentic, communicating clearly and often (somebody once said that for humans to understand or register an idea in their minds, it takes a minimum of three times hearing it; I am not sure where I read this) helps to stand apart from many managers.
Peak Energy time
Time blocks in the calendar are a great productivity system. Yet, they can be less impactful if you don’t consider energy reserves. Humans have limited energy reserves, and many mediums already compete for them. Knowing when you have high energy during the day and reserving those slots for impactful work is essential. If you are a morning person like me, I like to work on my top three priorities for the day in the first part of the day. As energy nosedives, the afternoons are generally for meetings or low-intensity work. As energy soars in the evening, I switch to making decisions or writing collateral as required.
Planning and Meetings
The worst design feature of the modern workplace is meetings. Meetings are easy to abuse and are the single most common reason for productivity loss. A while ago, someone on Twitter designed the calendar event UX to reflect the amount of hourly money lost per person per meeting. I wish every company adopt that.
While I am very cynical about it, meetings done the right way are essential for collaboration and progress. Having great meetings is a topic that deserves a separate post. That said, bi-weekly 1:1s, weekly team meetings, quarterly planning, and program review periods are cadence meetings that you should start and are essential for context setting and execution.
If there are meetings that can be an email or discussed asynchronously, please speak up and cancel those.
Expectations, Accountability, Transparency
Let us say you are asked to execute a top-priority project. After several discussions on technical design and execution, you have arrived at a clear program plan with estimates and timelines.
During the course, you task the lead engineer on your team to work on the low-level design of a critical component. As a manager, your role starts with defining the problem statement. If the person involved is a senior, they will independently describe the problem with minimal input from you. Your role doesn’t stop there. You must determine the expected outcomes, the parameters involved, what success looks like, and when the output is required (ETA). Of course, this is part collaboration and part negotiation. Sometimes, the engineer assumes many things or all the discussed points are not covered. Once the output is delivered, you will be in for a pleasant surprise (when the engineer was smart and covered all bases) or a rude shock (when the output and your expectations differ).
In the end, once all aspects are discussed and agreed upon, you should give free rein to the lead engineer. You can have periodic check-ins to see how it is going and help course-correct if it is off track. If the lead engineer requires more time, they should try negotiating with you and agreeing on a new ETA. Sometimes, a manager lets this critical phase go without check-ins, and in the end, when output and expectations mismatch, it leads to many problems between the manager and the engineer. The end delivery may be affected as a byproduct of this.
When the output is delivered, you should evaluate it against the success criteria and give feedback to your lead engineer. Managers sometimes hesitate to provide feedback at this stage to prevent any hard feelings. But if the output is not excellent and doesn’t meet the success criteria or expected outcome, you are expected to help steer it.
I picked an example of delivering the technical design of a component in a high-priority project and explained how expectations, accountability, and transparency contribute to this process. As an extension, you will be practising these themes at scale daily. It is important to get these skills right early to run a successful team.
Superpowers and Shadows lurking behind your superpowers
Nikhyl Singhal, who runs ‘The Skip’ community and podcast, wrote about the concept of Superpowers and the shadows that lurk behind them—[1], [2], [3]. He goes on to explain this with real-world examples and how. I found it helpful and wish I had learned this earlier in my career.
To explain, you can be a great wartime manager, but when there is peacetime, you always seek war. In this case, your very superpower (being a wartime manager) is negated by the shadow (chasing war during peacetime) of it. You can be a great individual contributor (superpower) but find it hard to delegate (shadow) when you become a manager because you expect perfection and don’t trust others to do as well.
Knowing your superpowers is essential. Equally important is discovering the shadows that lurk behind them. The shadows are the anchors that restrict your growth.
Few more
We have covered several topics on which you should examine yourself deeply. Similarly, you can continue down the rabbit hole and ask questions like those below. I promise you will be a different person when you emerge from it.
What triggers you?
How to earn your trust?
How do you give feedback?
How should your team members share feedback?
‘Working with you’ document
Once you explore those topics and much more, consider writing them down in a document. On this note, there is a great example to emulate. Claire Hughes Johnson, who played several leadership roles at Google and Stripe, published the ‘Working with Claire’ document. It talks about how she operates and what she expects—a guide to working with her. It is a highly self-aware document, and I am grateful she made it public. There is also this interview where she discusses this more, which is a great read.
A takeaway from this document is to write a ‘Know thyself’ document for yourself. You can choose to keep it private, but the document intends to seek answers to all the questions so that you know more about yourself and how you want to operate. Going deep into this exercise, you will learn your ideals to manage and lead. As you grow, you can tweak and keep this relevant.
Decisions and Indecisions
I have written about this in the past.
A manager is supposed to make decisions daily. In your initial days, it is totally ok to struggle to meet this expectation. Sometimes, this may lead to a delay in decision-making or, worse, you might want to make the best decision possible. To do that, you would seek the data of others—lots of it. Slowly, stress builds up, and you will end up sitting on several such decisions. Ultimately, you and the team will suffer. Sometimes, these repercussions can be felt early. But most of them take time to present themselves.
The great mental model for thinking while making decisions is the famous one-way and two-way door decisions popularised by Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos is writing about decision-making in one of his famous shareholder letters.
Applying the one-way door and two-way door analogies to situations that require your decision will help you give appropriate importance and diligence to the situation.
Once you make decisions, reviewing and communicating widely across your team is essential.
For one-way door decisions, i.e., the decisions that require great deliberation and consultation, there are several decision-making frameworks out there, and one of the popular ones is DACI(There is also RACI).
I am a fan of a few of the aspects of DACI. As a decision-maker, you are the Driver. Once you make a case for a decision, it must be reviewed and approved. This review/approval phase is vital since that is when skip level alignment happens. For many of the decisions that you make, you will have contributors whom you want to consult. This way, their voices are heard, and they feel respected. Also, external voices will help you remove bias, if any. Once you make a decision, you should start informing widely. This list of people knowing why and what of the decision will simplify your life. Once they understand the context of a decision, they will easily align and move forward.
Indecisions breed chaos. It is a slippery slope.
Execution
Execution will be the cornerstone of your responsibility as a manager. A manager can be a peacetime manager or a wartime manager. Peacetime managers are the ones who are strong operators and good at developing people, improving processes, and aiming for efficiency in a growth setup where most things are going well. Wartime managers thrive leading a team through a crisis or a lot of variability and chaos. They quickly rally the team to work on more formidable challenges and uncertainty. Identifying who you are and optimising your roles and environment is important. Rarely can you be good at both and switch with ease. These are rare folks and an excellent quality to emulate.
The simple approach to execution would be to do what you say and ensure your team is energized throughout the journey. Sometimes, strong-performing managers tend to treat a project as ‘their’ project and ride the team hard. This is antithetical to being a good manager, and one should have guards up to prevent sliding into this situation. Along the way, you need to ensure efficient communication downwards and upwards, thereby there are no surprises.
Tell stories
Storytelling is an art that humans have learnt since time immemorial. It has thrived for several centuries and will continue for several more. Incorporating this skill in the workplace is a superpower. I have seen leaders who are exemplars use this skill to a greater extent. Not everybody has this skill, but it is learnable.
Matthew Dicks, the best-selling author, has authored a book - ‘Storyworthy - Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Art of Storytelling’ and is quite outstanding. Through his work, we can learn how to inculcate this skill and use it to the best extent to engage with our team. I have used several tips from his book and have found them helpful.
His recent podcast interview on Lenny’s podcast is gold.
Help people level up
People also love clarity and direction in their careers. As people managers, our important responsibility is to help team members understand their roles and responsibilities, set clear expectations on outcomes and success criteria, and define directional goals for them to operate and level up.
Every (large) company will have a defined career matrix explaining each role's roles and responsibilities. This is the matrix managers use to assess their reports from time to time. As a manager, understanding this matrix helps to set the right expectations and give constructive feedback. Keep the feedback to the situation and never to the person. Personal feedback yields negative returns, and sometimes, your report might end up in a downward identity threat spiral. I have seen these situations get ugly and not useful for both parties.
In your 1:1s, it is important to talk(at least for a few minutes) about how their performance is trending and set/review specific goals. One superpower for a great manager is to have regular career conversations and set up the right opportunities for the report to work on.
Case 1: Let us assume your report is doing great, and you reward them with more volume of work(naturally :)). If the person continues to do that and expects the reward at the end of the cycle, then one of the two things can happen. You will be happy with the work and think that this person is performing at the next level. You reward them with a promotion or a considerable hike. Both of you walk out happy. What if you are satisfied with the work and walk out just by appreciating it? Your report is going to prefer something else since there is no reward.
Case 2: Let us assume your report is doing good work but needs some improvement in consistently demonstrating that. You decide to wait for a few more months before deciding to promote. If your report doesn't know that, it is going to be a terrible situation
Case 3: Let us assume your report is doing good work for the assigned work. However, these work items are not organisational priorities, are highly complex, or are a lot of simple ‘business as usual’ work. You will find organisational resistance when you pitch this person for rewards or promotion. It is not your report's fault. They have done what was expected. It is entirely the manager's fault for not setting up the right opportunities and not building a solid case for that person.
Setting up opportunities, giving timely and constructive feedback, regular check-ins, and course corrections are important skills, but they are not spoken or taught to a first-time manager. Learning these early and practising them consistently will yield great results and create trust within your team.
That’s it for now! What do you think about these? Tell me more about what has helped you succeed as first time manager.