Jesse's Blog

I think about the messaging I wish I'd gotten at certain points in my career, and then I write it. This is the speech I wish I'd gotten.

Hello there, welcome to the Management path at our organization! You're a newly anointed leader of people, and right now, you're probably feeling pride, fear, anxiety, and excitement in shifting ratios at any given moment. That's normal. Only psychopaths don't feel that way, and hopefully that's not you.

Someone saw something in you. I can't know what that was, but you should. Maybe it was experience elsewhere. Maybe, more commonly, it was motivation and work ethic; we tend to like that. Whatever it was, I want you to think about it for a moment.

OK, now I want you to forget about it for a little while. Don't worry, we'll come back to it. It's never lost.

When I first started as a Support Technician, my training consisted of "there's your phone, it's ringing, answer it." In other words, I was expected to know what I was doing already, and had I not had the gift of sitting behind an experienced professional and listening him take some calls, I don't know that I'd have survived. We've come a long way, and I don't believe that this happens to Support Techs anymore (although it's always going to be a long drink from a fire hose). I suspect this might happen to managers, though.

So let's think about what being a manager means.

There was a fellow by the name of D. C. McCallum that rain railroads back in the 1800's who wrote one of the most enduring definitions ever penned, and he described management as five duties:

• Get a group of people to work together to common goals
• Make sure the job gets done
• Give people the right amount of responsibility
• Know how things are going along the way and improve them
• Do all this with respect for others

We're going to break those down, but before we do that, I need you to think very hard about what he doesn't say. He doesn't say "Keep doing the job you had before we promoted you." Keep that in mind, it's going to be important later.

Group and Goal

You are tasked with getting people to work on common goals. Before you go leafing through people, let's make sure of something simple.

Do you understand the goal? Are you committed to it?

One of the most common and painful mistakes young managers make is the "the Boss Said So" statement. It is, without question, one of the worst mistakes that you could make. To get people to achieve a goal requires belief in that goal, and if your people think you don't really care about it, they're not going to get there, either intentionally or subconsciously; people respond to your attitude in ways you may not see yet. So, if your leadership sets a goal, before you talk about that goal with your people, make sure you can restate what that goal is, why it matters, and some idea of how we're going to know that we've achieved it.

The time is going to come when you're going to be set a goal that you don't believe in. Maybe you think it's a bad idea. Maybe we've tried it before, and it didn't work then. As a manager, you are duty bound to call these disagreements out. How you do that, though, is a critical skill. If you immediately start telling your boss her baby is ugly, then you deserve the outcome you're probably going to get. Instead, you need to start out by separating out why we set the goal from how we're going to achieve it. If the path we're to take won't get us there, then that can be stated constructively. For example: "I want to achieve a 2 million dollar sales goal for the next quarter on this project. To get there, we may want to solve the problem of the price being too high." That reads a whole lot more constructively than "I can't hit 2 mill, you want too much per unit."

There will come a time when such objections are overruled. You have arrived at a pivotal moment in your career path, and the road ahead of you splits in two. On one path, you can become the negative obstructionist, who either outright practices defiance, or worse, engages in passive resistance by not really trying very hard. That road dead ends, and it will likely lead others down that road with you; I don't recommend it. The other path is the concept of disagree and commit. In other words, you made your point, you got the decision from your leadership. Let it go and commit.

That means you work hard at it anyway.

That means that if the problems you saw coming happen, you never say "I told you so," but you also call it out to be dealt with, too, respectfully. Some people feel that moving forward on a goal that you disagree with is somehow a moral failing; if you do, you are in the wrong role.

OK, got that goal down pat? You can explain that goal and path to your team and mean what you say? Congratulations; you've achieved the concept of "alignment."

Now let's talk about that group.

You are now responsible for what these folks do. If they look good, you look good. If they mess up, you messed up. This should encourage you to get to know them, their strengths and weaknesses, their goals and hopes, and get to know them quickly. And the reason why isn't just about how you look.

Remember earlier, we mentioned your work ethic, and your abilities? You very likely got to where you are because of your ability to act as an individual contributor. On the one hand; that's a very good thing; you know how to get things done. It's also a problem, because your job is no longer to get things done.

Your job is to get them to do it.

Think of your skills as a shovel. Your job is not using that shovel any more. It's to teach others to do it.

This is one of the hardest transitions you're ever going to make, and some people are not capable of it. We'll talk more about this in a moment.

Make Sure the Job Gets Done

"Success is not about setting goals; it's about following through on them." - Maya Thompson.

I've known far too many managers who've fallen into the same terrible moment that I've been in; the quarterly review where you realize that all of that drive and energy you put into starting things has not resulted in finishing things. And now you get to explain why.

There's a lot of totally legitimate, completely understandable reasons why that might happen, and not one of them matters. The role is not to try; we're tasked to achieve, and if we don't, no matter how completely understandable those reasons were, we failed. That may not mean that it's game over, but failure is something we need to prevent.

There's one reason that isn't acceptable though, and that's because you weren't following through. Your goals should be something that are constantly on your mind, but far too often, you let them go because you're chasing the next shiny fire burning and leaving that goal behind.

There's a huge amount of tools you can pick up at this point; the top of the pile is "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. We could get into a lot of downstream work like Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, but that's just the tool you happen to like best to keep you organized. The real point is that you must not lose track of what's needing to get done, and many managers often do. This tends to happen because of a few problems:

• You're not organized.
• You're still using that shovel instead of watching others use it.
• You're firefighting too much.

The second and third points are really the same problem; your team are your tools now, and so you really shouldn't be firefighting unless something is wrong.

The first and second points might also be the same problem, too; maybe you're not organized because you're still doing your old job.

So what might be wrong?

Give People Responsibility

It's a company ethos; make your job meaningful. As a manager, you need to make sure your group's jobs are meaningful. if you're going to carry that out, that means you have to make sure that people have actual responsibility, and that means that they have the authority to make decisions within that area of responsibility, and that they carry acting on those decisions out.

Far, far too often, we get burned because, as we said before, if they mess up, you mess up. Instead of accepting that this will happen as a part of the role you've taken (and we'll talk more on this) and using that experience to sharpen the saw, people react by refusing to trust their teams, and trying to shoulder the responsibilities themselves, or by micromanaging.

It's important first to remember that no one can do everything themselves. If they could, we wouldn't need teams; we'd just pay that one person to do it all and save the cost. That can happen, and we should watch for it, but it's exceedingly rare. No one ever had a meaningful job that the boss does for them. Similarly, the worst jobs are the ones that you're constantly being micromanaged in. It's demeaning to be treated as if you have sub par intelligence by a boss, and it should come as a surprise to no one acting that way when their teams quit or transfer out.

Giving people responsibility and authority is the only way they can grow, the only way they can act without you having to practically be doing everything yourself.

So how do you mitigate the risk of your teams messing things up and getting you in hot water?

Know how things are going along the way and improve them

If five people are digging a ditch, they don't need a sixth person down in the ditch with them. They need someone watching what direction they're digging in to make sure they don't veer off track and miss their target.

It's easy to let your work ethic, prized as it was and is to us, fool you on this. It feels wrong for people who are used to getting things done to not be right there beside the rest, getting their hands dirty. And indeed, every once in a while, you should probably get into the weeds with your team as a form of making sure things still work the way you thought that they did. The problem is we can confuse that need to understand things with the comfort we feel when we get back into the old rhythm.

Mary Kay Ash said "Those who are blessed with the most talent don't necessarily outperform everyone else. It's the people with follow-through who excel."

That means that you must be watching and listening. You listen closely to what your people tell you, you ask good questions, however you also supplement that with direct observation of the work underway; your people can't always see where the ditch is going from within it; that's your job.

This is where the old expression "Trust but Verify" comes into play. You have to balance your own observations with believing your people when there's a difference between them. You've got a good sense of how things need to work (or if not, you want to develop one very quickly), but that can make you too skeptical sometimes. So how do you keep from going overboard?

Do all this with respect for others

As the old cliche goes, people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses. Customers don't usually tell you when you provide a bad experience; they just leave.

When you reach this point in evaluating, it's easy to get jaded or frustrated when what you thought were clear instructions are misunderstood, or when obvious problems happen, or when you just find yourself repeating yourself, it's very easy to lose sight of an obligation; we have to treat our teams with respect. Even if you don't see that as a moral duty, it's self-serving; shoot the messenger enough and you stop getting bad news. That leads to getting blindsided, and eventually exited.

So, you keep that need to respect others at the forefront of your mind. Treat their input with the same seriousness and attention you want your input taken upstream from you, and you should balance this line well.

Put it all Together

You've stepped into a very different world from being an individual contributor. It carries some risks, but the rewards are high, and if done well, can be one of the most satisfying experiences you can have that people pay you for.

Someone in this organization believed in you, and took a risk that you could live up to high expectations. Pay that forward, now.

"It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through." - Zig Zigler