TECH LEADERSHIP SESSION
26th February 2021
Congratulations, you're a manager! After you pop the champagne, accept the shiny new title, and step into this thrilling next chapter of your career, the truth descends like a fog: you don't really know what you're doing.
Sharing is Caring.
Thanks @mihai for this book 😀
The myth
The reality
Manager Goal: get better outcomes from a group of people working well together
Best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.
Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far (additive amount).
Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.
You are now responsible for the outcome of your team, including all the decisions that are made within it.
If something is getting in the way of great work happening, you need to address it swiftly and directly.
What gets in the way of good work?
⚠ bias: the above only works if you can have honest, constructive conversation together.
"You must trust people, or life becomes impossible" A. Chekhov
"Managing is caring", giving honest feedback, doesn't mean always agreeing with them.
When you give feedback or make a decision, your report may not agree with it.
Keep in mind that some decisions are yours to make.
You are the person ultimately held accountable for the output of your team, and you may have more information or a different perspective on the right path forward.
You can avoid being blindsided by developing a relationship founded on trust, in which your reports feel that they can be completely honest with you because they have no doubt that you truly care about them.
1:1s
The best tool for understanding what's going on (on both sides) is to ask (don't presume/assume).
No one is perfect, and managers are not exceptions.
For a leader, giving feedback, when things are going well and when they aren't, is one of the most fundamental aspects of the job.
Mastering this skill means that can knock down two of the biggest barriers preventing your reports from doing great work:
So that they know exactly where to aim and how to hit the target.
Does my feedback lead to the change I'm hoping for? (vs game of telephone | broken telephone)
⚠ You are giving someone an opportunity to grow in a way that speaks to their interests and strengths.
"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".
Yourself
Being a great manager is a highly journey, and if you don't have a good handle on yourself, you won't have a good handle on how to best support your team. You first need to get deep with knowing you.
When you fully understand yourself, you'll know where your true north lies.
Know your strengths.
The Journey is 1% finished (Facebook internal slogan).
Every manager feels like an imposter sometimes. Why?
How two different mindsets make a huge difference in our performance and personal happiness:
StrengthsFinder2.0
We must confront the truth of what we're really like by asking others for their unvarnished opinions.
The Pit
On some days you will feel the imposter syndrome so strongly that you might as well be stuck at the bottom of a darsk, deep pit.
The double whammy of struggling with something and worrying about the fact that you're struggling with it.
Admit that you're feeling bad.
Even if you're afraid of the answer, confronting reality is always better than spinning disaster in your head.
Admitting your struggles and asking for help is the opposite of weakness, in fact it shows courage and self-awareness.
High workspace stress has been shown to inhibit creativity, whereas "when people were feeling more positive, they were more likely to be creative".
You can't do your best work unless you physically feel your best, so take care of yourself.
It's always worth it.
Management is a highly personal journey. We are all at different points on our paths.
Some of us start out stronger at certain skills than others.
The person most invested in your career isn't your Manager; it's you.
Meetings are the "necessary evil" of management or the grown-up equivalent of homework.
Do you need to be in all of them? Let's delegate!
As a manager your time is precious and finite, so guard it.
Life's too short to be wasted in subpar meetings (or bad books).
Plan
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." MattiaB
A good strategy understands the crux of the problem it's trying to solve.
Following Pareto principle, the general idea is that the majority of the results come from a minority of the causes.
Prioritization is key, and it's an essential managerial skill.
Effort doesn't count; results are what matter.
Executing well means that you pick a reasonable direction, move quickly to learn what works and what doesn't, and make adjustments to get to your desired outcome.
Speed matters: a fast runner can take a few wrong turns and still beat a slow runner who knows the shortest path.
Execution > Strategy
Good process is ever evolving.
One of the most useful tools for improving processes is the practice of doing debrief/retrospectives.
The goal of a debrief is not judgment.
Don't treat it as a trial, instead as an opportunity to mine the experience for future lessons.
If you find yourself doing a similar thing over and over again, chances are good that it can be codified into a checklist that can make the task go smoother in the future.
Another bonus of doing this: you can then pass the playbook to others to learn and execute.
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man". Heraclitus
"If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else."
Growing a team
If your team is 5 people, you can develop a personal relationship with each individual where you understand the details of their work.
If your team is 30 people, you can't manage them directly, at least, not to the same degree.
This is why managers of growing teams eventually start to hire or develop managers underneath them.
You're still responsible for your team's outcome, but you can't be in all the details.
At first, this can feel disorienting, like you're losing control.
But empowering your leaders is a necessity.
One of the biggest challenges of managing at scale is finding the right balance between going deep on a problem and stepping back and trusting others to take care of it.
When people don't know you well and see that you're in a position of authority, they're less likely to tell you the ugly truth or challenge you when they think you're wrong, even if you'd like them to.
Context switching all day, every day and as the manager of a large team, you learn to roll with it.
You can't do everything, so you must prioritize.
Perfectionism is not an option.
Having a great bench is one of the strongest signs of stellar leadership because it means the team you've built can steer the ship and thrive, even if you are not at the helm.
"If your team can be successful without you, doesn't that mean you're not actually valuable?"
You should still see your job as being a multiplier for your people.
A strong bench frees up a manager to tackle the next big hill on the horizon.
"You're giving away your LEGOs" sharing your building blocks with others.
Delegation
Delegating well is far from an exact science: "the art of knowing when to dive in yourself and when to step back and entrust others''.
The most talented employees want to be challenged, there is no greater sign of trust than giving people big problems.
The key, of course, is that you need to actually believe your report is capable of solving the problem.
Beyond people, you and your report should be aligned on why you're doing what you're doing and what success looks like.
When the vision is clear, the right actions tend to follow.
What to do when a manager struggles?
It is important to empower your leaders to tackle hard problems.
If the bar is perfection, nobody is going to try.
Part of delegating well is recognizing that your reports (like you) will make mistakes and doubt themselves, and that often the best thing you can do is to believe in them.
The best manager all agree on one thing: growing great teams means that you are constantly looking for ways to replace yourself in the job you are currently doing with someone to do it as you (or ideally better than you).
The rule of thumb for delegation goes like this:
You can extrapolate that anything your report can do just as well or better than you, you should delegate.
Right ahead is another mountain that's bigger and scarier than the one before.
Everyone keeps climbing, and everyone achieves more together.
As a leader, nurturing culture may not be the first thing on your mind.
But success or failure aren't usually the results of a few sweeping decisions.
Pay attention to your own actions, as well as what behaviours you are rewarding or discouraging.
All of it works together to tell the story of what you care about and how you believe a great team should work together.