Leading and managing people is one of the most challenging and rewarding occupations I can think of. Which makes it quite surprising to me how difficult it is for most of us to be clear on what our key responsibilities are and what exactly we are doing to be effective. When asked “What are your key responsibilities as manager?” many of us struggle to find a clear answer. When asked “What is it exactly that you do that makes you a good manager and can you teach it?” it becomes even more challenging.
The good news is that there are clear true and tested answers to those questions. That doesn’t mean being a good manager is easy but it is at least learnable and teachable independent of personality types.
So let’s get into the meat (or tofu in case you are vegan) of the topic. All you need to know is contained in two main sections. In the first I talk about the key responsibilities of any manager and the second covers the basic tools and blueprint that is teachable and repeatable.
Table of content:
- Key responsibilities of a manager
- Results
- Retention
- Talent aquisition
- Methods & Tools to be an effective manager
1. Key responsibilities of a manager
As a manager you have three key responsibilities
- Getting results for the company/business you work in
- Ensure employee retention
- Talent acquisition
From a business perspective the company expects you to deliver results. This is your number one task! Don’t kid yourself in anything else. You could be loved by everyone of your employees but if you can’t achieve anything with your team, you are a liability and not effective. On the other hand you can achieve results by being a raging dick, which usually leads to high turn-over of employees and therefore causing undesirable high costs for a company. Which is the reason why retention is the second of your key responsibilities as manager.
The third is talent acquisition (mainly in growth phases). For simplicity sake of our discussion I will focus on results and retention as those are the most relevant cornerstones for most managers. In case you want to learn more about hiring the right talent have a look at this article.
Now that we clarified your key responsibilities, results & retention, let’s discuss how to achieve this.
Luckily for us there have been many studies done on how to be effective in this complex role and there is a pretty much a consensus on the key building blocks, which are:
- Building trust/relationship with your team members
- Communicate about performance
- Ask for more and help team members grow
- Push work down (important to increase company efficiency.. more on this later)
Looking at these points you might think “Well… that sounds easy enough, but how the hell do I actually do this?” then you are not alone. Chances are if you are already in a managing role you found your own system or techniques that you deploy. If you have something that works well for you, great! I am not going to ask you to change it. However, if you are like me you likely want to learn more and increase your toolbox.
💡 A word on retention: It is important to understand that the deciding factor of employee retention has not much to do with the company itself but with their direct work experience. This experience is always related to the team and the people team members are interacting with. As a manager and leader you play a massive role in shaping this experience. High turn-over indicates a problem with building relationships and having a good team atmosphere which is on YOU!
2. Methods & Tools to be an effective manager
a. Building trust/Relationship with your team members
Building trust with your team members is the most critical task on your todo list if you want to be successful as a manager. A tested and reliable and replicable way to build this is by conducting regular one on one meetings (or 1:1) with each team member.
When setting up 1:1s it is important to follow below best practices to get the desired results. There are also some pitfalls that could render these regular meetings ineffective and even cause adverse effects so ensure to check out the mistakes section!
Rollout
Share in your team meeting that you will start in 3 weeks to roll out regular 1:1 meetings with the team. The meetings are for the team members to address their topics and needs and get planned time from you.
The 3 weeks in advance will help you find slots in your busy calendar. Ideally you select slots that fit for you and share them with the team… they can then select one of the schedules that you offer (example if you have 14 team members, you could offer 18 slots). Share them in an email, and you will see once the first person picks a date you will get the rest of the slots filled fast.
Fundamentals for success
- Conduct
- Who talks?
1:1s are about your employee. NOT YOU. Employees should always talk first, otherwise, the meeting will be perceived as just another meeting and will not give you the results that you are looking for.- Since you invite for the meeting, you open the meeting but you should immediately hand over to the employee: “Hello XXX, nice to see/hear you. What do you have on your plate? / Do you have any topics you would like to discuss? / Do you have anything you would like to share?…”
- Take meeting minutes and follow up on action items that are assigned to you. You should have the past minutes with you in the next 1:1
- Who talks?
- Frequency, Length & Scheduling
- Frequency: Ideal is once per week,
every second week is not ideal but will still give you better results than not doing them. A week is the typical work increment and we tend to not really know what happens in two weeks. Therefore most questions or alignment need occurs within this time frame. - Length: A 1:1 should be set up for 30 minutes.
These 30 minutes are split into the following agenda- First 10 minutes: Employee talks and addresses his needs
- Second 10 minutes: Manager talks and addresses his needs
- Third 10 minutes: Discussion about future & plans
- The agenda is only there to give you a rough guidance, the most critical point is that the employee can address her/his points to you. In case your team member talks more than his or her allowed time, don’t stop them.. If they talk for 28 minutes good! Let them.. the meeting is about them not you!
- Scheduling: 1:1s have to be scheduled regularly. Set them up as regular, fixed appointments in your and your employees calendar! Do not attempt to do them on the fly when you have time. This is not appreciated at all by people and leads to detrimental results in building relationships.
- Frequency: Ideal is once per week,
Mistakes to avoid at all costs
- Not having a regular schedule!
- Scheduling it only once per month or less than every second week!
- Talking first! You risk to take over the meeting and studies show that in this case, team members will perceive it as not useful to them!
- Interrupting or stopping team members from talking to follow the 10/10/10 agenda (it is only a guideline should the team members be less forthcoming with topics.. which usually tends to happen in the beginning of rolling 1:1s out)!
If you want to learn even more about regular alignment meetings have a look at this article.
Now that you know how to build a relationship with your team members let’s discuss how to discuss performance and influence it.
b. Communicate about performance
Communication about performance is crucial to get results and foster behaviours in our team members that are positive and productive. To do this we need to give feedback. Now, if you are like me, giving feedback can feel challenging and is probably something you have no blueprint for. Before going into a clear blueprint let’s take a minute and discuss what we want to achieve with feedback.
💡 By giving feedback we do not want to punish or praise past observed situations, instead we want to influence future behaviour.
Feedback is in many cases only given if something goes wrong. I would encourage you to not do this and give a lot more positive than negative feedback. Yes, it takes work to notice the things that are done well, but once you practice it you will see it easily and notice over time that praising what goes well will lead to repeating good behaviours.
💡 A word on excellence: It has been proven repeatedly that excellence does not come from being the most well-rounded individual. Instead, it is focusing on honing your strengths. It is ok for talent to have edges. If you want to foster excellence in your team focus on the strengths of your employees and less on the weaknesses.
Rollout
Inform your team that you will start giving feedback and explain how you will do it. The blueprint to follow is in short (look at the blueprint section for a detailed description):
- Ask if you can give feedback
- Describe observe behaviour
- Describe impact behaviour had on you or others
- Formulate what you would like to see in the future (more of the same or a change)
For the first 8 weeks only focus on giving positive feedback (ideally only start this once you performed 1:1s already for 3-6 months). The main reason for this is that you are likely still uncomfortable with how to give feedback and how to formulate feedback is not yet second nature to you. If you deviate from the script too early you will likely give negative feedback in a way that will not lead to the desired results. After you gave positive feedback for 8 weeks, start with adding negative feedback or better feedback for improvement.
Blueprint/Script for giving feedback
To become good at giving feedback and getting the desired results you will need to practice this. I would recommend to follow this blueprint/script closely. Once you get comfortable with the model you will be able to give feedback in roughly 30 seconds… This can be done timely and often which is one of the keys to good feedback.
- Ask if you can give feedback
- Feedback needs to be accepted or wanted in order to be effective. Someone that does not want to receive feedback will simply ignore what you have to say.
- Before rolling out your blueprint, tell your team that you will ask and that they can say no. If someone says no, accept it. The good news is, that very few people say no and even the ones that say no, usually come back to you after a few hours and want to know what you wanted to share (curiosity killed the cat 😉 )
- Phrases you could use:
- Can I share an observation with you?
- Can I give you some feedback?
- Do you mind if I share some feedback with you?
- Describe observed behaviour
- Only give feedback in observed behaviour and never try to assume intentions! You cannot possible know what goes on in anyones head. As soon as you start guessing you open yourself up for defensive arguments
- Use the following sentence structure to observe behaviour: “When you <behaviour and time/occurence>…”. Examples: When you greeted the agitated customer with a friendly smile yesterday… / When you delivered the animated presentation in the stakeholder meeting today…
- Describe the positive or negative impact the behaviour has
- add the description of the impact or perceived result the observed behaviour had
- Example: “When you greeted the agitated customer with a friendly smile yesterday it immediately set the tone for a friendly and productive conversation and put the customer at ease”
- Example: “When you delivered the animated presentation in the stakeholder meeting today everyone in the room was engaged and it resulted in great discussions and clear decisions. ”
- Formulate what you would like to see in the future
- Positive: “Thank you!/Keep it up!/This is great, keep it going!”
- Negative: “Could you change this?/How could you improve this?”
💡 The key for getting improvement on negative behavior is that the employee or team member commits to improvement. This becomes very important if despite several feedback attempts no improvement is observed as this means the issue is now no longer the specific behavior but the broken commitment.
Pointers & guardrails to follow
Now that you have a clear blueprint let’s talk about some guardrails that will help you make this successful.
- Only give feedback if you can chuckle about the situation.
Don’t give feedback if you are angry or frustrated about something. You will likely not be able to state the situation in a way that the recipient will be able to accept it. It is better in such a situation to let it go and either give no feedback or wait till you are calm again. - Give only positive feedback in the first 8 weeks.
Practice makes perfect. Since the system is new to you make sure to give only positive feedback during the first 8 weeks to become comfortable with how to phrase it. Furthermore, you will practice watching out for actions that are performed well, which is something that most of us are not accustomed to doing but is critical for effective feedback. - If feedback has been given 6 times in a row without seeing improvements then systemic feedback on commitment issues need to be addressed.
Let’s talk about this difficult case (the good news is that this happens very rarely). In case a team member does not improve or change their behavior despite consistent and continuous feedback we need to have a different discussion. If you followed the footprint then we now need to discuss with the team member the bigger issue which is that you can not trust the employee’s commitment to you. So in the next discussion, you need to highlight that we are now talking about serious infraction that has a different quality. The feedback is now focusing on keeping commitments and being reliable. In some cases coaching might be required, more to this in the next section. - Try to give feedback as immediately as possible.
Don’t wait longer than a week (before your next 1:1). We probably all heard that we should give immediate feedback. In the real world, it is often not possible to do it right away. This is no problem. Just make sure to give feedback as early as possible. If you need a timeframe, then use it before the next 1:1. Why one week? Most of us think in work weeks if it takes longer the feedback will likely not be effective as the observed situation will likely not be vivid in the mind of the feedback recipient. - Let your team know how you will go about feedback and what system you use.
It is a good idea to be completely upfront and open with your team on how you will give feedback. Don’t worry, it will not cease its effectiveness. Studies have shown that feedback recipients need to be active in the process and knowing it helps to be mentally engaged. Furthermore, it is important that everyone who is about to receive feedback is aware that they can decide if they want to receive feedback or not. - The past is the past, we want to influence future behaviourRemind yourself that feedback is about influencing future behaviour and not judging past actions.
💡 A word on negative feedback: We have a tendency to focus on negative traits. If you cannot discuss a negative observation without emotions on your side I would strongly recommend letting it go. In my experience, it will likely not occur again or resolve itself. Giving negative feedback when you are emotional will lead to defensive posturing on the recipient side and render the feedback basically useless as we won’t see acceptance. There is one dichotomy which are serious infractions or unethical behavior. Such topics need to be always addressed immediately.
c. Ask for more / Coaching
Part of your job is to get more and better results out of your people. To do so you will need to be able to coach people in areas that they need to improve. This goes beyond giving feedback. The challenge here is that you will have to coach topics that you yourself might not be completely familiar with. Luckily, it is less complex than you might think and you can again follow a clear blueprint.
Once the need for coaching is identified it makes sense that you schedule one or two specific meetings for the initial goal definition and brainstorming. The rest of the alignment can be easily done in the regular 1:1 meetings to track progress and adapt the continuously changing goals.
Here are the concrete steps you can follow for good coaching:
- Define the improvement goal together.
Sit together with your team member and agree on a clear measurable goal in a realistic time frame. It is often better to add a little bit more time to the initial estimate. An example of a goal would be: ”Improve on not interrupting colleagues during meetings & discussions. To test the improvement you will participate in the weekly operations call in 6 months and provide 5 contributions without interrupting anyone else” (ideally pick a concrete date) - Brainstorm and decide on learning options and material.
In the first iteration simply brainstorm what learning material and ways of learning are out there (everything goes… courses, books, in-person training, or other ideas). Once you have an initial list decide together on two or three sources. Every person learns differently so it is a good idea to really let your employee pick at least one of the learning sources. If you have one that you think is really good it is completely fine that you add it to the list. - Assign short-term deliverables for the immediate next week and not longer.
When you are coaching it is important to keep iterations short. Forget about assigning detailed long-term plans. You will likely have to adapt what works and what does not which is why focusing on a delivery horizon of a work week makes the most sense. It also keeps your effort lower than creating complex unrealistic plans. Therefore it is best to assign short-term deliverables such as:- Sent me a picture of the book you orderd by Thursday 11 am
- Sent me a 3 sentence summary of the first chapter of the book by Monday 3pm
- Use your 1:1 for reporting and assigning new deliverables.
Use your regular 1:1 to review last week’s deliverables and decide together on the outcomes for this week. If something does not work simply adjust your plan and pick different learning sources and approaches. - Give feedback on achieved or failed deliverablesUse the feedback model to give feedback when goals are met or if improvements or changes are required.
- Repeat as required and till improvement goal is met
d. Delegation
Delegation is a powerful tool that leads to increased productivity across an organization and allows members of the organization to grow into new and more responsibility. It is inevitable that you will get more tasks over time, let’s assume the CEO of a company decides to take on a new big client that brings in a lot of money. To do so the CEO will have to free up capacity. She will do so by delegating some of her tasks to the next manager in line and so on. This trickle-down effect will lead to changes in tasks & priorities and is a natural occurrence that is required to keep increasing overall productivity.
In theory delegation sounds easy, but in the real world many struggle with the details on how to do it properly. Let’s break it down to a system you can follow.
- Identify the right responsibilities to delegate.
Before you can delegate you need to decide on what you should delegate. To identify the right tasks there are a couple of exercises you can perform to get to a good answer:- Create a list of your big and small responsibilities that consume your time. It is usually better to delegate several less time-intensive items across your directs than one big item to one team member as each of your directs will be already quite busy.
- Consider what your direct wants, needs, and is good at. Depending on this pick one of the tasks you identified in your earlier exercise.
- Use the Venn diagram and identify which of your tasks/responsibilities align best between your organization, yours, and your team member’s needs (Items that fall in A, B are preferred as the organization has priority… C is acceptable if there is no guidance on an organizational level.)
💡 Consider: By principle, you should only delegate things that you know how to do so you can train your directs on how to do them. It is also not a good idea to delegate a new task that you have been assigned by your manager. Delegation is about pushing existing responsibilities down and not simply passing work through.
- State the desire for help to your direct report.
Once you identified a topic that makes sense to delegate ask your direct for support. Tell him/her briefly about the task you would like to hand over. - Explain your direct report why you are asking him/her.
Did you pick them because they are good at XYZ? Or because you think they like to do this kind of task? Maybe you picked him/her due as you see it as a growth opportunity? - Ask for specific acceptance of the new topic.
Ask if they are willing to take over this specific responsibility. It is ok if direct reports object or have concerns. If there is an objection try to figure out if you can resolve it. Respect that saying no is an option. In that case, look for someone else. - Describe the responsibility or task in detail once your direct accepts the topicIt is important that you clarify
- what & how to do it
- the timelines and the effort it usually takes. Keep in mind that it will take your direct report likely a bit more time than you to do it as you are already used to the task
- address deadline expectations
- share the expected quality standards and review points
- Give credit and visibility.
Once your employee takes over the task/responsibility make sure he or she also gets the credit for the work. It is good for their growth and motivation to get exposure to the various groups in your company.
If you found this article helpful, then maybe you are also interested in guiding principles for new leaders.
In case you are looking for books I can especially recommend the 4 books below for practical leadership and management advise:
- The effective manager – Mark Horstman
- Extreme Ownership – Jocko Willink & Leif Babin
- Dichotomy of Leadership – Jocko Willink & Leif Babin
- Hal Moore on Leadership