The manager skills
What managers do all day, and how great managers multiply themselves
What do managers do all day?
Before I became a manager, I thought my career could go either way. When I was talking about the promotion that would ultimately be to a manager position, my then-boss asked — do you want to manage people.
I thought the answer was probably yes, but “managing people” had never been an explicit goal and I didn’t want to hang the promotion on whether he thought I was ready for people management, so I was noncommittal. I talked about how I thought I was important to have parallel career opportunities for individual contributors and managers, and that regardless of which track this promotion took me towards, my work warranted a promotion.
I really did think that, at the time. And I still think that it’s important to build career opportunities that let individual contributors advance and thrive.
But I have a new appreciation for what it means to be a manager.
In High Output Management, former Intel CEO Andy Grove argues that a manager’s productivity should be measured by the output of their organization. The premise of management is that one person can multiply the effectiveness of a group of people, and that’s why significant career advancement usually includes managing people.
Before managing people, I thought of management as necessary bureaucracy — the people who spent all day in meetings so that the folks doing the real work could get stuff done.
Or else I thought it was all about empathy, making your team feel supported, coaching them in their work and decision making.
And it is about those things, but I underestimated two skills that I think are at the heart of effective management. They are:
Rallying other teams around your cause
Making the people on your team more effective
Managers multiply their impact in and outside of an organization by coordinating (by multiple meanings of that word) larger groups of people towards a common goal. As I’ve watched people I respect become managers and rise in their organizations, many have started to express a similar idea.
What you know is less important than what you can get done.
To the knowledge-obsessed nerd in me — the one who buys books like eating breakfast and keeps a ranking of used book stores, who has been known to take entire weeks off to focus on study/practice and investigates new topics by reverse-engineering syllabi from university websites — this was a tough pill to swallow.
But that doesn’t make it less true, and the manager skills are at the heart of what you can get done (as a manager or a non-manager).
Rallying other teams around your cause
Your team needs work from other teams to be successful. Name the project. You need help.
Great managers are great at rallying support from other teams, regardless of level. A great CMO operates at the C-level to coordinate support with sales, product, engineering, and other groups. A great marketing manager works with the other marketing managers to coordinate campaigns.
“You need to work with other teams” doesn’t sound revolutionary, because duh — you work with other teams all the time.
The difference is that a great manager is always thinking about how to advocate for their team in the organization. Particularly uptight people (ahem, no one that I know and definitely not me, definitely not) will have a strategy for internal communication that’s at least as detailed as the work they do externally.
A great manager often has lots of meetings, but the purpose of those meetings is (or should be) to gather information. What do other managers care about? What do they struggle with? Where are their successes? What is their team best at, and where are their gaps?
Information is how a manager builds relationships and influence in an organization.
When you know what other people struggle with, you can find opportunities to help them. They are later more likely to help you.
When you spot successes on other teams, you can find a way to contribute your team’s expertise to build on that success. This creates better external results and good will.
When you understand what other people care about, it’s easier to sell your team’s ideas to the people who need convincing
The “how to get stuff done in an organization” playbook is huge (and wordily named) and there are a ton of plays a manager can make to help their team. A project is starting but the kickoff meeting feels scattered? Summarize the information in a brief. A quarterly planning process is starting? Get involved early to help decide how the planning process will run.
I tell my team that our ability to do great work is a function of:
People thinking we’re good at our jobs
People thinking our jobs are hard
The more people feel like we know what we’re doing (and what we’re doing is hard), the less often they come with spur of the moment “ideas” — every manager’s favorite — and the more able we are to approach new situations as experts.
(By the way, a whole other genre of influence is how to manage incoming ideas. Sometimes that means helping, sometimes it means elegantly saying no, and sometimes it means setting the agenda for another team — which can be difficult to do well — so that they work on that stuff instead of coming with new ideas. A whole other topic).
Building the perception of your team and rallying support is easier when you celebrate your team’s successes.
Whenever you do good stuff, share it with someone. When your team brings you good news, tell them to share it with your department. When you get good feedback from a customer, shout it from the rooftops.
Make this a rule. Success leads to more success — because everyone wants to be attached to a project that looks like it’s going to be successful.
Celebrating successes also makes the second skill of management easier.
Making your people more effective
Unfortunately there’s no form of people management that doesn’t involve people.
“Unfortunately” is a little tongue-in-cheek. I say unfortunately because people are wonderful and caring and hardworking and creative and inventive in ways that I can’t even imagine — but they’re also fickle and inconsistent, or maddeningly consistent in the wrong ways, or temperamental, or just generally confusing.
When you build a team that starts to come together, you can see the flash of lightbulbs going off in every meeting. You the manager get to step back and watch an idea go from a vague notion to something really cool and solid, simply by being pressed through the force of 10 brains.
But getting to that point isn’t always easy. People management is hard in obvious ways and in less obvious ways.
You’ll hear about empathy and how important empathy is and stories of people who celebrated their empathetic manager.
What you won’t always hear is that empathy can go too far — it’s possible to make yourself the lightning rod for negative feelings on your team, which takes a hefty emotional toll and isn’t good for you or anyone else. You can be celebrated for an empathetic decision, but there are times where empathy is hard to distinguish from permissiveness, and there are times when you have to push people in ways they are uncomfortable being pushed (even though it’s for their own long-term gain).
Managers can fall into the trap of answering questions when asked. Which seems entirely reasonable until your team starts to ask you questions instead of making decisions on their own.
Managers can make too many decisions, or over focus on the team member who is doing well, or unintentionally micromanage when priorities are unclear. They often have to translate bad news from high up in the organization (whether that’s simply that work needs to be scrapped, or more serious news related to the company).
A manager’s job is to make their team more effective. I happen to think that can’t be achieved without empathy, but “empathy” has also become a popular catch-all term that I don’t think catches everything a great manager does. Making your team more effective means:
Creating systems that give the right amount of structure. In the six fencing classes I took 15 years ago, they taught that you should hold the sword like a baby bird, firmly enough that it can’t escape but not so firm that it dies. Your team’s systems need to have guardrails to ensure quality while still allowing creativity.
Building the skill of feedback. Forget the “compliment sandwich,” which so often comes off as insincere. Think about what elements of work you can praise — because your praise makes those elements more likely to happen again. If giving negative feedback, give as much context as possible. But negative feedback gets too much attention because of its visibility. You have hundreds of opportunities to praise even small wins, and praising the good when it happens makes it easier to talk about the bad when it happens, not to mention creating a happier, more effective, more resilient team.
Having your team members advocate for their own work, even when they are uncomfortable speaking up. It is easier for the manager to share ideas, but people will become more invested in their own work (and develop the skill of advocating for themselves) if they present their own ideas.
And more, of course. People management is difficult and messy because people can be difficult and messy, and because managers can be difficult and messy, and because managers are also people, which causes the difficulty and messiness to compound.
Managing through that messiness to increase the performance of an entire team is why managers are so valuable to a company — and why careers often advance through management.