I still remember my first time managing people, and how woefully underprepared I was for the job. Now that I am further along on in my career I have seen great people get promoted from individual contributor to manager, provided no (or minimal training), and then struggle as a manager. Having someone that is the best at doing task A (hence the promotion), and assuming that they’ll immediately be amazing at task Z without training or help is crazy!
First, I believe it’s important to ground ourselves in what the job of the manger is at a high level. Pulling from Andy Grove’s High Output Management book, managers should:
Increase the output of their organization and neighboring organizations they influence.
That’s it! But think about it–if you make everyone work 80 hours a week, that would be a short term output boost, but everyone is likely to quit on you, thereby reducing your output long term. If your team isn’t engaged, they won’t work with as much passion, and will get less work done throughout the day. Understanding how to maximize productivity of each employee, whose motivations and goals are different, is nuanced and extremely difficult.
Before going further into my definition I first want to highlight that I have observed two models that both work, although I use the second myself.
- Manager/Team Lead as independent job functions. They are a pair that typically oversees up to 16 direct reports.
- Manager that handles both manager and lead responsibilities, who typically handle up to 10 direct reports.
I break Manager Responsibilities into three categories:
- People Management
- Work Product Management
- Operations Management
People Management
This is all about creating an environment that maximizes a person’s ability to achieve to the best of their ability. Understanding what’s going on in people’s lives is critically important (significant other broke up with them will impact work, it’s important to be sympathetic to situations), and sharing how their behaviors are impacting teammates can be difficult conversations to have. I once had to ask an employee to shower and put on deodorant after riding their bike to work due to Body Odor complaints from coworkers.
People Management is about building the team, driving morale and career growth, and aligning with company values and culture. This is the area of focus where you are working with your team on the “people” side (vs. the work product side). Duties include the following:
- Hire: Finding the right talent that matches our values and mission statement is a big part of a healthy organization.
- Serve your team: A set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals and ultimately builds better teams by being open and honest.
- Performance Management: employees who repeatedly exceed expectations need to be recognized and promoted while those who fall short of expectations must improve or exit the business.
- Communication Management: managers are conduits of communication both to their employees (down), to their managers (up), and with peers (across).
- Engagement: managers are the most important factor in determining employee engagement.
- Inter-departmental relationships: Good relationships with other internal teams make work happen more effectively and improve our customer experience.
- Demonstrate Leadership: leadership gives the direct report a vision for the future and connects their contributions to the big picture. Employees who are connected to the vision and understand the greater impact of their contributions are more engaged.
- Provide Feedback: be aware of behaviors and interactions to provide positive and corrective feedback. Examples, how a direct interacts with peers, events outside of work that may impact work directly or indirectly, and proper time management.
- Professional Development: helping the employee grow and develop to be an amazing talent regardless of the specific job function.
- Weekly One-on-One: a weekly meeting with IC (individual contributor) is key to developing and maintaining the relationship with a direct.
Work Product Management
This involves digging in and providing active management to your team members on how they do their jobs. The only way you can help your team get better is by being there to help them and to actively review work and provide recommendations on how to improve!
- Work Product Feedback: Everyone can improve. Managers must provide work product feedback to help identify areas of excellence as well as areas of improvement to enable changes necessary for improvement to occur.
- Management Work Review: Being aware of what is happening with our customers and the work we are doing for them is key to success for our team.
- Escalation Point for Direct Reports: The expectation is that each direct report can work independently, ask peers for assistance when blocked, and then go to the manager if still unable to resolve.
Operations Management
Within a start-up, there are endless opportunities to improve and make an impact, not only for your team but for the organization as a whole. Sure members need to follow processes, but in a start-up, you also need to be creating those processes, driving cross functional alignment, understanding the actual capacity of your team, and predict when your team will exceed their capacity. All of these tasks and more are part of operations management:
- Team Meetings: sharing of information between the direct reports increases each individual’s knowledge and improves their ability to proactively manage their respective work product.
- Process Management: managers can improve productivity by maintaining/enforcing existing processes, ensuring processes achieve the intended results, identifying opportunities for improvement within existing processes, and identifying potential for new processes. The customer experience must always be top priority in all processes.
- Enablement: directs need to be trained on behavior, processes, and products to maximize productivity.
- Workload Management: managers must also be reviewing and owning the larger outcomes their team is delivering. Ensuring queues, tasks, and commitments are all meeting or exceeding expectations, and working to improve performance against today’s standard.
- Reporting and Auditing: reporting, with continual analysis of key data is vital to running a successful team.
- One-Off Activities: in spite of best efforts, managers need to be flexible and the company will leverage managers’ skills and expertise to just get the job done.
Time Allocation
Given the above job expectations, assuming 10 headcount maps to the following estimated weekly time commitment
Downloadable Presentation
I’ve attached a PDF for the presentation that goes into each bulleted item above in further detail. Please let me know what you think!