Advice for new managers

Let us imagine, for a second, that you’ve just been promoted to your first management job. Having worked your way up the ranks, you are now responsible for a team, and are expected to produce grand strategic outcomes. You have been given people, resources, and authority to do it with. Now, it is up to you what you make of it.

In this scenario, I am always a little surprised when I discover new managers who have failed to work out their jobs have ceased to be about producing whatever deliverables their specialties have equipped them to produce.

They stagger along, trying to add their people responsibilities to their other portfolios of work, somehow reasoning that by being promoted to management, they have been anointed arch-guru of the specialisation, and must prove it day to day by leading from the front.

That is not leadership. Neither is it is management. What it is, in fact, is an abrogation of responsibility.

You see, I personally think that being given people responsibilities is a duty which commands all your attention, even if you happen, after all, to be the arch-guru of your particular profession. You hold people’s lives in your hands, and you are the one that has control over just under a third of their lives.

It is disrespectful not to give this task your number one priority.

Quite apart from that, though, it is also stupid. As a manager, your performance is judged entirely on the outputs of others. You get to create outcomes only because you motivate others to produce outcomes. Clearly, if you don’t spend enough time with the people you manage, you don’t get any of those outcomes and you fail yourself.

This leads to bad manager coping strategy number one: do all the work yourself. At least you’ll then get some output of the standard you require, though it will probably not save you from getting demoted. Single person outputs don’t scale.

This is why I am amused when people jokingly refer to managers as a teflon-man or teflon-woman. As if, somehow, it is wrong to delegate. The fact is, you are dead if you fail to delegate.

There is another intimidating thing for new managers, though, and that is the second priority you have, once you’ve made sure your people can do their jobs and are happy to do so. The second priority is producing a constant stream of decisions.

If there is one thing more irritating than not getting enough attention from your manager, it is getting that attention, but not being able to turn it into action. Managers spend so much of their time going to meetings so they can make decisions. It is unbelievable to me when they invest the time in meetings (time they could be spending with their people) and then fail to make any decision at all.

Oh, I know it is an easy trap to fall into. Having lost direct control over the deliverables you’re now responsible for, it takes a bit of courage to make a decision given you can’t have all the details in your mind. Neither can you do all the reading of everything your people give you before you make the call to get all the details in your mind. So you either guess at the decision and hope it is correct, or you rely on your people to tell you what decision you should make.

A good manager will always do the latter. Even a bad manager will probably not do the former.

Which leads us to bad manager coping strategy number 2: don’t make any decision at all. Failing to make a decision almost never has immediate significant repercussions. There is almost always time to delay and get away with it. Long term, of course, you’ll probably get demoted or fired because you haven’t achieved anything. But that’s the long term. At least you’re safe in the short term.

A failure to make decisions is usually the sign that there isn’t any trust between the manager and the people. It is another reason you get the manager trying to do the work of the whole team. They just aren’t comfortable exposing themselves to the unpredictability of anyone else.

The thing is, managers need to earn the trust of their people before they have much chance of being able to trust them to do the right thing on their behalf. People who trust their manager will always do the right thing by their manager. People who don’t, on the other hand, will tend to do what results in the best outcomes for themselves, which may or may not be the best thing for the manager.

Managers earn trust by extending trust first. That’s necessary, because managers have an unfair authority asymmetry over the people they manage. When you have someone in a position of power over you, it is inevitable you won’t trust what they do with that power until they’ve proved they have your best interests at heart.

Which is the reason why I am frequently staggered (yes, staggered) to see managers figuratively punching up their staff to get things done. Sometimes, even, raising their voices for emphasis, or waving fingers in faces. Why would they ever need to do that? They already have an unfair authority advantage over their people, so why on earth underline it? All it does is remove trust.

Here is bad manager coping strategy number three: You don’t have control over your deliverables, and you don’t know enough to make decisions. You feel exposed, so make sure to reinforce your sense of importance by making everyone around you know you are their manager. It will make you feel like you have a modicum of control, even though things will be spinning right out of control behind the scenes.

I know many of you reading this will be nodding sagely at all this advice, and wondering how you can put this post in front of your new manager. For you, too, I have some advice:

Your new manager is going to be really terrible as a manager until he or she has learnt the lessons above. Whether or not they realise it now, they’re going to have to learn them, and if they don’t they’ll always be a bad manager.

You can help them learn by setting up the situations which let them demonstrate they can trust your work. By creating scenarios that let them prove they are worthy of your trust. And by avoiding those times where they’ll feel it necessary to assert their authority. This will be painful and annoying, I know.

But the thing is, if your new manger doesn’t learn these lessons early enough, their bad habits will be fused to them forever. It will be another bad manager released to the wild making work miserable for the rest of us.

That, surely, is something it is worth investing a little effort in to avoid.

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[Gordon Rae]

It's the truth. Every word of it.