I’m now officially a manager for a team. Yikes! I feel so unready. I have a “worker bee” mindset. So, fellow SDMBers, what do you think I need to know and do to be a good manager? Fire away! And thinks in advance for your help.
The book I found most helpful in this context was The First-Time Manager by Loren Belker. (Mine was a first or second edition, don’t know about the later ones.)
Do I have the blog for you! Ask A Manager is all about life at work, and there’s a lot there about how to be a good manager. Good luck!
I have 3 managers that work for me, and this is what I expect out of them:
Show up on time
If big things come up, call me
Don’t be dumb (seriously)
Obviously me, and the owner of the company you work for aren’t the same people…unless…
But seriously, I think as long as you work hard, show up, and do things that are in the businesses best interest, you should do great
“You manage things. You lead people.” - Grace Hopper
“You manage systems and equipment but you have to lead people.” - my preferred variant from an old company commander
I prefer that variant because it’s less binary. People are part of the systems. Trying to manage systems for efficiency and results affects your people. There’s frequently a confusing middle ground where you have to consider both managing and leading aspects. Never forget that leadership aspect. Your people aren’t mindless automatons that just follow your orders. They think and feel; on the best of days we are all quasi-rational. You can get the best from them when you remember that they are people and treat them like they are.
3 Ts - Training, Tools, Time.
Make sure your people are trained, and know how to do their jobs effectively.
Make sure your people have everything they need to do their jobs effectively.
Make sure your people have the time to do their jobs effectively.
Listen to them if they need assistance in any of these areas.
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You can do the job better than your reports. Don’t.
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Whenever possible, protect your people from your managers. Make sure they have what they need to get the job done in terms of time and money and tools. This may be hard for your, but that is why you’re getting the big bucks.
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Listen. Manage by walking around. That doesn’t mean drop into someone’s office five times a day, but don’t make them come to you. Saying you have an open door policy isn’t good enough.
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Give immediate feedback - for bad stuff but especially for good stuff. That makes performance reviews (which are going to be your worst job) much easier. Don’t surprise someone at the end of year by saying how they should have done better. If you see a problem, tell them right away. And if they do something good, tell them right away also.
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Know what your people are doing. I was on a committee to make our reviews better, and we did focus groups. One of the biggest complaints was when managers wrote up what someone did and got it all wrong. You don’t have to know the fine details, but you do need to know the basics. And what the hardest jobs are.
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Make the extra effort. My center had a rewards program for doing something kind of special. Nothing big, but something beyond the call. I got my people a lot of these rewards, not from being pushy but just from being often the only manager who gave enough of a shit to nominate them.
Bottom line - sometimes you may have to stand up to your managers for your reports. That doesn’t mean being unrealistic - if the company is in a rocky place and people have to be let go, they have to be let go. It means pushing back on things like unrealistic deadlines.
That should get you started.
Really? People for whom any of these things might be an issue get promoted to manager?
If you want horrid morale and high turn over, have a biweekly “you can all be replaced” meeting and encourage pitting your workers against each other for petty shit.
Human Resources does not exist to assist you or your employees. Their primary function is to protect the company against liability by the most effective means possible regardless of whether it deals with the actual problem. If you have to interact with HR because of personnel issues, document everything before hand (in email if possible), and keep a record of all interactions, and specifically claims and promises made. If someone comes to you with an actionable complaint, follow the written company procedures and avoid getting pulled into an investigation. If you are not offered training or guidance for harassment or other complaints, request it and document the fact that you did so. If a complaint is made against you, however lacking in validity, document and consult an employment attorney; do not rely upon the company to protect your interests.
Other than that, give the people who work for you direction on priorities, make sure they have the tools and information neede to do their job, and run interference so they can do their work unimpeded, and as long as they are competent and reasonably motivated they can do their job just as well without you looking over their shoulder or giving detailed directions; if you have to do so, you need more or better people doing the work, and no effort on your part is going to fix that.
Stranger
Lots of good advice, thank you! I was wondering about more specific things like budgeting, contracts, staffing, personnel, scheduling, GANTT charts, MS Project. But I like the general advice as well.
Why do you have to worry about contracts, staffing, personnel or scheduling?
You have people that work for you, can you change that? Do they have different schedules they work? Are there contracts that you are now responsible for?
All that stuff depends on your company. The only time I used project management software was for a big project at Intel, which was a disaster.
Scheduling: know what your people can do. If someone seems to have free time, no trouble giving them another job. But if someone is loaded and needs to work on a high priority job, tell them which of the tasks assigned to them can slip. Otherwise they will try to do everything and everything will be late, or they will dump what they see as the lowest priority task which may not be what they see as the lowest priority task.
Staffing: Maybe your most important job. Are you hiring cookie cutter employees - tons of applicants any of which could be okay, or are you hiring specialized employees?
At my last company we were very specialized, and it was much easier to hire new PhDs than experienced people. I had a network of professors. I could get their best students as interns and finally as permanent employees. It worked very well. Hiring fast food workers would be different.
HR people are not evil, especially if you are a manager. When my company got bought I connected to an HR person from the old company who came over, and she gave me very valuable advice on how things really worked in the new company. It is true that HR represents the company not the employee, but remember you are now the company. It will pay to make some connections.
Multitasking is bullshit.
People can work on one thing at a time and do it well, or try to work on several things in tiny slices of time, pay the context switching penalty, and do them poorly.
Do everything you can to ensure that your reports are working on one task at a time and performing the task to the best of their abilities.
Your job as a manager is to ensure that your team knows which of the tasks are most important, and that they should work on the most important undone thing first before moving on to something else.
You, on the other hand, are going to be expected to multitask, particularly if you’re dealing with requests from multiple stakeholders. Your job as a manager is to eat that shit, suppress the cognitive dissonance, and create a clear outline of priorities for your team. Your value to the organization is your ability to synthesize your understanding of the work with your understanding of the business, and to generate from that synthesis a daily plan for your team to execute.
It’s more of an art than science really. Your manager is dealing with the same thing if they’re any good, just with a bigger budget.
As a manager, I felt my job was to make my employee’s job easier. Provide them with the tools they need to be successful, but most importantly get out of their way. Micromanaging is the worst possible thing you can do, especially as a new manager.
Clearly define what you want them to do, and for the most part, leave them alone and let them do it. Don’t all of sudden become aloof and distant now that you are “above” them. Try to remember what you liked about the managers that inspired you to do your best and do what they did. Your goal is to earn their respect and trust, not their friendship.
Yes
You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find people that meet those 3 criteria.
The first, very first situation that came up when I made manager, was “So and so is leaning on my car at lunch and smoking!!!”
Stay out of that kind of crap. Tell them to settle it themselves.
- Management is a service to the employees, make sure they have what they need to do their job.
- Firing people sucks, even when they deserve it.
- Status meetings are so everyone knows what everyone else is working on, which tasks are priorities, and to identify who needs help, and from whom. They should take less than 30 minutes a week.
Don’t play favorites or use the same go-to-guy every time. It doesn’t matter if he/she is the best thing ever to walk in your door, being seen as having a “pet” will kill morale at light speed and and unite everyone to a common goal; hating your guts.
First off, it’s not clear what your situation is. But if you were promoted from within the group you are now managing: you need to establish new “boundaries”. That is, you can no longer consider yourself “one of the team” and be as chummy as you used to be. This may be a tough pill to swallow, but it is important and necessary. (If you were plopped into a group you didn’t know before then this is not as much of an issue).
As to GANTT charts and MS Project, these are “tools” to help you - primarily to help you find out if you’re not going to meet your schedule. More important than the tools is for you to know/understand your goals (deliverables and schedule). Once you have a clear idea of where you’re going, you can use the tools to help you chart your progress and see how you’re doing toward reaching the goals.
I personally have only had limited success with MS Project (over many years). It kind of depends on the situation how well it “fits” for how your team operates. It wasn’t a good fit for the realities of my situation. Be warned, though, that MS Project can be a HUGE time sink. If you can get an admin to “manage” the changes, that would be ideal. You DO NOT want to let the time you spend on a “tool” to take away from the more important tasks of managing your team (being available to them).