Tenets of Management Design: Managers are created not found
In this post, I continue to explore the tenets of the new field I’m pioneering, “Management Design.” Management Design is a response to the bad existing designs that are currently used in creating managers. These current designs describe how managers tend to be created by accident, rather than by design, or that efforts to develop quality and effective managers fall short.
Today’s tenet of Management Design: Managers are created not found
In an examination of the other “current designs”, there is a tendency to focus on the hiring process.
–Find someone with experience as a manager
–Find someone who acts like a manager
–Find someone who did well as an individual contributor
–Find someone with technical expertise in the area being managed
Here’s a goal for managers: Create a system that doesn’t rely on finding top performers — you’ll get more top performers this way
It seems that many organizations are on the quest for finding top performers. People who have the ability to get the job done, to do what no one else can do, and really “exceed expectations.” This quest makes sense intuitively: Find top performers, and your organization will succeed. After all, who would want an organization full of mid-range and lower performers?
But here’s the problem: When you are on the quest for finding top performers, you risk ignoring the quest for systemically creating top performers.
Here’s the quest to find top performers. This quest tends to involve finding great hires, offering big bonuses, providing quick promotions, and conducting annual reviews that attempt to identify who is great and who is not-so-great. In this quest, top performers are found and elevated.
Then there’s the quest to create top performers. This quest is more boring. It involves creating systems and processes that ensure basic level performance, creating teamwork that creates better output than any one individual, having a positive work environment that fosters creativity, productivity and collaboration, and opportunity to express ideas and see them through without political ramifications.
Performance Feedback is about next time
Here’s a scenario: Jim reacts badly to a new change in the organization. He starts telling all of his co-workers how much he doesn’t like the change, and discusses ways to undermine or avoid the change. This causes increased doubt in the change, and even causes confusion as to whether the change is actually going to happen.
Jim manager has the option of either addressing or ignoring Jim’s reaction. If the manager addresses it, this would be a performance feedback conversation.
However, many managers avoid the performance feedback conversation. One reason for this is the manager may believe that Jim’s behavior on the job is deeply embedded in the employee’s personality, and the employee’s actions are innate to their very being. So a basic thesis emerges that “Jim is just like that.” There is the belief that Jim just won’t change. So no performance feedback conversation is necessary.
But this is an untested thesis. Jim did react badly to the news, but does this mean that he has to react the same way next time? The answer is—you don’t know until you have the performance feedback conversation.
If you don’t have the performance feedback conversation, the Jim will definitely behave in the exact same way should a similar set of circumstances occur. His behavior was “negatively reinforced,” meaning that he received no information that his behavior was incorrect and he received no adverse reaction from his manager. In fact, his behavior may have also been “positively reinforced” when the other employees start agreeing with his arguments about how he doesn’t like the change. The manager, by being silent, is letting the other forces of behavior determine Jim’s behavior in the workplace.
So the basic thesis that Jim “always is like that” only is true if he never receives coaching or feedback on what he should do instead. And when the manager does not step in, then for sure this thesis will be proven correct.
The Art of Providing Feedback: Banish the use of “always”
Here’s a tip for managers: Banish the word “always” from your vocabulary.
The Manager by Design blog frequently writes about how to give performance feedback. Performance feedback is an important skill for any manager, as it is one of the quickest ways to improve performance of individuals on your team.
One particularly useless word in the art of performance feedback is the word “always.” Here are some examples of where a manager mistakenly uses “always” in performance feedback:
You’re always late
You always make bad decisions
You always come up short
These are examples of bad performance feedback, since they are not behavior-based, but the word that makes these examples particularly bad is the word “always.” That’s because “always” implies that the employee’s performance is eternal and permanent. And that undermines the whole point of performance feedback, which is to change the way your employees are performing, and have them do something better instead.
Let’s start by removing the word always from the three examples above:
You’re late
You made a bad decision
You came up short
OK, these are still pretty bad, but at least this feedback didn’t put an eternal and permanent brand on the employee as “always late,” “always bad at making decisions,” and “always underperforming.” At least without the word “always”, the feedback is isolated to the once incident, making it possible for the feedback to be more specific and immediate.
Removing the word “always” allows you to focus on the particular event you are giving feedback on, and not make a generalization about the person’s permanent character.
Removing the word “always” allows you to support the thesis about “late” “bad decisions” and “coming up short” with more details. By discussing the details, you at least have entry to discussion as to why this happened, and identify the forces that went into the performance.
Removing the word “always” implies that this bad event can be turned around and the next time the performance can be improved.
When you use the word “always” in a feedback conversation, it implies that there is a permanence to the employee behavior the manager is ostensibly trying to correct. “Always” makes the performance feedback conversation useless, because instead of trying to get the employee to do something differently next time (be on time, make a good decision, meet the goal), it instead sounds like a relegation or banishment to permanent underperformance that the employee can never get out of.
That’s not good for either the manager or the employee, unless you want a chronically underperforming team that hates the manager.
Finally, by saying someone is “always late” or “always makes poor decisions”, it is inherently incorrect. If that employee can find one time he was on time, or one time she made a correct decision, then the manager is proven wrong. Not a good move if you want to be able to lead a team.
So to all of the managers out there – banish the word “always” from your vocabulary.
Have you ever been told that you “always” do something? What was that like?
Related articles:
The Art of Providing Feedback: Make it Specific and Immediate
An example of giving specific and immediate feedback and a frightening look into the alternatives
Examples of when to offer thanks and when to offer praise
What inputs should a manager provide performance feedback on?
Getting started on a performance log – stick with the praise
An example of how to use a log to track performance of an employee
Providing corrective feedback: Trend toward tendencies instead of absolutes
Behavior-based language primer for managers: How to tell if you are using behavior-based language
Behavior-based language primer for managers: Avoid using value judgments
Behavior-based language primer for managers: Stop using generalizations
How to use the team strategy document to help you manage your team
In my previous article, I provided four uses for how a manager can use a team strategy document (example here). Today, I provide four more! Today, I focus on the internal uses – within your team — of the team strategy document.
1. Use it as a basis for improving processes, workflows and operational innovation
When you have a team strategy document, it allows you to better understand what the team is trying to achieve. With this, now you can start looking at your team processes and workflows. It also affords the opportunity for you and the team to discuss areas of innovation and opportunity that your team can perform to better achieve the goals. With a strategy in place, you and your team are less likely to meander in the status quo and more likely to strive toward a higher level of performance.
2. Use it as a guideline for strategically placing work assignments and identifying gaps in team capability
The team strategy document identifies who is on your team. You can also add some biographical and work interest info about each member. For example: Walter – management consultant, performance improvement, innovative instructional design. With this info, you can look at the strategy, and think about the job roles of the people on your team, and identify the strategic placement of where the people on your team perform their job. If you have someone who is outgoing, and makes excellent connections with people on their first meeting, and if you have as strategic need to make new connections outside your team, perhaps you should put that person on the task of developing new relationships. Read more
How to use your team strategy document externally
In my previous article, I describe a practical way to create a team strategy document using the input of the team. I recommend the team strategy document (example here) have the following elements:
–The team name
–Who is on the team
–What the team is trying to accomplish/what it produces
–Guiding principles and expectations
–Metrics that rate the productivity and quality of the team
–Business metrics that the team could affect
–The plan for how to meet the metrics that rate the productivity of the team
Now that you have the document, here’s what you do with it. In today’s post, I’ll focus on the external uses:
1. Use it as a basis to share with your partner teams and customers
No team works in a vacuum, so if you are armed with a strategy, you can share your strategy with the teams you need to work with to be successful, either the partner teams you receive work from and hand off to, or customers that you provide deliverables to. Of course you need to customize it for the team you’re meeting with. Sharing your team strategy will help your partner teams understand what your priorities are, what you can do to help them, and what your team capabilities are.
2. Use it as a basis for prioritizing work
Now that you have the team strategy in place, any work that comes or opportunities that present themselves should somehow fit within that strategy. Evaluate the opportunities against the strategy, as well as the reactive or legacy work that comes in. Many times a meeting invitation comes in where team members with legacy relationships naturally seem to require that they be involved. So the team member feels compelled to attend the meeting, even if it has nothing to do with the team strategy. As a manager, you have the ability to say, “No, you don’t have to attend that meeting and take on action items from it because I need you to work on the areas that are our team priorities.” It gives you a basis to keep your team focused on the priorities that you and your team agreed to.
How to create a team strategy document—use the team
In my previous post, I discussed the expectations that any team manager should have some sort of team strategy document. This is a key deliverable of any manager. OK, so how do you create one?
The operative word in the term “Team Strategy Document” is the word “Team.” Use your team to create the team strategy document. The manager who doesn’t use the team will create a manager strategy document, which will reflect the manager’s view of the world, and not the team. The team will ignore it, and therefore it is not a team strategy document.
So here’s how you do it:
1. Have a team meeting with the objective of creating a team strategy document
Don’t do the usual agenda items like updates. Those are likely boring anyway. This meeting should be focused on the team strategy document, and the objective is to have enough information to create a document.
2. Set up the meeting to be collaborative and brainstorming
Many team meetings end up being one person (perhaps the manager?) giving various status updates, news from above. This meeting needs to be different. It needs to require input from everyone on the team, even the quiet ones and the ones who possibly think team meetings are useless. Say, “In today’s meeting, I’m going to ask all of you to provide your input. This is an opportunity to think creatively and to get our ideas out. I welcome all ideas, and later we will hone it down and consolidate.”
In addition, find some tools to allow everyone on the team to provide input. If you’re serious about getting input from the entire team, do not just stand in front of the white board and ask people to shout suggestions during brainstorming. Instead, I suggest getting a pen and paper or Post-It notes in each person’s hand. Bring these tools to the meeting.
Teams should have a team strategy document. Here’s an example.
In my prior post, I discussed the need for team managers to produce deliverables that contribute to adding up to managing. Individual contributors are used to delivering specific items, but when they become mangers, a new manager can believe that there is no longer a need to produce deliverables. However, this is not true! A manager for any team should have at least one deliverable: That is a team strategy document.
It doesn’t matter what team you lead, if the team does not have a team strategy document, then it is the manager’s responsibility to create one. At the minimum, having a team strategy document is better than not having a team strategy document. Once a team manager has created a team strategy document, the manager has “delivered” something that is designed to increase the performance of the team. It is a step in the right direction, and a leading indicator of success. Not having a strategy document is a leading indicator of failure.
What is on a team strategy document? It can vary because there are so many teams out there, and so many ways to define strategy. But there should be some sort of the following elements on it:
The team name
Who is on the team
What the team is trying to accomplish/what it produces
Guiding principles and expectations
Metrics that rate the productivity and quality of the team
Business metrics that the team could affect
The plan for how to meet the metrics that rate the productivity of the team
Think of managing a team as a set of deliverables
In my prior article, I describe the dynamic of promoting a top individual contributor to management as a form of reward, only for it to turn into punishment. Yet this is not inevitable. You can find top individual contributors who become top managers. After all, if your top performer was able to learn one series of complex skills as an individual contributor, it stands to reason that the top performer is able to learn a second series of complex skills as a manager.
However, what are those skills? In individual contributor roles, people are expected to deliver something, and this is what they get used to as good work: “If I produce X, at quality Y, and in time frame Z, then I’ve done a good job.”
It’s a set of deliverables that tend to be pretty well defined.
Now the individual contributor becomes a manager with a team of three. The dynamic is suddenly, “Now there is four of me, and now my team needs to produce 4x at quality Y and in time-frame Z.
What the manager needs to produce is now ambiguous: Do you help produce all that stuff? If one person on the team is a lower performer, do I have to double my efforts and produce myself the gap in productivity? Do I stop producing individual stuff and monitor the work of the lower performers, risking lowering the productivity of the team?
The natural instinct for a new manager is to keep doing the individual contributor work, and hope that others will do as well. The problem is that the management tasks become a distraction from that individual work, and you get both an unmanaged team and a distracted, formerly high performing individual contributor. It becomes a mess where formerly rational employees become yelling managers and, in general, manage from a deficit.
So here’s a way to present to the manager what they have to do in a way that makes sense to an Individual Contributor: Management is a series of deliverables. They are different deliverables from the work done as individual contributor, but deliverables specific to being a manager.
Here is a sampling of what these deliverables are:
—A team “what/how grid”
—A performance log on employees
—Team expectations for performance
–Employee performance feedback delivered and documented
–Documented efforts to improve how the team works as a team
–Documented efforts to improve how the team works with partner teams
–Efforts to improve processes and tools
Tenets of Management Design: A role in management is not an extension of performance as an individual contributor
In this post, I continue to explore the tenets of the new field I’m pioneering, “Management Design.” Management Design is a response to the bad existing designs that are currently used in creating managers. These current designs describe how managers tend to be created by accident, rather than by design, or that efforts to develop quality and effective managers fall short, often to damaging consequences. We need to turn this around.
Today’s tenet: A role in management is not an extension of performance as an individual contributor
Most people start their careers as an individual contributor (IC). They bring skills that they learned in school or at other organizations, and then develop their skills in their role as an individual contributor, both through initial training and on-the-job experience. As I’ve documented, people in individual contributor roles tend to get lots of performance feedback and guidance on how they’re doing this job. If the manager of the individual contributor is doing her job, the manager is one of the sources providing ongoing, specific and immediate feedback to the individual contributor.
If the manager is doing an even better job, she is also strategically developing the skills of the individual contributor to what the organization needs to be successful.
When this works, this is a good design!
OK, so now how do you find people in management? From individual contributors of course.
Here’s where the mistake frequently occurs:
The management team will identify individual contributors for their skills as individual contributors, and then “reward” them for their outstanding work in this area with a promotion into management. The simple theory is that if the individual contributor could do X amount of positive work as an individual contributor, with a team of say, 3 people, the individual contributor can achieve four times the amount of productivity. That is 3X with direct reports plus the X that the individual contributor could produce. On top of that, the high performing individual contributor is rewarded with a promotion to management, which is typically higher paying and has higher status.
For example, Jim is an amazing business analyst. He creates insightful reports from a series of diverse sources, they are easy to read and understand, and always seem to provide recommendations that are spot on. He also comes up with useful pivots and ratios that allow the decision-making teams to ask in-depth questions that can be answers. The management team wants more. So they promote Jim to Business Analyst Manager, and he inherits a team of three other Business Analysts (Betty, Sarah and Amari), with the idea that they can produce what Jim does on his own to 4X the amount — 80 reports — with Jim-level quality.
That’s the implied theory I’ve observed.
