Secret Sauce to becoming a great people manager — Part 1

Pradeep Desu
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read

After working for 12+ years in the HR domain and transitioning from an IC to leading large teams, coaching first time and experienced managers and dealing with multiple people issues as a HR partner, this article is an attempt to put together my thoughts on what I noticed & learnt along the way. As a people manager and a function leader — one thing that I noticed is any amount of preparedness is not enough for managing people/ teams and more so if you are a first time people manager. By far, one of the most complex & underestimated tasks according to me has to be people management & I personally think it can get more complex than nuclear science sometimes! :)

So, with my limited experience and observation, here are a few tips for new managers and I hope this helps as you take on this role or pushing through the first few days/ weeks.

Fix yourself before you take up a People Manager role:

Before you decide to take up a people manager role ( Yes — it is a choice one has to make. People management is not everyone’s cup of tea or the only answer to one’s career progression), it is super important to invest time in yourself as it’s not just about managing people but about nurturing next generation workforce. It is a huge responsibility. I often tell people who reach out to me for advice that they need to identify their strengths and weaknesses and fix themselves first before taking on the responsibility of a team. People on your team emulate what you do and you want to ensure you are setting the right example. For most junior resources, path to success is what their managers do. So, if you are always grumpy, write aggressive emails for no reason, pull up people in a public forum or even just be stressed at all times and constantly talk about the workload your are single handedly managing, your team may mistake that to be the secret sauce for success and start adapting those traits into their working style.

As a hands-on father of a 5 year old myself, I find a few similarities in raising a kid and managing teams. For example, when I asked my son what he wants to do when he grows up, he said, “I will come home late every day”. His idea of achieving something in life is coming home late from work and he obviously picked that up from me. Similarly — consciously or unconsciously, your team members may be picking up wrong behaviours from you assuming that that’s the path to success. While imitation is the best form of flattery, you want your team to imitate the right set of behaviours. You are unconsciously forming “working style/ behaviour” in a bunch of people which is a huge responsibility to shoulder and it is so important to fix yourself and to ensure you are giving your team the right set of behaviours to emulate.

Insecurity — hire smarter people than you

Always build a smart team. Period.

One of the most common mistakes I have seen people make is allowing insecurity to take over while making hiring decisions. This not only leads to losing great talent but also a lot of resource investment in training the junior folks you hire. Many a times, I have seen this leading to stagnancy on the team which does not allow an opportunity for the team to push the bar, learn and grow. As I started managing large teams, what made me make good hiring decisions has always been to ask myself “Is this person smarter than I am and with him on the team, can we achieve bigger things?” If the answer to this was ‘Yes’ before deciding to hire the individual, I have always seen great success. In my experience so far, some of the strongest teams are the ones where the leaders insisted on a very high hiring bar and brought in the best on to their team and I have come to believe there is no better way of hiring!

Another common mistake I noticed is resistance to hire experienced/ seasoned folks (sometimes with more experience than you). If you have invested enough time in developing yourself, you should never shy away from managing folks who are seasoned. In my own experience, the average tenure of my team when I took on India Recruiting was 2.5 years which today is at 9 years now and the team has never been stronger than it is today!

As it is rightly said, “Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones”. With more experienced/ smarter folks on your team you will find yourself having the time to take on an expanded role/ bigger responsibility which helps you expand your horizon.

Empower them not enslave them

In so many ways new people managers have the tendency to do everything possible to make their teams remain dependant on them. There are any number of instances that I have seen where new managers create processes which enslaves the team members/ makes them dependent on their manager. From the few times, I tried correcting these behaviour around me, I came to learn that, new managers tend to go down this path in an attempt to prove themselves in the new role. They want to control the course of every action and ensure everything goes a certain way which in their opinion is error free and the best way to get the task done.

I think one of the best piece of advice I got when I was working at Facebook is — Don’t ask for permission — Just do it. If someone tells you not to do it — than stop doing it. And this is the culture I always strived to drive within my team when I took on the role of a people manager. This not only allows your team to feel empowered, but also enables them to not shy away from making mistakes and learn from them.

I hope you enjoyed the read. More to come in a few weeks from now.