Managing Junior Startup Employees
When we talk about junior employees, we might be talking about a fresh grad entering the workplace, someone in their 20s beginning their first or second job in tech, or someone later in their career switching to a new industry or type of work. Junior workers can be attractive to startups and tech companies as they offer lower-cost labor, fill critical execution positions in the org, and bring a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds that may not be present in the rest of the workforce.
Managers often struggle to effectively manage junior employees as they require more mentorship, active learning, and hands-on leadership than more experienced employees. By definition, they lack much of the business, cultural and technical context held by more seasoned employees. The power and knowledge gap between management and the junior employee is even more pronounced, which means that junior employees can find themselves being disproportionally (and even unintentionally) manipulated, exploited and subjected to negative power dynamics. Establishing healthy communication and teamwork across these divides is difficult but essential. There’s also significant challenges in building a healthy learning and growth environment, especially in startups and growing technology companies where explicit mentorship and growth has not been a cultural value.
In this post, we look at three axes needed for junior employees to be successful in startups and tech companies — fairness, trust and equality; employee growth; and feedback.
On Fairness, Trust and Equality
Market Rate, Goddamnit.
People in the early stages of their tech careers often don’t know how much they are supposed to be making for their role, experience level and educational background. For many managers, taking advantage of this naiveté to pay under-market salaries means more room in the budget and extracting more value for less cost. Unfortunately for you, mutual trust and respect lays the foundation for a healthy relationship with your team. You may get a good deal out of an employee for awhile, but eventually they WILL discover that people in their same position, with equal experience and equal responsibilities, are getting paid more than them and that was just fine with you. Read my post on Management Against the Man for more on the ethical responsibilities of managers here. This is a particularly essential practice when hiring women, POC, GLBT individuals and other marginalized persons in tech. The wage gap starts in these early roles.
Stop Lying About Equity.
If I had a house for everytime the CEO of a tech company told me there was a house in this shit for me… Look, it’s easy to manipulate junior employees with promises of insta-riches and it happens all the time. Just stop, don’t tip-toe around how many outstanding shares there are and buy the kid a fucking book about startup equity. Be a good person, not a manipulative asshole. They’ll thank you for it down the road.
Share the Paperwork.
When first hiring inexperienced employees, many managers immediately begin passing off a lot of their most annoying housekeeping work and administrative tasks. Presumably, this frees up the manager’s time to attend to More Important Things and also fits into our narrative around “paying one’s dues”. Unfortunately, many early startup employees get hired under the pretense of doing more strategic and meaningful work.
On the other hand, it is amazingly powerful when managers show they are a part of the team and are secure and willing to contribute to the administrative work generated by the team. When they show that their power and influence doesn’t come from forcing the people around them to do the shit work. When they, too, will take notes, schedule meetings, order lunches. It inspires more loyalty, more respect, more bonded teams, more effective teams, more egalitarian teams. A manager who uses their power to evenly and effectively tackle the administrative functions of a team is much more effective than one who uses delegation of trivial tasks to instill power dynamics and get out of annoying tasks. Junior employees will not be as effective if they are the sole carriers of this work — and making it so does them and your team a disservice.
On Employee Growth
Take Them With You.
Some managers get hung up and protective about their “important manager things.” Often, they don’t understand that their value comes from the way they help their team succeed, not their access to high level meetings, their status in the org chart, or their prerogative to nab all the high-profile projects, get maximum exec-facetime, develop the most important strategies, and make unilateral decisions. The best mentor I ever had brought me to ALL the “important, senior meetings” instead of leaving me behind, even though I was SUPER JUNIOR. I went to key meetings with important prospects, spent a ton of time with major customers, helped develop product plans, spoke in press and analyst briefings, and participated in strategy summits and partnership negotiations. At first, I was pretty useless. But I picked up technical and industry knowledge, product management skills, sales and marketing techniques, and key leadership skills at a very accelerated rate. Being there, immersed in the environment can help accelerate a junior employee’s value curve exponentially.
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Provide Learning Opportunities Outside the Workplace.
Sure, junior people can learn a lot from inside the workplace. But there’s also a ton they can learn outside it. Attending conferences, meetups, classes, training, and other “extra-curiculars” can be an awesome way for junior people to get market context, get experience evangelizing the company, learn new technical and communications skills, gain confidence and bring that back into the workplace. Some strategies to encourage and support these initiatives:
- Provide a sensible budget for continuing education events on a quarterly or yearly basis
- Work to identify some technical or other skills that would help the junior team member provide more value in the workplace and then build a plan to help acquire those skills and competencies.
- Encourage employees to give lightning talks, product demos, or engage in other speaking opportunities. You get awesome evangelism and they build their experience.
Give Them Responsibility for Things a Bit Outside of Their… and Your… Comfort Zone
Sometimes we learn the most in life by taking responsibility for things that are a bit outside of our comfort zone, beyond our existing experience level. That’s also how we can help our team members grow to provide more and more value to the company and take us to the next level in team development. Sometimes it’s easy to take our eye off of team member development in the day to day of executing on existing tasks — this is definitely something I’ve done as a manger in the past. Here are some ways to make sure you can keep pushing the growth of early startup employees:
- Make a point in every 1:1 to spend five minutes talking about what an employee might want to do or try, or what projects there are that they could take a bigger role in
- Every month, discuss ways to optimize existing work to free up capacity for more strategic growth
- Give opportunities for your junior team members to “shadow” you on initiatives that might be over their skill level so they can pick up learning from you or other more senior members of the team
On Feedback
Experiment With Feedback Strategies to Find Ones that Work
Oftentimes, managers simply impose their concept of how feedback should be given and taken on a junior employee who doesn’t have the skills or experience to work productively together developing a feedback system that works for everyone. Before just jumping to a system you designed solo, work with them to figure out what their expectations are, what they want to get out of feedback, and their ideas about the best way to set it up. This is a more equitable and fair way of working together on growth and can prevent a lot of hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities to work through the inevitable mistakes, failures and missteps along the way.
Let Them Give Feedback Too
Too often, managers look at feedback as a one-way street, especially when it comes to junior employees that are viewed as too inexperienced to provide useful feedback. But, not only can a junior employee’s perspective provide unique and valuable insight, but learning how to give feedback — not just take it — is also an important skill to develop. Whether it’s on your performance on a manager or on work produced by the team, give your junior employees the opportunity to share their ideas, feelings and concerns as well. This leads to more participatory and equal teams as well as healthier feedback loops.
Managers that can positively implement these strategies will have healthier teams inclusive and nurturing of junior workers, who in return will contribute more value to the business.
