The most important connections you need to develop as a manager
I like to think of managers like trees. The visible achievements are the branches and the leaves, the hidden connections in their organisation that let them grow and weather storms are their roots. As a new manager, there are a few things I have learnt from trees.
Trees need spreading roots to grow
Trees get their nutrients from huge numbers of small feeder roots that spread far and wide, but stay close to their ground level. These are your connections, usually at or slightly below your level throughout the organisation, the people you meet and collaborate with in sales, marketing, operations, HR and finance. Drawing on the things you hear and the people you know across the breadth of the company will let you get things done quickly, you can grow very fast simply by drawing on expertise from a large pool. You can call the person in HR and get them to prioritize hiring your new team, you can get help from the person in finance to format a stunning report for the CEO.
These connections are essential to achieving success, but even with hundreds of these connections, when a storm inevitably arrives, the small shallow roots will not keep you upright. The person you know from finance will help you, but when things are really difficult, they are unlikely to be giving their all to help your team succeed.
Trees need deep roots to survive storms
The other kind of roots that a tree needs to survive are deeper, stronger roots. These are the direct connections you have deep into the team that works for you. You not only need to have connections with the people that work for you directly, you also need to build direct connections deeply through all the levels of people that work for you.
Provided you have spent time developing them, these connections are incredibly strong. When a bad storm hits, these connections will result in the designer volunteering to answer the support phone on the weekend after launch or the developer asking to get on a plane to help the large customer you are about to lose. If you don’t have some meaningful connection to your team at every level, when your undertaking hits tough times, they will just let you fall.
For some managers, these connections seem superfluous, like annual flowers, they spend their first spring growing hundreds of shallow roots, sprouting lots of branches and masses of shiny leaves. These are the ever moving managers that in no time at all in a new role impress everyone with flashy, visible success. But they are also setting seed and looking for their next job, because they know that when things get challenging, they don’t have the deep connections to their team that they need to survive.
Don’t become root bound
Like a potted plant, when the size of your team is limited, there is a limit on how many roots you can grow, which in turn limits the number of branches and leaves you can support. You should be conscious of the number and strength of connections that you can build while still allowing your team the freedom and breathing space that they need to remain healthy. Like Bonsai, trim and focus on the quality of your achievements and don’t commit to achieving larger successes than your team can support.
A good example of a root bound manager can be the founder-manager. Having been involved from the very beginning of an organisation, having hired most of the team and done almost every role in the early days, the founder-manager has grown so many connections that the team may have no space in which to exist. You can tell you have reached this state when you aren’t learning from the levels below you, but instead they are waiting for instructions from you. If you are a manager two levels or more above sitting in a meeting telling designers which colours work well, you are root bound. While you should probably be in the meeting, you should instead be learning from your designer how their design has improved the customer experience.
Prune a tree heavily when you transplant
When you transplant a tree, you cut off most of its roots as you dig it out of the ground. When you plant the tree again, the worst thing you can do is to leave all the branches and leaves and expect the small root system to support it. Instead, the right thing to do to grow a healthy tree is to prune the branches and adjust your expectations. The new manager that has been able to sustain large, visible successes and weather disasters because of their great connections with their team, cannot be expected to achieve the same things in a new team until they have built those connections.
So, the next time you appoint a new manager to a team, make sure you trim your expectations and focus them on developing deep connections in their team, then more broadly across the organisation and before too long they will start to grow and deliver sustainable success.
