Managers, step down
Being a good manager is as much about learning how your position of authority influences your team as it is about knowing about what they’re up to.
At least, that’s my experience.
Try seeing it from a junior’s perspective. When they come into a new role and they’re working under someone, they have to all of a sudden learn how to appeal to their boss’s personality on top of all the other stuff they’ve got to do.
Impassive, relaxed or uptight, a manager’s personality is a burden for employees. It influences them to perform for the boss, rather than for the sake of their own development, or what’s best for the company as a whole.
Adding this element creates work and misunderstanding as employees doublespeak when they report. Naturally, managers inherit the responsibility for incomplete or poorly researched work. The whole dynamic often leads managers to know very little about what they’re supposed to be overseeing.
Plus, as a kind of cruel psychological quirk, employees tend to confirm prejudices that managers have of them. So if a manager thinks one of their team isn’t up to a task, that person will pick up on that vibe and begin to amplify that inadequacy, even if it wasn’t really an issue.
By understanding the unwritten assumptions that underpin management, you’re more able to recognise how you come across, check your prejudices, and become a better boss.
Basically, managers need to do more to manage themselves. Or they could do what I did, and choose not to be a manager at all.
I co-founded GrantTree because I wanted to build a business I would want to work in myself. It has since evolved into a holacracy, which makes it even more empowering for everyone who works here.
My co-founder and I made encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit in the business a priority by allowing our staff to lead and organise their own tasks.
And it’s worked. The team spend time on tasks more valuable than explaining what they’re doing to me, and I spend less time getting in their way.
That’s a win-win, unless there’s any uncertainty or confusion. But a truly open culture, where anyone can approach anyone else about anything, solves that.
We put power over work and transparency over secrecy, always.
As part of dedication to being completely transparent, our employees decide their own pay based on what they think they’re worth, and they decide my pay too. This has helped remove hearsay and juvenile one-upmanship, and has helped us cooperate on what matters most.
But allowing my team and our workflow lead me, rather than lead them myself, was tough. It still is tough. I needed to let go of my ego and improve how I communicate under pressure.
Sometimes the working day throws me a challenge, or a handful of challenges. I can get stressed and stress other people out, but it never leads to a positive result.
Although I’ve become much calmer since I realised how my stressed self impacts those around me, stress can still close me off to others’ more reasonable approaches and better ideas.
That’s tied to my personal involvement with the business, and will probably be something I’ll always be working on.
But if I never reach perfection, it doesn’t matter. I know I can trust my employees to tell me when something is or isn’t going to work for the business.
As an individual I’ve found what does and doesn’t work by taking on challenging tasks and uncomfortable situations.
And even if a holacracy won’t work for you, here’s what will:
- Giving people space to grow and become better versions of themselves
- Energising the team by giving them boosts of creativity and enthusiasm
If you liked this, hold down the 👏 below. You can find more from me here, and more novel approaches to leading a team at Manager Real Talk.
Here’s Eamon Tuhami, CEO at Motivii, on letting teams get on with it:
