Understand, Envision, Challenge: Three Essential Management Strategies
Managing a team of researchers can feel complicated, but it comes down to understanding their passions, helping them set their sights high, and challenging them to exceed those goals.
By Sal Becerra, Elisa Chang, and Omar Vasnaik
For some researchers, becoming a manager can feel like an overwhelming challenge. To help, we wanted to share a few of the most vital lessons we’ve learned as research managers. While each of us brings different experiences and approaches, these three tried-and-true strategies all focus on strengths-based management and demonstrating care through servant leadership. We’ll each take a turn highlighting an essential strategy.
1. Understand people’s career aspirations
Sal: I used to think that career conversations start happening after a reporting relationship is established. But over time I’ve realized that some of the best ones happen before that point — sometimes even before the person has even joined our company.
I had a phone call with someone who was considering joining our company. We turned the call into an opportunity to have a career conversation. This person shared more about their background and interests, including their passion for work related to diversity, inclusion, and community. I learned how they’d addressed recruitment and retention of underrepresented faculty, and shared more of my background and the work I’d been doing at our company related to DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).
Fast-forward a few months later, and they joined our team. Knowing where this employee’s passion and experiences were from our earlier conversation enabled me to connect them to opportunities to pursue their passions — to find the intersection between their interests and our business needs.
2. Paint a vision
Elisa: As managers, we want to make sure the people we support feel like they’re on the right path. But we also want to avoid creating a linear plan or a checklist, because career progression inevitably involves twists and turns.
Painting a vision is a verbal exercise I use with the people I support. It helps them envision different scenarios of what success might look like based on their aspirations, desires, and strengths. Once we’ve established solid scenarios that represent the person’s desired success picture, we then brainstorm near-term goals that are feasible, a bit audacious, and clearly represent a meaningful step forward toward their vision. This last step empowers the person to identify actionable opportunities that enable them to directly act upon their vision.
For example, I once supported a researcher whose vision was to be a recognized expert in generative research methods. Understanding this vision empowered us to confidently identify two ambitious near-term goals that directly contributed to where he wanted to be in the long term.
I’ve also applied this visioning technique to team and org planning. As managers, we’re constantly thinking about the culture we want to build and the impact we want our team to have. But the feedback loop for managers takes months, not days, and it can be hard to know in the moment how we’re doing. Having a vision for your team or org gives you a personal compass to steer your decisions over time.
3. Challenge people
Omar: To challenge someone is to recognize their strength and provide them with opportunities to help them realize their full potential. The tricky part is knowing when to challenge them. New employees, for example, are often eager to have impact; it’s important not to artificially limit their potential. An individual may also be ripe for a challenge when they show signs of boredom. Others may not currently have the appetite for a challenge due to personal or professional circumstances.
Spend time getting to know each person on your team. The key is to discover an individual’s passion and their “secret sauce.” I sit down with each team member to review their research roadmap, with an eye out for a “moonshot” project. This is a project that no one is actively asking for, and it’s often outside the realm of their specific product team work. If they don’t have a moonshot project, I brainstorm one with them. Moonshot projects carry the potential to move an organization forward. We’ve often heard the story of how brand-new products started off as a moonshot idea.
Challenge can also come in the form of leading initiatives. Your role as a manager can be to shape that initiative and connect the individual to the right people. You can be a sponsor for the effort, or help them find a sponsor. It’s important to show an individual a pathway where they can build on this work to elevate it.
Challenging involves taking calculated risks, a lot of upfront planning, baking in milestones, and constant checking in to track progress. If the outcome is successful, it gives the individual newfound confidence. There might be failures, which are a natural part of growth. It’s the journey that counts.
Keep learning
Another management lesson the three of us share is the certainty that we’ll never stop learning how to do it better. And we’ll never get tired of helping people grow — or of watching them meet and exceed their most audacious goals. We hope these three strategies create a sturdy foundation on which you can start building your own approach to management.
Authors: Sal Becerra, Director of Research at Facebook; Elisa Chang, UX Research Manager at Facebook; and Omar Vasnaik, UX Research Manager at Facebook
Contributor: Carolyn Wei, UX Researcher at Facebook
Illustrator: Drew Bardana
