Manager Confessions: Somehow We Manage
Hello from Netroots Nation 2019! This morning I moderated Manager Confessions: Somehow We Manage, a panel of managers at progressive employers engaging in some real talk about management as a skillset. My panelists and I held a similar session last year and its summary blog post was popular, so here we go again!
Our panelists:
Malinda Frevert (she/her)
Senior Digital Strategist, Run the World Digital
@MalindaFrevert
Adrian Reyna (he/him)
Director of Membership & Tech Strategies, United We Dream
@isaiasreyna
Rachael Junard (she/her & they/them)
Deputy State and Local Outreach Director, ActBlue
@rachaeljunard
Sean Carlson (he/him)
Founder, Apollo Collaborative
@itsthatseanguy
And your kindly moderator:
Jill Raney (she/her & they/them)
Founder & CEO, Practice Makes Progress
@jr3wx
Jobs in the progressive movement can be very, very draining, even when we’re paid what we’re worth and even when we get adequate vacation time. And many of us operate in crisis mode for weeks and sometimes years at a time. What do you do to develop your team’s resilience? And what do you do to develop your own resilience so that you’re able to provide grounded, consistent support to your team?
— Expectation setting, from the first day you join our team and throughout the process, about leave and flex time and other policies, and ultimately affirmation that they can ask me for what they need
— Leaning on my own manager when I need help for things
— Frequent check-ins and repeating back what I hear
— Asking how can I help you and then meeting those needs for help
— Our industry is full of insecure overachievers, people with intense needs to prove themselves — managers can look for and recognize this in our staff, give people honest validation, and make a point to encourage people to take their vacations to avoid burnout
— Vacation is sacred. Vacation means NO WORK. Model it for your staff and tell staff to log out if you see them on Slack or email during their vacation.
— If the work can’t survive if a single individual is gone for a week, that’s a bigger problem you need to solve.
— Sabbatical policy! No matter how great your leave policies are, if you’ve been working hard on an issue for many years you will get exhausted and your work will suffer for it. Allow long-time staff to take sabbaticals of a month or more so they can fully recharge and bring their expertise and institutional knowledge back to your organization.
— You really have to understand the specific individuals you’re working with and focus on bringing out the magic in them. Don’t treat people as interchangeable task executioners.
— Often we drive people to the ground because we don’t want to be honest when a role is unrealistic or an individual isn’t the right fit for that role.
— Watch yourself to make sure you’re not putting your own anxiety, your own temper, your own stuff onto the people you manage. Deal with your anxiety with your manager and other support structures, and make your relationships with people you manage about their needs.
— It’s an ongoing management task to monitor the temperature of your staff, not just on work products, but on how people are feeling.
— If something’s broken, it’s a GOOD THING to discover that, because then you can make changes to repair it.
— Leader isn’t a person, it’s a practice
— We have to unlearn a lot that we’ve inherited from the corporate world — people are best at what they do when they can show up as they are. “I’m so much better a person outside of my job! I treat the people I work with so differently than everyone else in my life! Damn, maybe I want to choose to change that.”
Some progressive employers have unwritten but strong expectations that staff will leave at the end of the next election cycle, and even at many organizations that aren’t laser-focused on elections, it’s still a pretty common expectation that staff will leave after a few years. This doesn’t have to be how our industry works. What are the pros and cons of this expectation of short tenures? How has this affected your career, and the careers of people you’ve managed? What would you recommend to organizations who want to change their expectations about longevity?
— Party committee chairs change every 2 years, and they usually pick a new Executive Director, and there’s usually a wave of departures and new hires once the ED changes. Confusion about what the process is like between election day and the dust settling after big staff turnover, and anxiety about whether they’ll still have a job in a few months, is really draining psychologically for people whose jobs require intense focus, and it also forces people to job hunt when they could be focusing on their work.
— Who wants to work for an employer who treats you like you’re disposable? Your job security shouldn’t depend on whether the new ED likes you or not.
— Unionize the committees!
— Losing institutional knowledge is a problem for our organizations and the progressive movement. Exit memos only convey so much.
— There is also real value in not tying people to a job for 5+ years — sometimes you only want to be at a job for a year or two, and it’s positive that in our industry that’s not a blemish on your resume.
— But when people leave because an employer isn’t offering them good enough reasons to stay, that’s important for the employer to change.
—Staff need to be valued for their work, economically and culturally, and protected from things like burnout and harassment in order to stay for more than a year or two.
— The people we’re managing are in high demand — it’s an organizing must as well as a human must to retain the talent on our teams!
— One of the most amazing benefits of cycling through jobs a few years at a time means we have relationships with former coworkers who’ve gone on to positions of tremendous influence. This is especially important for people with life experience of marginalization, who for reasons of ongoing structural bias often have their best shot to shine in an early-career job in smaller organizations, who can then leap from that opportunity to a presidential campaign or a major institution.
— I can’t get upset with someone who leaves after a year because they want to go on to the next great thing!
— We tend to think of campaign and election jobs as a space for young people, especially on the Dem side. Having a staff full of young people has benefits and also it means we’re missing out on the perspectives of older people. Why is it that our industry considers election work only for people without significant responsibilities outside of work?
Sometimes our teams grow a lot and quickly. As you’re building lots of new relationships, onboarding so many new people, and managing evolving team dynamics, what have you found most helpful to keep yourself organized and your incoming and longstanding team members well supported?
— Hiring people can feel like it gets harder every time, in part because every time I do it I’m trying to reflect on and improve the process
— As a team gets bigger, managing team dynamics gets more complex
— Frequent, sometimes daily, informal check-ins with new hires can help gauge if there are any gaps in onboarding or issues to nip in the bud
— Tell people who ALL they can go for help with different things. Make absolutely sure you’re not the only person they know they can go to, and help them seed new relationships of trust.
— “Here’s how we communicate with one another, here’s what our values are, here’s how we mediate conflict” — investing the time to talk through these things with new staff produces enormous returns in healthy team culture.
— Onboarding is the easiest time to set people up for future success! Evolving team culture with long-time staff often requires healing of past harms and re-earning trust, which is important and doable but it’s a lot of work. Nothing beats starting with a strong foundation.
A lesser-discussed but critical aspect of managing a team is lateral management, all the coordination and negotiation that team leaders do with each other so that the people who report to you know what’s going on across departments and what’s expected of them within the bigger picture. What insights about coordinating and managing expectations with other team directors can you share with us?
— Hiring for a brand-new role that hasn’t existed before at the organization might create new problems if you don’t get your colleagues on the same page about why the role is needed and how the new person will fit into workflows. I thought everybody understood why we needed this brand-new role, but my team made that new person’s job extremely difficult, because the existing staff didn’t get why that new role is important.
— Sometimes showing up for your staff means getting people who don’t report to you to respect your staff and collaborate with them well, and often that means real talk with other team leaders about the different priorities your teams are accountable for and addressing any feelings of priorities being in conflict with each other.
— Onboarding needs to include a lot of work with existing staff so that there’s cultural space to welcome the new person in and the work they’ll be holding
— Managing organizers is tough because organizers can tell when you’re trying to organize them. You have to be super authentic about why what you’re asking somebody to do matters.
— Competitiveness is such a human thing, and a major source of interdepartmental drama. But there’s always a way to get a little humble and find a way forward that doesn’t feel like one director wins and another director loses. “Whyyyyyyyy is this person not getting it??” is a signal to ask yourself this question, what’s the third option?
— This advice is true for external partners as well as peers within your organization.
— Everybody wants to do their best, so find a way to let them.
Audience question: How would you create a space for people who are talented managers and people who are talented strategists to collaborate effectively?
— Promoting people to management because they’re good at the content sets people up to fail. Management is a skillset.
— When you’re the one who gets promoted because you’re good at the content: “I need to get trained in management skills!”
— Some people just don’t want to manage other staff. The expectation that you lead a team just because you’re senior is kind of ridiculous and not true in other industries.
— An important part of this is self-reflection: if you’re not a good manager and training doesn’t help, you probably shouldn’t be a manager.
— Good managers hire great people and then get out of their way. If you’re managing a team but you really want to be the senior strategist, it takes a ton of humility to facilitate your direct reports to be successful strategists instead of doing it yourself.
— CEO and COO or President and Executive Director type dual leadership at the top of organizations can be an extremely helpful strategy to ensure both strategy and management get their due attention and expertise. It’s rare for expert skills and experience in both areas to exist in a single person.
Audience question: Sometimes in our industry very young people get promoted to manage people much older and more experienced. What’s a young boss to do?
— Get clear about why you were put in that role and what you uniquely can bring to it.
— Get management support/training/coaching and work through any impostor syndrome you feel about your role.
— Do your job! Hold the responsibility that you’ve been given and do it well. Don’t try to pretend you’re not someone’s manager to ease awkwardness because it’ll backfire.
— Ask the people you manage what reservations they have about your new role and talk honestly about how you can earn their trust.
— Bring it back to outcomes. “This team needs to produce X and let’s talk openly about what’s necessary to make that happen” — make the implicit stuff explicit and figure out healthy ways to deal with it.
— Sometimes people just need to say out loud that they’re cranky because you’re younger and managing me and it feels unfair. Saying it out loud can neutralize it.
Audience question: I’ve found success in fostering a team where people can show up as they are, yay! But I’ve allowed my own biases about other departments to reach my staff and it’s caused some siloing. How can I fix this and prevent it in the future?
— Having clear lanes, clear understanding of who’s holding what and what each individual’s and team’s responsibilities are is very helpful, but don’t be rigid about it. The work we do is interconnected!
— The team leader can have conversations with other team leaders about wanting to collaborate more effectively, then facilitate conversations among members of their respective teams. Sometimes junior staff do this on their own, in which case support/encourage it and get out of their way!
— Sometimes this is about our own anxieties or strategy disagreements, and you might need to work through those or put them aside in order to do your job well — or sometimes it’s a sign of major dysfunction at the organization that needs to be resolved.
— Be careful about talking shit. It can feel fun in the moment to say to your team, “we’re the best, everybody else needs to get on our level,” but be mindful of the attitudes underlying the ways you cheerlead your team.
Audience question: I come from a lot of different high-pressure work environments where managers don’t have time to manage because they’re responsible for such critical work. Is there a way to do better when we’re working on life-and-death issues?
— There’s no way around investing the time and money in people’s wellness that’s necessary so that they can function well enough to do the work.
— At United We Dream, the undocu-healing team coordinates retreats for staff to process the trauma that’s inherent in our work and to genuinely restore ourselves. People say things like “this sounds New Age-y” and “how could you spend time on this when there’s so much to be done??” but it’s non-negotiable. This is the only thing that keeps the work possible long-term.
Audience resource: Fighting Activist Burnout
Audience question: We talk all the time about how we’re ~data driven~ but all the data uniformly shows that after 50 hours a week people’s productivity crashes. Why do we put people through these absurd schedules? How can we change it?
— This is a massive systemic issue in our industry and more broadly. Thanks capitalism!
— People tend to leave this industry before the 10 or so years that it takes to build expertise, let alone put that expertise to work and build upon it, and that’s a tragedy and a serious barrier to winning the justice we’re working for.
— Unions are an answer — not the only answer, but an important piece.
— A sign of burnout is lack of empathy. Folks at the top who’ve gotten there because they’ve been working 60–80 hour weeks for YEARS sometimes have such toxic management styles, and maybe this is why.
— What can each of us do to change it? Take your vacation! Stop bragging about overwork! At the end of the day, go the fuck home!
