People Take Time
TL;DR: Managers sometimes fail to devote enough time to their practice. It takes five minutes to forward a book recommendation to your team. It takes years of individual attention to develop talent.
Management as a Core Competency
If the one thing your company did better than anyone else was the practice of managing people, what would be your outcome? If your managers excelled at recruiting, training, aligning and motivating talent, what could you do?
After 15 years as an entrepreneur over three wildly different companies, I believe that any company that can develop management as a core competency will have a significant competitive advantage when it comes to execution. What’s incredibly frustrating is that the knowledge around good management practices is everywhere. Even mediocre managers can clearly articulate good principles. The problem is practice.
Anyone can read a book on ‘how to swim.’ You can know the theory. You can understand the technique. But you will never excel if you don’t put the hours in the pool. Putting in the time is the only way to become a good manager and instill management competency throughout your organization.
Crutches
As both a founder and executive, I made many mistakes in regards to how I managed. Thinking I was a good manager was probably the worst mistake. Here are three bandaids I used (and have seen others use) to procrastinate the work of actually learning to manage.
PEOPLE AND CULTURE
In my opinion, perhaps the worst crutch is the department-formerly-known-as-HR: People and Culture. Why? It’s not that I have a vendetta against HR — it’s simply that the employee experience largely revolves around managers, not the People and Culture department. The reason why it is such a dangerous crutch is that investing in a “People and Culture” department can give the leadership team an excuse to stop investing their own time in developing the company’s people and culture. Again, please don’t misinterpret this to mean that HR doesn’t play a pivotal role — this department and the folks that work in HR never get the respect they deserve. However, they are not responsible for the people and culture. LEADERSHIP is responsible for people and culture. It’s the equivalent of outsourcing the most important pieces of parenting — such as love, values, and bonding — to teachers. As a parent, you still have to put in the quality time for the “hard stuff” because, at the end of the day, the hard stuff is the people. The hard stuff is the culture. The HR department cannot be used as an excuse to not put in the time and effort.
SOFTWARE
Performance review and goal-setting software is useful, but it’s important to remember that they are just tools. If the only time you think about your direct reports’ careers is when you get your annual notification to fill out a form… you’re doing both yourself and your employees a massive disservice. We have replaced training with webinars on how to input information into Lattice, which quickly degenerates into a data collection task. I have yet to find any software that is better than a notebook coupled with intention.
HACK-CULTURE
In a similar vein, I believe leadership should move away from the idea of management hacks. “What are the three things to cover in a one-on-one meeting?” is not the right question we should be asking. The right question is “how many one-on-ones does it take to fundamentally change behavior?” The answer is “tons.” The simple, elegant solution to management is showing up and giving a damn about your team and your organization. There is no hack to create a long-lasting, fruitful relationship.
Seven Hard Truths About Managing
There are no shortcuts to becoming a decent manager or instilling good management as a competency in your company. It takes more time and more effort than people are willing to give because inputs are fuzzy and outcomes take years. It’s much easier to spend 30 more minutes polishing a presentation or shooting out emails. Here are seven truths that I had to internalize before I was able to progress as a manager. I hope you find these helpful as you grow your teams and hire your next level of management.
1. MANAGEMENT IS A SACRED RESPONSIBILITY
As a manager, you control an employee’s day-to-day experience. Since most of us spend a majority of our high-utility time at work, our manager is the person with the largest impact over our time and can dramatically affect our happiness. Approach this role as a duty and calling to serve. You are entering a temple of responsibility. TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. Statistically-speaking, managers are the primary reason people leave their jobs. In my experience, managers are also the major reason people stay. The bar to become a manager should be set high. If you are hiring or promoting someone to manage, ask yourself: “is this person ready to be responsible for someone’s career?”
2. MANAGEMENT TAKES A LOT OF TIME
I failed to allocate enough time to prepare and develop individualized plans for my direct-reports and their performance suffered. Many of us have one-on-ones blocked off on our calendars, but we don’t have time set aside to prepare for those meetings. We also let quarterly reviews sneak up on us and then try to do all of them in one marathon session. Every time you meet with a direct report, they are evaluating whether you are prepared. Leave slack in your bandwidth to show them you care by taking those meetings as seriously as an important customer call; they are also your customer.
3. MANAGERS ARE NOT SUPERVISORS
Supervisors oversee work, set tasks and ensure delivery. Managers supervise AND are also responsible for your growth and experience. One of their core metrics is your retention. They must be able to (1) clearly articulate where you are in your trajectory, (2) describe the next phase in your development and (3) help you create a plan to get there. Is this overkill at a small start-up? How much more productive would your company be if every individual could answer those questions? From what I’ve seen, when folks can answer those questions, their productivity goes through the roof because they are both investing in themselves and the company at the same time.
4. MANAGERS ARE MADE, NOT BORN
Quick example: Something feels off in your current role and you have a heart-to-heart with your boss. You take a walk around the block (pre-Covid) and feel like you’ve made lots of progress. You are back on the right track! But that feeling slowly dissipates over the next few days. You again feel confused. You reach out to your boss again and you go another walk that makes you feel better.
Your manager is likely very charismatic and could even be a good leader; but maybe they are not a great manager. Many people in leadership positions that ‘manage’ teams are like hosts that can easily make everyone in a room feel important for ten minutes. They are fantastic on a first date. Charisma has diminishing returns if not backed up with substance. You cannot only rely on natural talent and EQ to manage. Management requires the famous 10,000 hours of work. If you spent 10 years becoming a great engineer and have been recently promoted to manage a team, get ready to spend another 10 years becoming a great engineering manager.
5. MANAGEMENT IS CONSISTENCY
Consistency is allowing your reports to know which version of yourself is going to show up at the office on any given day. The worst managers are the ones that are laid back on Monday and hypercritical on Tuesday. Either be consistently critical or consistently laid-back. Similar actions should create consistent reactions. The message to managers is this: make up your mind on what behaviors you expect. Create a standard, clearly articulate expectations and maintain consistency. If you say ‘no cell phones in meetings’ and consistently chastise anyone for looking at their phone, that’s okay. If you have never said anything about cell phones and one day you freak out at someone for checking their email, that is not okay.
Keep in mind that emotional consistency is just as important as behavioral consistency. Try not to take the company through the ups and downs of your mood. As a founder, if you show up at the office during a fundraising process depressed and closed off because you broke up with your girlfriend, people might assume the company is going under. Develop discipline on when to exercise emotional authority over your environment. Be steadfast so people feel secure that capable hands steer the ship.
6. MANAGING IS UNDERSTANDING DOWNSTREAM CONSEQUENCES
Every decision you make has consequences. Those consequences are invariably magnified by your number of direct reports. If you have six direct reports and tell them that the most important thing to work on is X, you have created a significant amount of thrust. You need to understand the consequence of that thrust. That means that you need to think of the consequences of everything you ask and say — especially those that have interpersonal effects.
For example, let’s say you invite one of your direct reports to dinner. This might seem petty, but you have just set a precedent that you invite direct reports to dinner. Does that mean you are inviting all your direct reports to dinner? How are you going to choose who goes to dinner and who does not? Is there going to be a rotation or are you simply picking a favorite. Is the company paying for these external meetings or are you assuming that your direct-reports now have to spend money to get face time? I could go on…
This is an exaggerated example, but one that illustrates that actions are magnified. Creating thrash with short-sightedness and wasting your direct reports’ time is the easiest way to lose their trust.
7. MANAGEMENT IS MIMETIC
No matter what you say, your reports will act how you act. If you are late to meetings, they will be late. If you respond to emails quickly with typos, they will assume that speed is the name of the game. This goes hand-in-hand with consistency. As a manager, you are always ‘on.’ This mimetic behavior includes how much time you devote to career development. If you invest time in preparing for your one-on-ones, they will spend time preparing. If you care about their careers, they will care about making you look good and they will work to the bone for you.
Portfolio of One
Your new company can become a massive hit without investing a lot into management. There is an enormous amount of luck involved in having the right idea at the right time. Capital and a head start can be enough for a select few. Investors are fine with this because they pursue a portfolio strategy. This strategy can produce results because among dozens of poorly-managed companies, there can still be a hit based on market timing and luck. But as a founder or employee, you can only allocate your time to one company at a time. You have a portfolio of one. If you fail to develop your management competency, there will be years when you spend 95% of your bandwidth putting out management fires. That is risky for your portfolio.
As an Employee
Keep your managers accountable. They have a big part in your career trajectory. If you don’t take that seriously, they won’t either. Ask them for clarity. Ask them for feedback. Expect answers. One of my favorite mantras is that you are in control of how you are treated. If you have a bad boss — go find a good one.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.
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