How to “Be a Manager”
If you don’t like bossing people around.
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In “Be A Manager”, I did my best to get you on board with the idea of that having non-awful managers starts with you agreeing to do the job. Now what happens?
For me, being a leader means being a servant leader. It’s the only way I can feel okay about doing this for a living. Servant leadership is
- finding out where each person’s professional goals intersect with those of the organization, and,
- removing impediments to their achievement of those goals, then,
- holding them accountable to moving forward on those goals, and,
- showing them how far they’ve come from time to time.
I’m going to focus today on finding out that intersection of goals.
Before this sounds too kumbaya, I should point out that you might find goals or behaviors that are inconsistent with the health of the organization. Servant leaders fire people just like any other manager.
So how do we tease out this intersection of goals? Two ways:
- Being a broken record
- Exploring individual goals
Be a broken record
We constantly restate the company’s vision of success. This is not to form a cult. It’s so that people can discover motivations within themselves that gel with that vision.
We keep restating the goals of the company or the team so that a resonance can build with team members’ own goals. Hopefully, they get an inkling of the intersection between their own aims and those of the company.
(Some of the people hearing your message might not even work for the company yet. This is sometimes called “recruiting”.)
As Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg says, “When you think you’ve communicated something too much, you’re probably just beginning to get through.”
Most people don’t like repeating themselves this much. I don’t.
Communicating the vision usually happens in broadcast. Team meetings, all-hands, written updates, etc.
Explore individual goals
If the work and direction of the company is well-understood by all involved, a lot of people will have found a place they’re excited about contributing. But there’s no guarantee that they’ve found the best place to contribute.
Exploring individual goals happens in the 1-on-1.
The Typical 1-on-1
Across most of my industry, the 1-on-1 is a 30 to 60 minute weekly meeting, always on the same day and time. They’re canceled so frequently that multiple sources will counsel you to institute a rule to never cancel them. (I look with great suspicion on any recurring meeting you have to make a rule never to cancel.)
My experience is that they tend to devolve into status reports, particularly if they’re 30 minutes. Most managers have gotten the email from a direct report that says “Nothing much has changed, so we can skip our 1-on-1.”
The tendency of managers to whittle these meetings down did not come along recently. Here’s bit of Peter Drucker’s 1967 classic The Effective Executive:
To spend a few minutes with people is simply not productive. If one wants to get anything across, one has to spend a fairly large quantum of time. The manager who thinks that he can discuss the plans, directions, and performance of one of his subordinates in fifteen minutes — and many managers believe this — is just deceiving himself.
Look at that passage! It’s so old it was published back when it was normal to assume that your average manager was a man (“himself”)!
But whatever Drucker’s reasons for recommending long 1-on-1's, let’s rather look at what your job looks like if you give 1-on-1's short shrift and turn them into a status report. Look what’s left of this job we call “management”.
Constantly repeat yourself, then constantly badger people about their progress
This sounds like a horrible job. If this is the job description, we’re selecting for people whose love of power exceeds their distaste for repetition. Does that sound like anyone you know? Where do you find humanity in a job like this?!
This is why the 1-on-1 is the heart of my practice of servant leadership. The 1-on-1 is the only place where I get to connect with a person, help them and the company succeed. It’s where I get to find out what’s going on in the company without sticking my nose in and micromanaging.
In the next piece, I’ll elaborate on my exact approach to 1-on-1's. The Creative 1-on-1 can help you coach, connect, and discover many things about your company and the people in it, all while having a pretty good time.
