Accelerating Experience for Newly Minted Managers

In an ideal world, when you start a new project, product line, or spin-out a successful feature into its own team, all you need is to hire a great manager, a few talented engineers, a designer…etc, and kick things off to great success.

Unfortunately, as it comes to no one’s surprise, we do not live in an ideal world. The best strategies any company can come up with will go unrealized if you don’t have the right team behind it.

In this article, we discuss identifying leadership characteristics and distinguishing them from individual contributors traits, and how to accelerate the process of acquiring experience for people moving into management.

Given talabat continuous growth and the immense demand for talented engineers and inspiring leaders we have to grow from within as well as getting amazing people onboard.

Nature versus Nurture

Both the “Great Man” and “Trait” theories suggest that the capacity of leadership is inherent and that those great leaders are born, not made.

Trait theories, in particular, often identify distinct personality or behavioral characteristics shared by leaders. But if specific traits are key features of leadership, how do we explain people who possess those qualities but are not leaders?

On the other hand, behavioral theorists believe that leaders are made, not born, through a series of learning, observation and coaching experiences. If this is the case, how can you teach charisma, influence, integrity and empathy?

You can argue that some inborn traits can predispose people to become great leaders, but your job is to identify those traits, complement, and amplify them.

No matter which camp you end up in, it’s important to identify what leadership characteristics are the most essential in your new leaders and how you can work closely with them, helping them to close gaps in their leadership skills to function efficiently.

Identifying Potential Leaders from Individual Contributors

You often hear stories along the lines of “this talented engineer… a superstar talent who got promoted into management and then things went downhill…”. It’s somewhat folklore in the industry.

It’s no surprise that this happens more often than anyone wishes, an individual contributor is a very different role than that of a people manager, but that doesn’t mean you roll the dice on your best engineer. It’s a dangerous move; in addition to failing to place a new manager, you also risk losing your best engineer.

Looking at different individual contributors’ traits can give you a signal about what kind of leader they could become. By correlating an IC’s traits to leadership characteristics, you not only get to minimize the risk but also gain an excellent insight into which qualities to complement and amplify.

Congratulations: you already started to build your plan!

The idea from the table below is that if they have one, then they have a higher chance of successfully growing the other.

Once you build an understanding of your potential leaders’ traits you can make better placement and development decisions.

Accelerating Experience by Coaching

Once you have identified these gaps in your new managers, it’s time to work with them closely to improve their management skills, closing leadership gaps and developing their mindset in a way that equips them with the right mentality enabling them to deal efficiently with future situations and circumstances.

Experience is (the process of getting) knowledge or skill from doing, seeing, or feeling things — Cambridge Dictionary.

People build experience at a different pace and different individuals can interpret the same situations differently; some may be keen observers while others need time, multiple occurrences, or a small nudge for these experiences to sink in.

How can we accelerate this for the keen observer and make it happen quicker for everyone else, helping them become more efficient in absorbing months’ worth of experience ideally in a shorter time span?

Shadow Coaching

Shadow coaching is not exactly the real-time observation of work practices and communication flow, however, it is very close to that concept.

In this process, you simply ask them to go about their day or week (the cadence is up to you), and then reflect on the decisions they made, opportunities they took, and risks they mitigated (or observed). This creates a framework for continual learning, reflecting over the previous period.

During extended discussion sessions about the various situations that a coachee encountered and how they approached them, you dig a little deeper on why they took these decisions, communicated in a certain way, or how they built their perspective on an issue.

You should follow interesting threads, ask questions to clarify, and try to navigate adjacent areas of the conversation. Oftentimes, the coachee does not know which part of their day is worth venturing into. It’s your role to dig into these less obvious areas.

American psychiatrist Dr. Peter R. Breggin says, “A major characteristic of brain-damaged patients is the tendency to confabulate — to hide and dissemble about their damage.”

But what does this mean; basically it is natural for people to subconsciously avoid surfacing some topics.

It is also very crucial that you don’t address the issues at their face value; you look at the reasoning behind them to figure out from your earlier understanding what traits of the coachee shaped and brought them to this thought process, understanding and judgment.

Your goal here is not to fix situations; these situations happened in the past. Your goal is to help the coachee build the ability to navigate them more successfully in the future by challenging their thought process.

For these sessions to be practical, you need to take steps to build stronger relationships and set up the most nurturing environment. We will explore some of these steps in the following sections.

Build Common Understanding and Set Expectations

Changing people’s mindset is a massive investment in time and energy for both sides. The coachee must have a clear understanding of the expectations along with the drive to go through the process.

Establishing Trust

There are multiple levels of trust; changing people’s mindset requires a high degree of flexibility that can only come with an even higher level of trust.

Don’t be mistaken — this trust doesn’t come automatically to you because you are their manager or mentor. You are hoping to change their mindset and how they see things certainly has an impact beyond their job.

To ensure the best outcomes, you need to validate that you have their trust. It is essential — after all, they are the ones narrating their communications, decisions, and feelings to you, and so they must have faith in your motivations and judgment.

Clearly explain why you are investing in them — there is something in this for you as well, and you should state it clearly. Having better managers and leaders within your team frees you to focus on other things which may be very high impact, and will improve the overall organization. In turn, this will help you grow yourself.

Mutual Value Addition

It may seem obvious that you are working with them to improve their management and leadership skills, but a shorter-term gain would create the needed urgency and high level of concentration and commitment required.

So start here: if the long-term goal is for them to be better managers, leaders, and people, then what is the short-term goal?

It could be a promotion, a new project, or simply helping them out of a position that they are currently struggling with.

Setting Expectations

Once you have defined the short-term, it becomes easy to put a timeline to show meaningful results.

Changing someone’s mindset takes time. It won’t be fair, nor realistic, to expect ground-breaking improvements or a completely different person in a few weeks; what you can aim for is a noticeable change in their growth and learning trajectory.

They start building a more comprehensive perspective on issues or begin approaching problems differently; whatever their development needs are, you should start seeing a noticeable improvement and you no longer have much to add or correct. Your coaching value should start to diminish over time.

Having a solid understanding of their development needs, one should be able to gather qualitative and quantitative data points around their improvements.

Keep Reflecting

Take notes during your sessions with the exact phrasing they use for interesting communications or decisions they made. Reflect later, and map your understanding to their characteristics. Was this a communication or a decision you expect from this person, are they screening or improving? Think about how you can help them see things more clearly.

Don’t Compare with yourself

A common mistake is to (unintentionally) compare the new manager to your best self. You will find yourself perplexed as to why they struggle to see what is crystal clear to you. Even if you try to compare to your younger self, you often recall an unrealistic version of yourself because you just can’t fathom that these basic concepts were once foreign to you — Time is tricky that way!

Your benchmark should always be what skills and characteristics required for the job they are trying to do and how much of that they are able to master.

Work Behind The Scenes

Your work doesn’t stop at having these frequent conversations; you must work proactively to create the right environment for them to succeed or fail fast, as changing mindsets can also be expensive.

People tend to use the tools they know rather than those that are better-suited if they are not comfortable with them. Work on denying them these options that limit their growth.

This is very important, so let me give you a couple of examples.

The Introvert

Suppose you are coaching someone to be better at communicating with stakeholders. Make sure there is a specific project that is reliant on performing quality communication themselves.

Be aware that they may find it easier to lean on someone else to do this part, such as a product manager or business analyst.

By assigning them to a side or a separate project with different stakeholders, you force them to hone their communication skills rather than get by relying on someone else. You create the environment for them to succeed.

The All-Nighter

Suppose another newly promoted manager tends not to delegate and works late hours to finish his team’s work because it’s the only way he knows how to get things done.

Make sure they are getting a broader scope that is virtually impossible for them to handle everything alone, again forcing them into figuring out how effectively delegate more to their team.

Measure Growth Trajectory

As an experience, people grow at different paces and rhythms. Mindset change, accumulating experience and becoming a better manager is a gradual process that takes years — what you need to measure is a positive growth trajectory rather than absolute growth or meeting pre-defined hard goals.

Use qualitative data to measure improvements in the most important areas and pay attention to the speed and scale of these improvements, a positive steep curve is what you are looking for.

Happy coaching!