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CHAPTER 1
WHY MOST MANAGERS SUCK
"I most seriously believe that one does people the best service by giving them some elevating work to do and thus indirectly elevating them."
— Albert Einstein
Intention: It's on you to set your managers up for success.
Let's face it: Most managers suck. We will first take a focused look upstream at this problem and explore three key questions for hiring and promoting the right manager for your team. Choosing the right manager can make or break the success of your team and company, so it's critical to get this step right. You may not feel as though you have the tools or the time to properly vet a manager yourself. We'll discuss ways to give you more clarity throughout the process, making it easier to determine the right hire or promotion and saving you hours and hours of rehiring later on.
WHY TOP PERFORMERS DON'T MAKE GREAT LEADERS
Top performers are promoted into management roles because of their ability to do work well, not because of their ability to lead. The problem with turning your top performers into managers is that their skills as individual contributors don't always directly translate into leadership skills. The skills required to lead are vastly different from the skills required to be a top performer.
Too often, I see organizations promote top performers and then leave them alone to figure out how to run a team. Once they are promoted, top performers- turned-managers typically tend to power through, sticking with what got them there and relying on talents that may not apply well to their new situation. However, what got your manager there — being good at doing a job — doesn't necessarily mean they know how to lead others doing that job. When they continue to do all the work individually, they turn into what I'd refer to as a super doer rather than a leader, and the negative impact on the team and its success is immediate and profound. Without the right tools and skills, the transition from top performer to manager leads to an inevitable drop in employee performance, increased company turnover, and a lot of frustration for all parties.
This recently happened to one of my clients, Katya. Katya was the corporate hero. She'd mastered the science of success, of getting work done, and had achieved a level of excellence that most others don't reach. After being promoted to partner in her company, she found herself stressed out, overworked, and unsure of how she could keep up as her responsibilities and team grew.
Katya, like most other super doers, fell back on her work ethic. As her company grew, she had trouble saying no to all the various requests coming her way. From client fires to employee questions, Katya found herself increasingly more frazzled. Instead of benefiting from additional team members, she took on more tasks and responsibilities. To ensure success, she double-checked all client emails, orders placed, and proposals sent out. In reviewing every detail, it seemed she hoped her team would learn how to do great work simply by osmosis.
For Katya, things reached a breaking point when she was faced with a several- thousand-dollar mistake one of her employees made for the second time in three weeks. The first time it happened, she blamed the employee. But the second time, Katya realized it wasn't the employee's fault; it was hers.
THE IMPACT OF A BAD MANAGER
Having the wrong person in the wrong seat hurts the business on many levels. Not only is the manager being asked to be accountable for the growth, development, and success of a team of people, but she is also expected to continue performing on the same level herself. The results are often a failure on both ends.
First, you lose a top performer. They go from delivering great work to now having to manage their time between doing the work, leading others, and putting out fires. Instead of doing one thing well, they are now doing many things poorly.
Second, you create a team of frustrated employees who are also not performing. They are frustrated because their manager doesn't support their growth, doesn't communicate clearly, or doesn't help them be better at their work. The frustration can only last so long before you start to lose employees. And it all stems from this single manager promotion.
ACTIVITY: THREE QUESTIONS FOR HIRING RIGHT
[] Does she want to lead?
[] Do I have the right metrics in place to measure her success?
[] Does she have the skills to lead others?
HOW CAN I GET IT RIGHT?
The manager is still the number-one reason people leave their jobs. The impact of picking a bad manager never seems to end for a company. That's why it's so critical to get this right.
The most important thing to do is make sure you have the right people in the right seats. This means taking a step back and looking at your hiring and promotion practices. Before hiring a manager, I recommend first asking yourself these three questions:
Do they want to lead?
The desire to lead is the single biggest factor in the development of a leader. I once had an executive ask me if I thought certain people just aren't meant to lead. Although there are people who seem naturally and intuitively inclined to lead, I've found that anyone can lead if they have the desire to learn and are willing to do the work. I've learned through my work with leaders that those who are the most successful in our training are the people who want it — who want to grow and develop themselves as leaders.
If someone doesn't want to lead, then they shouldn't be doing it, and that's OK too. Sometimes this requires letting go of old mindsets and work structures where managing people is the only way to get ahead in business. It's time to recognize there are other paths to growth within an organization. It's OK to promote individual contributors up the ranks of your organization without giving them a team to lead.
Tip: It can be hard for an individual to recognize that they would rather be a contributor than a leader. Instead of asking them if they want to lead, ask them what excites them about leading a team. Their answer — the way they either light up when talking about others or skip over the team aspect — will give you a better insight into their true desires.
Why do we have to pluck a top individual contributor out of what they are good at and force them into something they don't want to do? There's no reason for it. We can stop this now by promoting those who want to lead into leadership roles while creating other avenues of growth for those who don't. Knowing who wants to lead and who doesn't also enables a company to prevent problems further down the line when it realizes it may not have the right person in the right position.
ACTIVITY: IDENTIFY YOUR INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS
1. Create a list of all your people managers.
2. Go through each manager on the list one by one and ask yourself:
a. Does she truly want to lead? (yes, no)
b. What is the impact of her managing people on your team? (positive, neutral, negative)
c. Is she better served as an individual contributor? (yes, no)
3. Put a big star by each manager who is a better fit as an individual contributor.
4. Determine your course of action with each manager.
Now that you've identified your people managers who would likely be better off as individual contributors, it's time to determine your course of action. The impact of doing nothing is likely far worse than you might imagine in the moment. Just because someone isn't a fit right now to manage others doesn't mean they have to be demoted or fired. That's counterintuitive if they're great contributors.
Often, the most effective transitions have no impact on a person's title, pay, or position in the organizational chart. Rather, the change that's needed will free your leader up from the responsibilities of managing others and give them time to crush it for your organization, thereby performing even more effectively. By keeping certain leaders on as individual contributors and allowing them to continue to thrive within the organization, you create a path others can see for success, one in which career growth is not dependent on managing people.
Do you have the right metrics in place?
Once you've confirmed the answer to the first question and have determined your potential new hire or promotion does want to lead a team, it's time to take an internal look at your metrics. Do you have the priorities and performance metrics aligned for your managers to be successful?
Priorities and performance metrics are the success measures and evaluation milestones for the position. They are what allow both you and your managers to understand what success looks like for them in this role. By understanding these metrics, you can better share them up front with each manager, giving them clarity about their role and your expectations.
Prioritizing your leadership
During a recent check-in meeting, my client asked how it was going with her team. In full transparency, I shared how they have the skills but they don't have the time.
This is something I see frequently from organizations experiencing hypergrowth. As the leader of your organization, you have a picture of what you want the company to be — a beautiful vision of people who love to work for you, who love their coworkers, and who come to work excited to work alongside their boss and team. The only problem is the execution of this vision; that's where most of us fail. We fail because although we say it's critical for our leaders to spend time coaching and growing their team, what we do conveys the opposite message. Although she wanted her team to develop their skills and although she invested money to do it, my client wasn't showing up as an example they could follow and didn't give them the space needed to actually develop their skills.
People do what you do, not what you say. As the leader of the organization, you are the archetype of what success looks like; you are the corporate hero for your team. If you are constantly running from meeting to meeting, showing up late, pushing meetings over and over again, and generally too busy to spend time developing your leaders, you are sending a specific message and creating a picture of what it takes to succeed in your organization. This CEO was sending a message that getting work done was more important than developing skills to lead more effectively and efficiently, so her leaders didn't do the work it took to develop their leadership toolkit.
One of my clients recently admitted to me that he doesn't do one-on-ones with his executive team. He says it's because he trusts them to do their work and wants to give them autonomy. But autonomy without accountability doesn't work. It's a basic human need to have at least some level of certainty, and people crave structure and accountability, even if they say they don't.
In reading between the lines, it became clear to me that, between board meetings, strategy sessions, and travel, my client had to choose where he spent his hours in the day, and making the time to meet with each person on a biweekly basis was not high enough on the priority list in an already busy schedule. What kind of example does this set for his executive team? By not making time for his team, his leaders then didn't prioritize one-on-one meetings with their own direct reports, and the pattern followed, on and on, down the line, resulting in a company culture that lacked structure and accountability. And when this happens, people pay for it.
If you want others to lead, you need to prioritize leading yourself, or put someone else in place to lead so you can contribute to the company in other ways. What this looks like is taking the time to have one-on-ones with your people, making sure you check in periodically, and asking your team how you can help serve them. It also means letting your team make mistakes so they can learn from them instead of having you jump in as the savior to fix their errors at the eleventh hour.
Establishing the right performance metrics
It takes time to lead. Depending on how many people you have reporting to you, managing people should take between 20% and 30% of your time. That's at least one day a week, whether you plan it or not. If you don't plan ahead, you'll end up losing that time and more. If you are unable to effectively lead, your reports are left to fend for themselves, which brings about fires. You'll have to stop what you are doing to jump in and help or fix a situation that could have likely been prevented. If you plan ahead and are strategic in your approach, you can get ahead of those major fires.
Does your organization incentivize new leaders to spend time with their direct reports? Or do leaders only get recognized (or paid) when they deliver work? It's crucial to get your performance metrics and incentive structure aligned properly.
Even if your newly hired manager wants to lead others, if they are expected to do the same amount of work or even more while also managing a team of people, something's going to give. Where do you think they'll decide to prioritize their time? On what their bonus compensation is tied to? Or with their team? The answer is obvious: They'll focus on what helps them get their full bonus, not on their team. What gets measured matters.
Tip: Including one or two measures of team performance in your leader's individual performance metrics is a surefire way to make sure you align priorities.
A great example of this comes from Frank Riordan, the president of DMC, a rapidly growing engineering consultancy with offices all across the country. Frank has a wonderful dashboard he uses to assess each of his employee's performance. He looks at three elements: billable hours, projects proposed, and project dollars managed. Each element is scaled as if the employee were only performing one of them, and then a composite score is created to get a weekly snapshot of performance. Frank knows each element is critical to the success of his organization; he recognizes the importance of intentionally taking time to lead and manage his team, and so he assesses his team accordingly.
Tip: Avoid putting more than eight people under one manager. I've found that any number larger than this is simply too many people for one manager to be able to handle well.
It's imperative to set up success measures for your managers. The happiness and well-being of people in your company — and, ultimately, the performance of your company — are tied to the ability of your managers to connect effectively with their direct reports. When you sit down to assess your leaders at the end of the quarter or year, one element of their performance should measure how well their team is performing and how well they lead.
By including performance metrics around people management, your leaders will be able to clearly see where your priorities lie and will motivate them to spend more time focused on developing the skills it takes to be a great leader.
Do they have the skills to lead others?
This might seem to be the first question you should ask when determining whether someone is ready to lead. The order here may seem counterintuitive, but in my view, skills and tools should be the last element to review on your checklist of whether to hire or promote someone. Even if your manager is equipped with the right tools, if they don't want to lead or don't have the right incentive to lead, you've set them up to fail. Tools and skills can be provided and developed, but they'll work only if the manager wants to grow and already has the structural support to do so.
If your managers don't have the tools and skills for effective management, there's a simple solution: Invest in their development. You can start small and focused. The four most important skills any leader can develop are these: to listen with intention and attention; to ask powerful questions; to be open, honest, and direct in their communication; and to hold critical conversations. Managers who practice these skills daily can motivate, evaluate, and lead their teams successfully.
To set your managers up for success, make sure they have the bandwidth to not only do the work you're asking of them but also time to manage a team of people and work on themselves as leaders.
WHAT'S THE POINT?
Finding the right manager for your growing team is crucial to supporting the growth of your organization. To really get it right, this requires exploring the manager's desires, taking a serious look at your incentives and performance metrics, and then assessing their leadership tools and skills.
Since you've made it this far and are still reading, you are likely one of those leaders who is willing to do the work it takes to build a truly great team. Congratulations! You are already in rare company; most organizations don't take the time to be so thoughtful and deliberate about choosing and developing the right people to lead. By doing so, your company has a better chance of success and of being the type of place where people want to work.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Open, Honest, & Direct"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Aaron Levy.
Excerpted by permission of River Grove Books.
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