Seven Basic Tips for Managers

To be in the position of manager carries responsibility. It is a big deal.

This post is written for first-time managers, but I hope you’ll read it through and provide feedback whether you are one or not. It might even contain a couple reminders if you’ve been in the manager game for a while.

When I say “manager”, I mean that you have gone in the direction of managing people. You’re not a principal software engineer, account-managing sales rep, or dedicated manager of marketing content. You’re no longer a sole individual contributor, but you might contribute. You’re a marketing manager, sales manager, engineering manager, etc. You are in a role where you’re responsible for direct reports.

In recent weeks, I’ve spoken to your highly ambitious direct reports. At some point, I was in their shoes. I’ve also been in your shoes — and maybe in the shoes of your boss.

Here are seven quick tips for people who manage other people.

1. Embrace your heightened fiduciary and social responsibility
2. Establish your leadership style
3. Build faculty, regardless of your primary leadership style
4. Understand the science of diversity
5. Encourage calculated risk-taking
6. Foster a culture of collaboration around data
7. Nail down the essential employee relations questions ASAP

TLDR: take great care to listen to and advocate for your direct reports. Lead by example where you can. Starting day one, don’t forget the basic administrative requirements of being in a managerial role.

1) Embrace your heightened fiduciary and social responsibility

First, congratulations. You have a new role.

You now also have a higher fiduciary and social responsibility to your organization.

• you have achieved a new level of fiduciary responsibility to your investors, whether you interface with them or not
• you also have a social responsibility to your staff and the families of those who work around you; they must pay rent, their mortgage, and must put food on the table
• your decisions, the decisions of your team, and the actions of your team matter more than ever

2) Establish your leadership style

There is no one effective ingredient to becoming a good manager. I suggest you establish an appropriate mixture of three ingredients.

Leadership by Charisma

You use your brilliant smile or charm to put staff at ease. Even though you’re “dangerous in Excel” or “used to code in C#”, you cannot answer in-depth questions about your unit’s performance or exactly how something works. You’ll get back to the person who’s asking. On larger teams, it doesn’t matter. You lead through inspiration.

Leadership by Dictate

People would be thrilled to see you smile. But instead, you’ve trained them to listen to and follow your orders. You also can’t answer in-depth questions about your domain of expertise, but it doesn’t matter. When you ask your staff to do something, they listen. They probably will comply, because they have to.

Leadership via Faculty

You might be at the top of your class, self-taught, or have come up through the ranks. Regardless, your staff respects your ability. They know that if you had the time, you could do their job as well or better than them. You can’t stand in for your entire team, but they know you are always learning and are willing to share knowledge and know-how.

3) You’ll need faculty, regardless of your primary style

I have always preferred working for and being a “faculty” manager. I want to be the person who, yes, could figure it out if I had the time. Sometimes I have the time. Not always. But I’m always there to train and coach. In order of preference, I’d rather lead via faculty, then via charisma, and if needed, by telling people what to do (dictate).

Your direct reports want to work for someone they feel they’re learning from. Your role is teacher and coach. So, carve out extra time for your 1:1s to work through the tough problems that your direct report is living.

Ask how they are thinking about and approaching the problem. Then show them how you think and how you would approach the problem.

The more hands on you are, the better.

4) Understand the science of diversity

At QFlow.ai, we know the cultural, socioeconomic, and moral importance of supporting underrepresented groups in tech and in broader society. Providing opportunity is just the right thing to do. But did you know that it’s the right thing from a cold-hearted business perspective?

Science proves that a diverse team making a decision beats a homogeneous one. Hands down. No need to take my word for it. It is mathematically proven.

Get involved and do whatever it takes to create diversity and opportunity on your team.

5) Encourage calculated risk-taking

As a manager, there is a pact that I make with direct reports:

• When things go well: “I trust you. Take the risk. When things go well, you’ll be the hero.”
• When things go to hell: “I trust you. Take the risk. Things went south, I’ll take the blame. We’ll figure out why and fix it together.”

The extent to which you are comfortable taking an approach like this reflects your confidence level as a manager. Those around you will recognize it.

6) Foster a culture of collaboration around data

Being “data-driven” can feel like a cliché nowadays. Still, you need to foster a culture of data-driven collaboration. Provide your staff easy-to-consume views of the inputs and outputs of your business. Encourage people to share insights. Encourage differing interpretations of sound analysis. Discourage opinions and rifts based on anecdotal evidence.

7) Nail down the essential employee relations questions ASAP

In the coming weeks, I’ll round this post out with additional thoughts on the issues of hiring, firing, performance management, and so on. For starters, here are a few areas in which you absolutely must be able to answer questions after your first week as a manager.

Tenure, compensation, and retention risk

If you’re a first-time manager or director and don’t know the comp details of your direct reports, stop reading here. Is this a mistake or is your organization not treating you as the manager you are?

You must know how your team is compensated and incentivized. This isn’t confidential — it’s essential. If you’re a manager, you must be firm on this. Consider the cost of replacing the top 20% of your team. Your team is smart enough to know they will re-invent themselves several times before they retire. They’re already working on it. You must provide value in the form of fiscal and intellectual compensation. Pay them well and teach them something.

1:1 structure and cadence

Now is your chance to change everything you didn’t like about prior 1:1s with prior managers. 1:1s with your direct reports should take place every week and no less than every two weeks. My advice is to keep it simple and suggest a structure from the beginning. As a manager, I want to know your priorities, where you’re blocked (where can I help). The final third of the 1:1 agenda belongs to my employee, not me.

I’m confident that readers will have a better format than I’m offering here. Managing finance, to sales operations, to HR, to marketing, this is just a repeatable format that makes sense to me.

Your direct report should dictate the entire agenda. Hopefully, she or he runs with the rough outline you provided from above. At least 2x / quarter, force a conversation about personal growth trajectory if it doesn’t come up more often naturally.

Every 1:1 is a performance review

Unless you traveled across a time-space horizon I’m not aware of, you were promoted to be a manager at some point within a fiscal quarter. You will likely be asked to write quarterly performance reviews before you know it.

Treat every 1:1 with your employee as a performance conversation that evaluates both your employee’s — and your — performance.

When you do write your first performance reviews, you better not surprise anyone with your feedback. Surprises in performance reviews are not just unfair to your employee. They reflect particularly poorly on you as their manager. A true manager delivers ongoing performance feedback, positive and negative. On an ongoing basis, document examples of the good and the bad. You’ll likely be asked “can you provide an example of that?”

Performance reviews can be a pain to write, especially if you feel that you’re already delivering ongoing feedback. Take them seriously, nonetheless. Feedback, positive or negative, always requires a thoughtful example or two borne in documentation, data, logic, and reason.

Work-in-Progress

Being a good manager is a work-in-progress. I’d like to think that my previous direct reports would agree that I was usually in a state of improvement.

That’s the point, I guess. Strong performers seek leaders who seek continuous improvement.

To that end, I will continuously improve this post and fill in the gaps as I find the time.