In the first part of this post, I looked the first key job of a manager, which is to offer guidance to their team. In this post, I will look at the two remaining objectives of building and maintaining great teams and then driving them to results.
Teams
People in a team have different ambitions. Scott defines the two terms that are often used to define people in Apple – rockstars and superstars. Rockstars love their jobs and they don’t want to grow constantly. They form the bedrock of your team. They represent stability and reliance. Superstars are people who want to grow fast and get the next promotion. They want to be on a fast growth trajectory and you can look towards them for leadership. I know you’re already thinking one is better than the other but that’s not the case. Managing these two types of people is what she calls growth trajectory management. You need both kinds of people to create an effective team. Let go of your blink judgements and understand that your rockstars are not your B players.
Growth trajectory management is about working with them to learn about their goals and aligning their responsibilities in a way you get the best out of your team. Remember that ambition and contentment are words that trigger different initial reactions from us but mean different things to different people. Managers need to understand that people have different aspirations and the way you use them has to be linked to them. An important point to note is growth trajectory is not constant. People go into different modes in phases. People in a rockstar phase will hate a superstar role and vice versa. People constantly shift between these phases and different circumstances can push people to shift their phases differently. The tactics section below talks about a few ways in which you can understand how to use different people.
An important point that this book makes is about understanding people’s motivations. Scott says its not a manager’s job to provide purpose to her people but it is her job to understand them well and figure out how they derive meaning from their job. This distinction is quite important as it lays impetus on a manager on understanding their people personally (caring personally).
Tactics for creating and maintaining an effective team
- Understanding your people by asking them 3 questions.
- Tell me what motivates you (in other words what is important to you).
- What are your dreams.
- Let’s come up with a plan on how we can help you achieve your dreams. These questions help you structure a discussion in which you will get to know people well enough. The idea is to get information from #1 and #2 and then use it to come up with a #3 the plan, on how the job can help them achieve their dreams (or at least pave the way for them to be able to achieve their dreams).
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Hiring carefully is one of the hardest things to do. Blind skills assessment, proper job descriptions that talk about growth expectations and cultural fit, hiring by committee, getting multiple written down views are some ways you can ensure that you are hiring the right person. It is equally important to get the wrong people off the bus.
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Promote carefully and silently. Always ensure you reward your people correctly. Not everyone wants to be a manager and a good individual contributor’s only path of natural progression shouldn’t be managing a team. Explore other ways like making them a Guru and provide options to see if they want to teach others. The again, make sure your reward doesn’t eventually become a punishment.
- Partner, don’t micromanage. You can be sufficiently hands-on without appearing to be micromanaging. On the one end of the spectrum is absentee manager who is mostly unavailable, doesn’t listen and is afraid of any details and on the other end is the micromanager who wants to be looped in to everything (see table in image). A true partner lies in the middle. This is a hard balance to strike but one that goes a long way in fostering a great team. The expression Scott uses to define partnership is hands-on, ears-on and mouth-off.
Driving Results
The third and final job of a manager is to get results collaboratively. In terms of action items this is where the rubber meets the road. There’s a lot of tactics discussed in the book for this part but the core idea is that the main job of a manager, when it comes to driving results, is to ensure you don’t waste your team’s time. All the tactics are some version of understanding and removing hurdles and letting your team go back to work. This part of the book also spends a lot of the time defining the different kinds of meetings (I will skip some parts as I have felt not all the different types of meetings are needed by most companies). Let’s just jump headfirst into the tactics.
Tactics For driving results collaboratively
- One on one’s are most important meetings that you can do as a manager. They help you listen and thus, move on the care personally axis. They are the best when they are informal (over lunch, walks etc). 25 mins every other week for each direct report is a good thumb rule you can use.
- Do cross team staff meetings. Staff meetings are like update snippets that allow people to be looped in with what’s happening in the other teams. They also make way for cross team collaboration and spread of ideas. This is also a place for your to give public praise (but to it carefully after making the effort to understand who is deserving of the praise).
- Clearly demarcate decision and debate meetings. One of the main reasons people get frustrated with meetings is the expectations with which they come. Half the room wants to make a decision and half the room wants to brainstorm. By being upfront about which meeting is for debates and which are for decisions, you set their expectations accordingly.
- Anyone should be able to attend big debate meetings. Follow the simple rule of checking egos out of the door. One way to make debates more useful is to get the sides to switch roles half way through the debate. Getting people to argue from each others’ perspective makes them more amenable to finding middle grounds.
- Control meeting proliferation. Your number one job is to ensure your people have the time to execute and you should jump on any opportunity to limit the number and kinds of meetings.
- Block time for thinking. This is one of those charity begins at home type things. As a manager you can soon find yourself being spread too thin. Block time for clarifying your own thinking. This allows you to be more productive and also lead by example as others will observe and do this as well.
- Kanban boards are great to assign a workflow and manage the chaos of overseeing multiple activities. Measuring activities helps you realise who is doing a good job and what’s not working. When you just measure the result, you miss out on understanding the fundamental attributions. Visualising workflows helps you understand what to focus on and what to do less of.
- Walk around and listen in. Dick Costolo, the ex-CEO of twitter was known to walk around in the office and pay attention to the little things. By listening in and observing what is going around you can find opportunities to give and take in-moment feedback.
This are some incredible stories in the book that help you internalize these lessons more clearly and I would urge you to pick it up. If you are a founder or a CEO running a company which has many managers, you could benefit from gifting this book to them. If you’re a new manager, this is a great book to learn how to move up and across on the care personally and challenge directly axes.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.