The role of a manager
Managers have three roles: direction, support, and administration.
To be very clear right off the bat, none of those roles involve doing the job of your employees (unless that’s specifically stated in your contract), building empires, throwing staff under the bus, power-tripping, or being a bully.
In fact, I very much believe there is a general ethos you need to be able to subscribe to to be a manager, and many people don’t have the capacity to adopt that, but we’ll cover more of that in the future.
Direction
I always envision a team as a ship, specifically when I see everyone trying to go their own direction or drilling holes in the side of the damn thing.
The manager and the team should know where the ship is going and why; everyone needs to be on the same page.
To do this, you personally need to do the groundwork to understand the company's goals and your own team's goals.
Every company has a strategy, and it’s on you and your leadership team to understand that strategy and figure out how you contribute to it.
Depending on your team, you may be involved in some or all of it. If the strategy requires a lot of your team, it’s important to negotiate with your management about how your team can realistically achieve that. That may be done by establishing a priority or by downsizing something. It’s important to get that sorted out and agreed upon by your management as early as possible.
Your team also can't be 100% committed to things; you need to leave time for professional development, workflow improvements, and other stuff. Make sure you leave 10–20% capacity spare for that.
Then, once you know how your team is expected to contribute to the company's goals, communicate that. Make sure your team understands. I would recommend regularly reminding your team throughout the year in team meetings and such.
Don't just point to the marketing-approved version of the company strategy and expect everyone to get it; convert it into words, phrases, and diagrams that your team will understand.
The next step is to get your team—the entire team—to agree on their goals. It’s important that everyone feels like they contribute to the conversation, even if their specific goal wasn’t selected.
The goals shouldn’t be a long list; the shorter the better; it makes it more achievable, and given that you’ll also need to contribute to the organization's strategy, it will also make it easier to remember.
If your team has ambitious goals or some 'must-do' things that need to be completed, like upgrading your databases or something like that, make sure you go back to your management and negotiate that. You cannot overcommit your team, especially as the result will most likely be that the team's goals suffer. If the team doesn't achieve their goals, they will lose trust in the process, believing that their goals were some culture-building activity with no substance.
The best thing you can do in your first year is get wins on the board and achieve what you set out to do.
Make sure you take the next step and marry them. Make sure the team understands how they will be contributing to both the team's and the organization's goals. If you nail this, you’ll rarely have to make a prioritization call yourself; the team will naturally do that themselves (especially the more senior members); it should cut down on noise about non-strategic work and spur-of-the-moment ideas and allow the team and the boat to stay on course.
The last part is the hardest but also the most important. In order for everyone to believe in the process and want to commit to it, especially year after year, it is important to set measurements and hold people accountable for them.
Accountability is extremely important, and while it’s very scary to a lot of people, the point is to demystify it. People can miss deadlines as long as the reasons are understandable. In fact, missing deadlines can be a really good learning experience. You may have set the goal too high. Getting your team comfortable with not meeting every goal they set is just as important as getting them to set goals and be held accountable.
Now, I don’t have many hot opinions about how you set goals or what frameworks you use (KPIs, OKRs, etc.); they all have their pros and cons. What’s important is that you find something that works for your team.
Now the last part is to keep revisiting all of this. A monthly meeting is a good cadence. Talk about the strategy, visit the team's goals, and review how you are tracking against the measures you’ve put in place. Keeping the team's eye on the prize is the best way to keep everyone feeling like they are contributing, and like I said, it keeps the conversation of prioritization a pretty clean one, and if someone on the team is drilling holes in the side of the boat, it makes that easier to address.
I cannot stress enough how important this role is. You need to be at the helm, leading the ship, but in such a way that the team keeps itself on course.
No one has ever criticized a team for being too in the know, too aware of their direction, or too focused on their goals. It’s a good thing, and as a manager, you need to facilitate it, drive it, and support it.
Support
A manager of mine described the team as being like a university. They will all graduate one day, and the goal is to have them leave with more skills than when they started. I like this because you should always be pushing your staff to grow and accept that the best thing for all of them is to graduate onto something better.
How a manager treats their staff can have ripples across their careers. They will always remember the promotion they didn’t get, the project they didn’t get to lead, the manager who couldn’t admit they were wrong, and the manager who didn’t have their back. They remembered it all for a very long time.
That’s your role—to not fuck it up, to not be the manager they remember poorly, to not be there for them.
The best thing management taught me was that very few things people stress about at work are actually worth it. Your position as leader should give you the clarity to understand what is worth it; you should have an endless supply of pragmatism, trust, and empathy. One of the best ways you can support a member of your team is to remove something they are worried about or struggling with.
Not going to make the deadline? That’s fine; you will go tell the customer it’s going to be late, and you will take the heat. Taking the heat for your staff members is one of the best things you can do. Get good at being yelled at, get good at delivering bad news, and get good at holding your ground. Your staff and colleagues will be so thankful for it, and you’ll show them you have their back. In turn, people will learn how to do this themselves; bring them along for a few uncomfortable conversations and let them see how it doesn't matter if the report is two days late.
Besides, most deadlines don’t matter; is someone going to die? Organizations are filled with deadlines that don't matter, and nine times out of ten, you miss the deadline because something else went wrong. Poorly communicated requirements, ineffective tools, and inexperience at planning Support your people by protecting them from these false deadlines; push back; add a few extra days when sizing up the work; and when something goes wrong, step in front of the heat, but behind the scenes, drive a culture of learning from it.
If a deadline is do or die, which is rare, then it's actually not your fault. If the deadline was that important, then the business should have supported you better. Support your team by identifying those critical deadlines and demanding that your team be supported by whomever you need to get the job across the line. Share the pain, share the responsibility.
The other aspect of supporting your team, and this sounds like an odd one, is making decisions. You will often be subject to scenarios where there isn't enough information or conflicting information for your team to make a decision on something. Make the call—any call, really—if you don't know yourself.
You can't be too indecisive; weigh up the consequences and go from there. Like the deadline problem, most of these things aren't that important. The importance is often fabricated by the business, so take a punt, and if you get it wrong, well, that's a luxury you have. You can say, Hey, I made the call when it was unclear; oh well, we can see now in hindsight that it was the wrong one. You will rarely get lambasted for that, and if you do, well, hey, I did say you needed to get comfortable with being yelled at or having uncomfortable conversations. But your team will be thankful for you for making that decision, and that will build trust in you as someone they can turn to.
At a more personal level, if a member of your team has something going on in their life that’s causing them stress, don’t let them get caught between a rock and a hard place; work is the rock, and life is the hard place.
You have the power to move that for them; it costs you practically nothing but will mean the world to them. Always lead with empathy. Sick child, moving house, divorce, give them time off, give them flexibility. In some cases, you will need to force them to take it. People are very worried about being seen to let life impact work; alleviate them of the notion that life is more important than work; lead by example.
Some future articles will go deeper into career development, but part of your support role is to facilitate that growth. Both in a formal and informal capacity. A workplace is an endless supply of opportunities for people to learn new things—both hard and soft skills.
I’m a big fan of exposing future leaders to leadership meetings and recruitment. Get them to sit in on the odd meeting or interview, and they will learn a lot.
Move people around; don't let people get stagnant in their roles or become a single point of failure. Get a culture of communication, documentation, and knowledge sharing going. Get people to talk in meetings about what they are doing, what they learned, or their ideas on how to improve things.
Foster an environment of experimentation; your team won't improve if you don't give things a try, and stress that many experiments fail. Getting people exposed to failure is a good way to break that notion that everything they do on the clock has to be perfect.
Lastly, understand that not everyone wants to grow the same way. Not everyone is particularly interested enough in their job to be reading about it, going to a conference, or doing things like that.
The book Radical Candor by Kim Scott, which I'll talk more about at a later time, talks about rock stars and superstars. Superstars grow and move on quickly. They are the people who want help to grow; they want to be driving towards their next promotion or role, and so you will find it easy to support them. But rock stars are less clearly driven, and that's a good thing. You need some of your team to be rock stars, as that adds stability to your team. You can't have an entire team of driven high achievers, or you'll be replacing your entire team far too frequently.
Rockstars may be at a point in their lives where they have other priorities: studying, starting a new family, or growing a side venture. These people still need your support to grow slowly, but they may just want work to be this thing they do while they focus their excess energy on other things in their lives, and that is fine. Make sure you have a mix in your team, and make sure you aren't alienating one group with your efforts with the other.
Administration
The one thing that surprises most first-time managers is how much administration goes into the role, and the higher up you go, the more you will do.
From leave applications, budgets, expense approvals, hiring, procurement, and performance reviews, your world will consist of a lot of this. Some administration happens just infrequently enough that you'll forget each time what you need to do, so I recommend writing it down for your future self (I always forgot how to code an expense application properly, and the guides are always five years out of date).
I highly recommend that you take this part of your role seriously, and unless you have been explicitly given a support person like an EA, I don't think you should be passing that work on to others in the team; a lot of legal, safety, and institutional risk can sit on that administration. Take it seriously and take care of it as soon as possible. Don't leave expense requests sitting for weeks or applications sitting too long; it sends a message that you are too busy and prevents people from doing the things they need to do.
Closing thoughts
You are the captain of the ship. But you do not drive it, you do not hoist the sails, and you do not load the supplies. That's your team; your team makes the ship go, and your team gets the ship to its destination. Lead from the front in terms of getting everyone to know where the ship is going, then immediately leave your team to sail the ship, flip your role into a support role, and lead from the rear. Your team's success is your success, and their failure is yours. Too many ships (teams) have a captain yelling orders and then retiring to their quarters while the team tries to figure it out on their own. This is what results in your team working inefficiently or against each other, which results in unhappy stakeholders, staff retention issues, more conflict, and an inability for your team to reach its goals and the company's goals.
At the end of the day, you were hired to make the team a success.
Feel free to reach out if you have a question, all my links are in my Linktree and if you want to show some extra gratitude you can buy me a coffee through my Linktree.