Andrew Kesterson

"Love God. Live Righteously. Die Well."
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# Advice for New Managers : Part 3

2024-03-08 Leadership 2.7k words

Welcome back to my series of advice for new managers. In the previous post, Advice for New Managers : Part 2, we built upon the foundation from Part 1 with three more important things about scope, peers and mentors:

- Understanding the difference between a contributor, a manager, and an executive
- How to identify and network with your new peer group, and why it’s important
- The importance of identifying a mentor (who is not your boss)

Now in this episode in the series, we will close out with results, retention, relationships and delegation. Again, this is all information that, when I was promoted into management from a senior contributor, I had to learn the hard way. I really wish I had a guide like this back then. I hope it will help you.

## You are now judged on the results and retention of your team

We talked about how your job is no longer executing the tasks, but translating from the strategic to the tactical, and managing the complexity of distributing and completing that work. Your boss will be measuring your success by two primary factors:

- Your ability to achieve results with the resources you have on the goals you have been given
- Your ability to acquire and retain quality resources (people and capital assets)

There are two primary risks you are there to mitigate:

- Stuff not getting done (lost opportunity cost)
- Time and productivity being lost due to personnel churn

You need to talk to your boss about how they will judge your success in your role. They may not give you very good metrics - chances are, if they’re like most bosses, they don’t actually know how to measure whether you’re being successful. They have gut feelings, they know when major projects go off the rails, and they know when people in their network complain about or praise you, but they don’t really have good metrics on the performance of you or your teams. But even if they don’t give you really good metrics, you need to understand what their expectations are. But understand that, regardless of what they say, it really boils down to your ability to deliver results, retain good employees, and coach the troublesome ones up or out.

## Correctly define the relationship between you, your team, and the business

Managers who were promoted from the ranks of contributors face a special challenge that, on the one hand, can seem beneficial - but on the other hand, can create huge problems. And that challenge is that the manager may view themselves as, and the contributors will view them as, “one of us”, and that “now one of us has a seat at the table”.

As attractive as this is, and as useful as this sentiment can be, you must be very cautious about this. You need to carefully set expectations with your team, your boss, and yourself, about what your role is and is not. Hopefully, by this point in this series :

- you have a good idea of what your role is
- you have a strong peer network to lean on
- you have a good mentor to guide you
- you have a clear picture of how your boss will measure your success
- you have a clear breakdown of responsibility between you and the other layers of the business.

All of this knowledge will allow you to be effective in your role, but you can sabotage all of it if you don’t have the proper relationship with your teams. Here are a few boundaries that are critical for you to establish with yourself and your team.

- This is a business, not a family
- This team, and these employees, are not yours
- You should be their advocate, but you cannot be their friend
- You are there to enable them to deliver results to the business, not to protect them from the business

There is a pernicious lie spread in some organizations that “Here, we are a family”. This is said by well-meaning but clueless leaders and managers who are trying to create an inclusive environment that feels safe. But the actual effect is to create an environment where people feel trapped and abused. Families are a network of natural, biological connections we don’t get a choice about, and they are primarily held together by unconditional love. A business is a network of skilled individuals primarily held together by a contractual agreement to provide a wage in exchange for time and effort. It is critical to understand this difference, or you will do enormous psychological harm to yourself, your business and your employees.

Nobody can love you like family, and nobody can hurt you like family. Business relationships can be nurturing and fulfilling in many ways, but a business will never, ever love you. It can not. An individual within a business may love a person or every person, and may exhibit exceptional caring and empathy, and they may go to exceptional andinspiring lengths for those people. But the business itself is a faceless, heartless thing that must make logical decisions based on success criteria, which usually boils down to financial impact.

Some of my readers might be very offended by this. Maybe you work for a non-profit that does great work within society. Maybe you work for an organization where every employee truly does feel loved and cared for. I’m not denying that there are some amazing companies out there; but they are amazing because of the people who lead them, not because of the company itself. They are not families. Ask yourself - would you rather starve than leave your coworkers? Would you rather freeze on the street with them, than leave them? Would you sacrifice your own happiness, well being, and safety, in order to offer them something better? That’s what family does. And that’s why it’s so dangerous to tell people that your business is a family. Because while people can and often are motivated to go to such extremes for the people around them, the business absolutely will not do these things for them. And the moral injury that results from this realization can be crushing for everyone, and many will never recover from it when it happens.

This brings us to the next point: these teams, these people, are not yours. As leaders, it is critical that you create a shared identity with the teams you have been assigned to lead, and that you personally invest in the success of the individuals you have been asked to manage. You cannot lead if the workers don’t feel that you represent them, and someone will not allow you into their life to develop them if they don’t believe you actually care about them. These things can lead to you using identifying language like “my teams”, or “my employees”. They have been assigned to you, and you’re putting in the work, so they’re yours. Except … they’re not.

Remember, this is a business, not a family. And those employees, those teams, have a contract with the business, not with you. The business may, for reasons completely and entirely unrelated to your performance, decide to take those employees and teams and move them to a different part of the organization with a different manager. Or the business may move you to a different team and different employees. Your relationship with them, as strong as it may be, is temporary and based entirely around the needs of the business.

If you feel that you must protect your team from the business, this creates an adversarial relationship between you, your boss, and their objectives. It paints a big bullseye on your team’s back when it comes time for layoffs and reorganizations. And it severely limits your effectiveness, because it shows you really don’t understand the priorities that your boss has set for you, and that you can’t be trusted to manage the complexity of the work you’re being given.

The desire to protect your team from the business usually comes from past trauma that you’re carrying around from a prior moral injury you sustained at the hands of some representative of the business. You need to dig that up, work through it, and square it away. Talk to your peer groups and your mentor about it. Understand what drove the business decisions that were at play in what happened to you, and understand how much of what happened was simply due to the human being who delivered that business decision to you. Once you’re able to effectively divorce the actions of the business from the actions of the humans that were employed by that business, you can prepare to do something that is actually useful for your team: managing relationships between your team and the various humans representing the business, so that you can predict and interdict troublesome human interactions around business decisions that are likely to result in moral injury. Taking this approach will ensure the business sees that you are fully utilizing your resources in support of the goals set before you and your leadership, while your teams will see you as a leader who is calm under fire, a rock in times of trouble, and a fierce protector against injustice.

At the same time, as we discussed when defining your new peer group, you have to be careful about staying too close to your team. You cannot afford to allow them to be your friends. You are responsible for their productivity, and ensuring that they are doing what the business needs them to do. As much as you do your best to inspire them by leading from the front, by modeling the values you expect them to show… Ultimately you do control their addiction to food clothing and shelter, you tell them what to do, and you will be the one who has to discipline (or fire) them if things aren’t going well. It is important that you establish trust with your team, that they understand you will go to bat for them and will always stand behind them, but that you establish clear boundaries so they know that you are not their buddy. You are their employer. You are their boss. Just because you don’t like using your role power doesn’t mean you don’t have it, and they need to maintain a healthy level of respect for the position you hold and the business you represent. And you have to understand those things, too - otherwise you won’t be able to provide honest feedback, you won’t be able to issue difficult commands, and you won’t be able to make difficult decisions. You won’t provide discipline (which is not the same as punishment) where necessary, and things fall apart. Your teams will suffer if you don’t establish boundaries here.

## Delegate all the way to the floor

The last thing I’m going to cover in this article is delegation. You understand now that your job is tactical execution of the strategic objectives given to you by your boss, breaking up that work amongst your resources, assigning it out, and following up to make sure it gets done. If you were a successful contributor, you’re almost certainly going to fail here. And it’s because you’re used to executing, not delegating.

The process of learning to delegate is why lots of managers who used to be contributors feel like their transition to management has made them useless. They are so used to directly executing tasks that they can’t be productive without their hands directly in the work. These managers usually also feel like they need to protect their teams from the business. As a result, when these managers are given a task by their boss, they will hold on to that work and try to get it done themselves.

Unfortunately, you are NOT the correct person to get this work done anymore. Holding on to this work might make you feel good because you’re comfortable with this kind of work and you can feel productive, whereas with your other managerial tasks you might not feel as productive, that’s just sticking your head in the sand. By holding on to that work, you prevent your employees (who are better positioned to actually do this work) from picking it up and executing it. Further, you are delaying the completion of that work, or you are delaying completion of managerial work that your boss expects you to do, or both. By holding on to this work and trying to get it done yourself, you are making everything about this task worse. This is a terrible habit.

A much better habit to develop is delegating to the floor. The idea is simple: Any time you get something from your boss, or when you are dealing with a large pile of tasks broken out from a larger initiative your boss gave you, you delegate everything by default. You take a unit of work, and ask two questions:

- Am I the CORRECT person to do this work?
- Am I the ONLY person who knows how to do this work?

If you are the correct person to do the work, then you should do it. But you should also ask yourself if there’s anyone in your team who is ready to learn the task - remember, part of being a good manager is training the people beneath you to learn your job so that both of you can be ready to move up to new roles when vacancies appear in the organization. If so, then grab someone else and have them learn the task as you do it. Then, when the next time comes along, if it is appropriate to do so, you can delegate it to them.

If you are the ONLY person who knows how to do a task, and you are not the correct person to do it, this is a big problem. You now have a training responsibility. Pull your team together, walk them through how this task should be done, set clear expectations with them, and then delegate it to someone. This is how you empower your team, and yourself, to do bigger and better things.

Don’t worry about over-delegating to your team. What you need to focus on is ensuring that your team knows the priority order in which things need to be done. If you are setting clear expectations around priorities, then when you delegate something new to your employees, they know exactly what to do - they delegate the same way you do. The things that can be handed off to a peer or a more junior contributor are handed off; and when the work item gets delegated down so far that it can’t be delegated to any other person, and it is lower priority than some other work item, it gets delegated to the floor. It doesn’t get done. And that’s okay. Not everything gets done. But we have to make sure the right things are getting done at the right time by the right people, and delegating to the floor allows us to make sure that those right people are doing those right things instead of constantly chasing every little thing that comes their way.

## What now?

We’ve covered 9 fundamental topics in this series:

- Understanding the difference between a contributor, a manager, and an executive
- Identifying and networking with your new peer group
- Identifying a mentor - who is not your boss
- Remember, you probably don’t know what you’re doing, and that’s OK
- What is the difference between a boss and a leader (and why you should be a leader)
- Understanding the power that comes with your new role (and why you should avoid using it)
- How your performance is judged (results and retention)
- Defining the relationship between you, your team, and the business
- Delegating all the way to the floor
- There is so much more to being a good manager and a good leader. Literal libraries of content have been written on the topic. But these 9 things are, in my opinion, absolutely critical for new managers to learn and implement effectively. If you do these things, you will rise head and shoulders above 90% of your peers.

Good luck out there.

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