Three core elements to being a manager, pt 1; Direction
Setting sail requires a map, a captain, and some teamwork
A managers role entails a variety of different responsibilities, these vary from role to role.
However, there are three non-negotiable responsibilities that I consider to be core to every managerial position.
Those are:
If you are falling short in any of these departments then your team isn’t getting what they need from you, and they will suffer for it.
Over the next three articles I’m going to dive deep into what each aspect entails, and talk about what I consider to be best practice in fulfilling these responsibilities.
Today we are going focus on Direction.
The captain of the ship
I always envision the team as a ship. It has a crew who work together to get to a destination, and ultimately the captain is responsible for the ship, the crew, and the mission.
So when I see a team that’s not functioning correctly, I see it like a dysfunctional crew. People arguing over what the best heading is, people confused about the exact destination, and some drilling holes in the side of the ship because they got confusing orders or are acting out..
Like a ship, the manager is responsible for ensuring that the crew knows where the ship is going, why it’s going, and how to function as a team to get there safely and efficiently.
Refer to the map
Whether you have just started leading a new team, or have been leading one for some time, the steps to be effectively setting, and keeping your team on course are easy.
To start you need to educate yourself. Start by identifying what your team’s role is in your company and understanding the companies current strategy and any subsequent departmental strategies too.
It would be a good idea to talk to your manager or other managers to help get a bit of a reality check on things like the companies official strategy, as things always change.
Every company has a strategy, its normally plastered all over the company intranet and often in an easy to consume Power Point presentation.
It may sound obvious to say all of this, but the thing I most commonly see is teams operating on auto pilot. They ‘know’ what they are there to do, but to them, the company’s strategy is just some meeting that happens once a year and don’t pay it much attention.
But, it’s the blueprint of what your team needs to be doing for that timeframe. It’s the closest thing you are going to get to a cheat sheet on how to run your team.
Knowing the strategy and how your team is expected to contribute to it, gives your ship a clear direction, and can help you navigate difficult waters. From helping you decide what work to focus on when busy, to help inform big decisions. The companies strategy is the golden hand book for running your team.
You’ll never be told off for following the strategy.
Knowing your teams priorities, in regards to the strategy, is the single most important thing you can do. It makes so many problems go away, and issues easier to solve. You’ll never be told off for following the strategy.
Depending on your team, your contribution to the strategy will differ. If you lead a team with a specific focus like software development then you’ll need to confirm with your management team that what you’re building and maintaining is aligned with what the company expects.
If you lead a more broader team like Finance, HR, or IT help desk where you are doing multiple things for different parts of the business then what you want is clear priorities. To ensure that you aren’t holding up work other teams need to meet the strategy. Any work that is not in service to the strategy, can be safely de-prioritised and tackled when capacity is more available. There will be exceptions of course.
Check the crew manifest
Once you have wrapped your head around the companies strategy and how your team feeds into it, the next step is to do a rough resource budget.
A resource budget is some simple math to calculate how much staff you have vs what your expected workload is. It’s important to get a quick understanding of what position you are starting from.
For example, I took over a team, that had fifty staff in total, but the organisation had about 30 projects in flight and the BAU demand on our team was so high we had requests that went back three years we hadn’t been able to get to.
With a team of fifty you’d think we could handle anything, but in doing the math I realised we had far too much demand and was able to show to my management that I could fully staff the top 3 priority projects and then I had no one left for anything else. But because I could show that math, my leadership were able to support me.
Knowing your resource budget is crucial for understanding how you approach managing your team’s direction. If the companies strategy only needs 10% of your teams resource in a year, then you know that you just need to prioritise that work when it comes in and take the rest of the work as it comes.
However, if you end up in the situation I did and nearly your entire team is going to be needed to deliver the strategy, you need to be transparent about that issue with your leadership.
Being transparent about what issues your team faces is one of the best tips I can give you.
Being transparent about what issues your team faces is one of the best tips I can give you. Very few issues in a team’s life are actually caused by you and your team. Short of performance and how you run your team, most problems are caused by the business.
Whether it be too much demand, not enough resource, conflicting direction, unrealistic deadlines. When you are faced with an issue that is caused by the business, the best thing you can do is be transparent about the issue to your superiors. They have the power to help you solve the problem, or at the very least when shit hits the fan you did your due diligence in warning your superiors. I’m not delusional, I’m well aware that 80% of the time you will still need to solve the issue yourself, but still be transparent.
Use your managers to help navigate the demand on your team. Get agreement from them about what is and isn’t a priority. When work needs to be paused or de-priortised that’s something your leadership needs to be aware of. Because more often than not, when another team isn’t getting what they want from you they will escalate. If your leadership are aware of the problem, then they are prepared for that conversation. It doesn’t make the issues go away it just resolves them faster and easier.
Restock, refuel, repair
An important part of your resource budget is understanding what you need for your team to keep the ship afloat.
Your team needs time to do professional development, carry out maintenance, administration, or even workflow improvements.
When considering your budget you need to be leaving at least 10-15% of the time spare for that. Ensure you know exactly what these tasks are and make sure they’re getting done, non-essential work is always for the team to ignore if they’re feeling busy. The same goes for professional development, which will be covered in another article.
If your team has a lot of work to do in this department. Whether its a much needed software upgrade, a migration to a new system, or just a severe lack of documentation and processes, you may need more than 10-15%. This is something you need to highlight to your leadership so they can help navigate this process. You can’t avoid this work forever as your team will suffer, so make sure you make time for it.
Spread the word
Now you know what your team is here to do, and how you need to approach it, the next step is to communicate this with your team.
It’s important that you and your team are on the same page, it keeps the ship on course.
It’s far too easy for your team to want to help other teams that aren’t getting seen to, or get excited by some new work that’s popped up. Unfortunately what you need to work on is dictated to by the business who won’t look kindly to their number one priority being delayed because you went off course. This is why it’s important for everyone to know what the plan is.
In my experience corporate speak laced power point presentations don’t do a great job at communicating what it actually means in practice. To get the message through to your team, don’t read off the script, put the strategy into terms, examples, and diagrams they will understand. Normally this takes the form of work specific scenarios.
Your staff will often feel uncomfortable making a judgment call themselves as they are afraid of getting it wrong. So spell it out for them, for example:
Project A is the companies sole focus so all work around this project goes to the top of the priority list, or
All requests from Project A need to be turned around within 3 days, even if that means pausing other work. Come to me if there are any problems.
It’s not enough to communicate this once. I recommend talking about the companies strategy and how you're contributing to it often. Even if it’s once a month during a meeting and you feel like it’s getting repetitive. Your staff are deep in the weeds and their view of the company and work is different from yours, they will need regular reminding to stay on course.
Swab the decks
The last thing you need to be doing regarding direction, is to get the team to decide on the internal direction of the team.
It’s important that your team feels like they have some control in all of this. The team needs their own strategy to execute on. Whether its changing how you do things, investing more in documentation, automating some annoying tasks, or going to some training, it’s important to a team to feel like they are growing. You’d be surprised how much happier staff are when they feel like they have control over some things.
Work with your team to set some goals, these will be tackled in that 10-15% of time you budgeting for. 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, given you’ll also need to be contributing the organisations strategy, it will also make it easier to remember.
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 loose trust in the process and might feel 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. A team that gets practice at achieving things will gain confidence faster improving their buy-in for future endeavours.
I don’t expect this to work straight away or be without its hiccups. This is something you work towards over time. It also gets your team comfortable with some experimentation and failure. That’s healthy, far too many teams operate expecting perfect results.
Accountability
The last part is the hardest part, but the most important part. With everything your team is setting out to do, there needs to be a level of accountability.
It’s a concept that is very scary to people, it’s been abused a lot in the past, but there’s a reason ‘lack of accountability’ features in the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it’s important.
The goal here is to first demystify accountability
Working with your team to set realistic deadlines and goals, and holding them to that is imperative to your whole teams success and happiness.
The goal here is to first demystify accountability. Deadlines can be missed and failure can happen as long as the reasoning is sound. Most teams suck at estimating how long it will take to do something, which is why you need to fail a few times to get better at it.
You demystify accountability by practicing it consistently, be amenable when mistakes are genuinely made, and use any failings as an opportunity for the whole team to learn. You, of course, need to not be a dickhead through any of this.
Once the team is comfortable with accountability then it fosters a level of pride and buy-in with their work. They’ll understand why they are doing and what they are doing, they’ll feel motivated to ensure that the priority goals are being met, and they help each other out and take more personal responsibility.
It’s the reasons sports teams work. They work together towards a shared goal and there is an abundance of accountability. Like needing to keep fitness levels high, like not being able to drink at certain times of year, collaborating, because they all want that win.
When you succeed at this, you’ll be surprised at how much easier your job gets. When everyone knows the plan, then they’ll self edit. You’ll make less priority calls because your senior staff will make those calls for you. People will get side tracked less, and if anyone is acting out, they’ll feel the collective pressure to fall in line, because everyone else is.
Set sail
You are the captain, but that doesn’t give you permission to bark orders and hide in your quarters for the whole trip.
You need to be at the wheel alongside the team making the ship run smoothly.
However, you need to do it in such way that when you aren’t around, the ship runs just as smoothly without you, because you have done such a good job at setting the direction of your team.
Check out the workbook
For many of the topics covered in this article I have provided a workbook to give you a more hands on approach to guide you through the process. Check it out if you need some tips.
Three core elements to being a manager, Direction, Workbook
Welcome to the workbook for our piece on Direction.
💡If there is any topics you’d like to see covered on the blog or have any specific questions, feel free to drop a comment, leave a message in the chat or reach out to me on social media.