Three core elements to being a manager, pt 2; Support
Being there for them, is as easy as one, two, three.
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 Support.
Building Trust
It may seem redundant to dedicate a whole section for being there for your staff, but I feel that support is a multi-faceted discipline, it’s more than just answering their cries for help. It’s about how to approach problems in the team, the micro-behaviours you display to your staff, and the methodology you enact in growing the capabilities of each person.
It’s an aspect that you can’t afford to be asleep at the wheel about. If you take a ‘doors-open, approach me about anything’ strategy, that’s not enough. When you leave things to chance, by not taking an active role, every person you work with will be forced to make an assumption about you, based on their own biases and the limited evidence they do have.
This will lead to some people being comfortable asking for help, and others being too afraid.
At one point in my career I was leading three seperate teams, and a fourth multi year project. I would sometimes have forty meetings a week. This lead my staff to start believing I was too busy, too important, to be bothered about their issues.
I found this disheartening. Despite all my efforts to show to my team that I was there for them whenever they needed it, they formed an opinion without my input and I was reaping the consequences of that.
Your support model needs to be an ethos that you not only state, but you prove to your team time and time again. You need to walk the walk.
The relationship you build with each of your staff will be different per person, so there is no, one-size-fits-all approach to building that trusting relationship.
But I’ve gathered a handful of top tips to help:
Prioritise what is important to them: When they ask for help, it’s because something is a priority for them. You should try and solve it with the same level of attention and urgency. Don’t let it sit at the bottom of your to do list. I’ve had situations where I’ve asked my manager if I could use the training budget to go on a certain course, they normally need to go ask someone else about that. I’ve sometimes waited weeks, because it took a week for my manager to get around to sending the email, and then normally other parts of the business have their own hold up. Action these requests promptly and communicate with your staff member about what’s happening. This shows them you care, and when the other party is the one dragging their heels, your staff member knows you're not to blame.
Communicate openly and honestly: There will be times you won’t be at liberty to communicate something you know, you just have to roll with that. But for everything else, communicate. Communicate what you're thinking about a problem, even admit that you don’t know the solution just yet. Communicate how you're feeling, positives and negatives. Being an open book, stops others from making assumptions about you and the situations they are in. You are only human, and demystifying the facts that sometimes you aren’t having a good day, or you don’t have the answer to a problem off the top of your head are great steps towards building trust. Though please note, that some honest communication can cause issues, don’t bitch and gossip and don’t badmouth other teams. Learn to self-edit your honesty for optimal results.
Be decisive: People come to you to make decisions, that’s a big part of the role, and so many leaders are afraid of making a decision. Either take this as gospel from me, or look back on your previous experiences, but failure happens often and it’s not a big deal. The one super power you have, is being able to decide what’s actually important and being able to shoulder a mistake. The amount of decisions I’ve made, that didn’t work out in the end, that resulted in me saying “whoops I made the wrong call” and having zero to minimal consequences are more than I can count. As a leader, you’re a lot more bullet proof than your staff, because you represent a whole team and level of hierarchy. I abuse this position often. I take the blame for my staff all the time. Missed deadlines, mistakes in the output, or miscommunication, simply say “sorry that happened, how can we fix it.” I’m obviously not talking about employee misconduct here, but when we look at the majority of issues that happen in a workplace, they are nearly all failure resistant. So make the call, trust your gut, or take a chance. When you need to make a decision and your unsure which one is the right one, pick one, give your team an answer and if it goes belly up, it won’t actually be that big of a deal.
Reiterate your function, often: Remind the team, often, that you are there for them. Whether it’s helping with an issue or personal development you might not be afforded a slue of opportunities to show that, so keep saying it over and over again, even if you feel like a broken record. Because you need to keep that idea fresh in their heads.
The goal here is to impress on your staff that you care and that they can trust you. You do this both through a few clear examples, but mostly through all the small things you do.
Your bullet proof super power, is to be used for good, not evil. I mentioned about that I take the blame for my staff all the time. That’s because the situation is split into two different scenarios.
The first is how do we solve the emergency at hand. Some people will want to sit on the soap box and play the blame game pointing the finger at your staff member. That benefits no one, especially not your employee. Its irrelevant. Most deadlines are imaginary, most emergencies are fabricated, and in business feelings don’t matter. So take the blame and focus on moving the angry person towards what can we do to fix this and then fix it. Humans make mistake 10-15% of the time, so this is bound to happen no matter how perfect your team is, so put this practice in place and get good at being yelled at. I promise you, nothing actually bad will come of it. I once took over a team that had such unrealistic demand placed on it, I spent a year sitting in meetings giving clients bad news that we couldn’t help them. I faced a lot of abuse, and no consequences.
The second part is learning from mistakes. Your employee / team already know they made a mistake and will want to fix it, so they don’t need to be exposed to an abusive client. Your goal as a team is to always be learning and improving, and most of that comes from experimentation and failure. Do a post-mortem, have a chat, discuss internally what went wrong and learn from it. Were the deadlines unrealistic? Are you missing processes that would have prevented the issue? Were you not resourced appropriately for the task? Discuss internally, behind closed doors and just focus on what you can do better next time, remember mistakes happen even in perfect systems, so not every mistake is an emergency.
It’s your call to make
I’ve alluded to this a few times already, but a workplace is a bit like the show, Who’s Line is it Anyway? Because the questions are made up and the points don’t matter.
So many things at work sound important and it puts unnecessary pressure on the people working there. As mentioned in the first article, your job is to provide focus, removing unnecessary noise and keeping the team happy and the ship on course.
This ultimately means, you decide what is important. I strongly recommend you lean into this heavily because it will make a huge difference. Start each day with a large glass of pragmatism and empathy and your world will be much better for it.
A major cause of distress for staff is when they feel penned in by too many problems. They feel like they are between a rock and hard place and that’s when they are at their most vulnerable.
This is when your super power comes in.
I had a staff member who worked really hard, was never sick. Was always up beat and took on a huge workload with a smile. Then their personal life got messy, and they were starting to drown. When I asked them how I could help they felt so much pressure from that workplace expectations that you don’t let your personal life impact work, they only asked for the ability to leave work an hour early to get some stuff done, and that they would work an extra hour another day.
I rejected that notion. Told them to go home immediately and get on top of things, and I personally emailed their clients informing them of delays. Nothing bad happened. Sure the clients weren’t happy but I didn’t give them the choice. If they continued to try and juggle everything that was on their plate they were going to burn themselves out, and their work would have suffered, potentially upsetting the clients.
This wasn’t a situation that was avoidable, but I chose the correct action, the more healthy path. This is the power you have, it costs you nothing, but means the world to your staff, and the consequences the business are often minimal.
Besides, things get delayed all the time, IT systems malfunctioning, Illness ripping through the office, your boss changing your priorities, and nine times out of ten nothing bad actually happens.
Don’t wait for a real emergency to pump the breaks, the consequences don’t actually exist, so get in the habit of pumping the breaks often, for non-critical emergencies. Your team will be better for it. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, pace yourself and the team.
Once I learned that the questions really are made up and the points don’t matter and that I call the shots, I do this all the time. It makes the team happier and shock horror, the work actually gets done and business doesn’t go under.
Some problems are the businesses problem
I will reiterate this in multiple articles until i’m blue in the face and my fingers have seized up. Part of your job as a leader, in supporting your staff is to understand that not all problems are yours to solve.
You and your team are a tool, to put it redundantly. It’s the business that decides how it uses its tools. Which means it’s the businesses fault when it puts the tools in a bad situation.
I had a job once where I was the only analyst in the business working on a type of work that impacted our end users. It was something that should have been automated but a human being ended up doing it. I was under a lot of pressure and I had to work really hard to keep on top of it. Suffice to say, my manager was a knob and didn’t support me at all.
When I made mistakes, the consequences weren’t that dire. They were easy to fix and the monetary cost to the company wasn’t all that bad, and I made a lot of mistakes because of how snowed under I was.
The one day, a client wanted me to carry out a specific task, similar to my existing duties but the risk was monumentally higher and the requirements more complex. If I made a mistake, the cost to rectify would have been over $50,000 per mistake. That scared me a lot, then my mother pointed out after a lengthy verbal panic attack that it’s not my job to shoulder that entire burden, it was the businesses. So I went to my bosses boss (we were a small company and he sat near me) and explained the situation.
He agreed that it wasn’t fair that this rested on my shoulders and responded with supporting me with additional staff.
Too many teams, individuals, and leaders see a problem and try and shoulder the entire responsibility on themselves
Too many teams, individuals, and leaders see a problem and try and shoulder the entire responsibility on themselves, when in fact its the companies responsibility to ensure it, because its the business who wants the outcome.
When you are faced with something big and scary, push back. Share the problem. The hammer in the tool shed doesn’t take responsibility for the end product, it’s the wielder that does.
Far too many times in my working life has a priority request come to my team and its carries really big consequences and most of the time has really short deadlines. When that happens, I simply push back. I explain the risks of rushing such important work and make them sign off on the risk. Making someone else responsible for risks is the best thing you can do for yourself and your team because it shields you from recklessness. Get into the practice of asking ‘who is truly responsible for this problem’ and sharing it with them. A good chunk of the time they weren’t aware of the issue they caused, and most of the time you can argue for some level of protection or support.
A word about reality
I talk a lot about consequences not being real, and to use that to your advantage as a leader.
I’ve had workplaces where this worked, and didn’t. Sometimes the people you work for are just assholes. Each workplace will take its own toll and I encourage you to cater this advice to your specific scenario. Some things I suggest will take more time and effort because of where you work, but they will work universally, whilst some pieces of advice won’t.
For the record I’m a tall, white, cis-gendered man, which comes with a heap of privilege and I acknowledge that for other people, the system will be against you.
This may mean you’ll need to be clever about how you approach situations and people using this advice. What this may result in, in a bad scenario, is that you will burn out trying to be a great manager in supporting your staff. It happens to everyone and it doesn’t mean you're a bad leader, it probably means you need to find a new job.
Your reputation is at stake
Employees have long memories.
How many times have you and another person whinged about people at work. Especially people you don't currently work with.
How a manager treats their staff can have ripples across years of 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, the manager who didn’t have their back. They remember it all, for a very long time.
At the very least, you should be motivated to not be another horror story your employee tells for years to come.
It’s like that adage, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
Honestly, being a kind, empathetic and supporting manager is an easier job in the long run. Bad managers I’ve experienced are often drowning under their own inadequacies and issues that they created.
This is the easier path, I promise you.
Supporting your staff, in every aspect of the role, will result in staff that care and trust you.
When they trust you, to care about them, prioritise their interests, remove unwanted experiences, and invest in their future, your job becomes a hell of a lot more easier.
They will bring issues to you early, feel empowered to go that extra mile, and be prepared to make mistakes in an effort to improve their work.
Your role will be easier to execute, easier to focus, and will honestly be less stressful.
I know this works because as I’ve practiced it, I’ve felt less stressed, and my teams have performed better.
I’ve managed close to fifty staff in my leadership career and I still get asked to go out for coffee, get stopped in the street to have a chat, and I even got wedding gifts from ex-employees. Being there for them helped them be better team members at work, and I’ve had the privilege of seeing them progress up the ladder in their careers.
💡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.