The title of this newsletter is a deliberate play on words.
My observation, founded through being a manager myself, and working under and along side other leaders, is that none of us are coping very well.
Most managers are barely fulfilling the role that they are expected to do, that is to say they are barely doing the job of being a manager.
Most managers are also struggling, unsure of what to do to be an effective leader, to get the results they want. They are barely managing to keep their head above the water.
People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers
It’s nothing novel to say that bad managers are everywhere. We all know the adage of “people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers”, what I’m curious about, is how we got here.
How we ended up in a society where on average our bosses are inadequate. People to whom we vent about their actions in social settings, sometimes years after leaving the role. People, whose existence makes us dread going to work, make us doubt our abilities and career choices, who impact our mental health on a deep level.
The impacts of poor leadership go wider than the personal ramifications of those around them.
Missed deadlines, over budget projects, sub par products, and un met KPIs are also the byproduct of poor management.
If you're not doing your job correctly, people make mistakes, work takes longer to complete, and work is completed to a poorer standard.
The bottom line is that this all costs the company a lot of money.
It costs money to replace staff who have left. It costs money to have staff be so burned out they are calling in sick often or making mistakes at work. It costs money when people don’t clearly know what to do, and it costs money when projects fail or miss deadlines.
I’m not a monetarily minded person, and there a plenty of things I think managers should do that aren’t necessarily financially efficient, but when we boil any business down it always comes back to cash. If you work in private, a bad manager is eating into the profit line, if you work in a public service then bad management is squandering tax payers money.
Good leadership still costs money, but it costs less than bad management, and that fundamentally what your team is there to do. Achieve its function without reckless expenditure.
How did we get here?
Depending on your outlook on life, and personal experiences you may not view the problem as harshly as I do.
I feel that in my career and talking to friends about their work experience, that the split between good-enough management and bad management is anywhere between 70/30 or 80/20, with the good managers being the minority.
Even if you view it different, say a 50/50 split, I want you to bear with me here. Even if a company has 99 good managers, and only 1 is bad. The employees of the bad manager don’t feel the benefits of the other 99. Their reality is that they have a bad manager and going to work sucks. My heart still bleeds for that team and their one bad manager and Id like to see a change in the world.
Through my experience I have observed the following:
Bad managers suck and make problems for their team and those around them.
Good people are not necessarily good managers.
Companies don’t know how to cultivate good leaders and so in turn do not know how to improve bad leaders.
Most leaders don’t have a qualification in being a manager, and so they learn on the job, with wildly different results.
Leaders achieve their rank normally after reaching a level of seniority in their field of expertise and but are promoted into a position that requires a whole new skill set.
Managers lean on other managers for support, if those managers suck or don’t know how to mentor, then nothing changes and cycle repeats.
On the whole, it feels like most companies are just winging it with their managers, just hoping that whomever they hire or promote is going to do a good job.
Companies don’t test new leaders coming in, the way they do technical staff. They don’t actively monitor or manage existing managers or have a clear framework to hold them accountable. They simply hire them and put their heads under the covers and hope that nothing goes wrong.
Some places make some level of effort with a multi-day leadership courses or some helpful resources from HR but none of them do the job effectively enough for my tastes.
I feel that the ambiguous and fluid role that leaders play in each team encourages people to believe that all management is different therefore you can’t make a one size fits all approach. The result, ends up being overly generic and useless training.
Whilst I agree that every managers job is different, and the make-up of humans in the team adds an uncomfortable level of complexity to the equation, I don’t believe that this variability is insurmountable. In fact I believe that at its core, every leaders job is the same, and by establishing a solid foundation you can adapt to the differences in your role.
With this foundation in place, life becomes easier. Rather than a hundred issues taking up mental space and causing anguish, for you and your team, you reach a level of clarity that cuts that number by a significant amount, leaving you more headspace to tackle the real issues.
The Management Foundation
When we boil it all down, your job is to make your team a success. That’s your sole responsibility, it’s not your job to bully people, grow your own status, flex your power, or take a free ride.
Success means that the work your team is being charged to do, is done effectively and efficiently. To achieve that your team need to be happy, your team needs to be good at what they do, and you, their manager, need to be taking an active role in the team’s day to day operations.
I see the foundation as having three pillars:
What your team does, i.e the work, is made easy through good systems, documentation, experimentation and improvement. Your team’s craft isn’t left to chance, the job is done consistently to a high-enough standard and issues and mistakes are absorbed into the process to improve future work.
Your team’s wellbeing is protected and supported through consistent management, good career development and ample opportunities to experiment and fail safely.
You protect your team from distractions, issues, and drama caused by other teams. You effectively establish a strategy, a heading, that the team understands and is striving for, while you work to solve issues and remove roadblocks.
Once you’ve established your foundation, the job becomes a lot easier, and in turn you and your team become a lot happier. All of a sudden certain issues go away, you start to see increased engagement amongst the team, and most importantly you are able to determine what is and isn’t important. This allows your focus to fall onto the things that need it.
The good news is that none of this is difficult. Depending on where your individual starting point is, it may mean more work than others, but the three pillars aren’t herculean tasks, and actually feed quite nicely into each other.
The better your systems, processes, and strategies are the less stress the teams feels in moments of uncertainty, increasing happiness. The happier your team is, the more they work to improve your processes and strategy, the more they speak up about issues you can help solve. It’s all connected and positive results are quick to show.
So if you’ve gotten this far and are still interested, I recommend subscribing and seeing where my words take you and your management practice.
I want you and your team to be happy, I’m going to provide tools, frameworks, mindsets, and guides on how to run a team well. This isn’t going to be some overly generic or hard-to-relate to product, it’s written by a manager, for managers, who have to tackle a myriad of scenarios as part of their daily role. I’ll have content on every aspect of the job, from hiring, career development, making strategies, and having difficult conversations.
It’s the guide I wish I had when I first started leading, and it’s my hope that it resonates with some other people and can be the help they need.
So stick around, and see how easy it is to be no longer barely managing.
💡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.