Read The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) Online
Authors: Jo Owen
2. Get the right support, both within your team and beyond.
The A team will make molehills out of mountains; the B team will make mountains out of molehills. Just because you inherited a team, you do not have to stick with
it. Try to move fast, because no team likes uncertainty. Beyond your team, you need support from key players, including your boss, the technocrats, and colleagues who are important to your plan. Invest time in building that support early, so you do not face constant battles later on.
3. Get the right budget, both in terms of what you must deliver and in terms of the resources available to you.
As with your team, do not lie down and accept what you have been given, unless it is what you need. The best time to negotiate on budget is before you start in your new role: as soon as you start you will have lost most of your negotiating power, unless you can bring some very compelling new data to the table.
4. Set expectations fast and set them low.
Your predecessor may have made all sorts of promises on your behalf (all of your team will expect promotion, your bosses will expect sales to triple next year...). If you accept those promises and expectations, you accept failure: you will not measure up to the expected miracles. Find all the skeletons in all the closets and put them on display. Paint a picture of a unit on the verge of imminent collapse. If your view is accepted, then even survival will be seen as success.
All of this means that your first 30 days are critical. You do not have time on your side, especially as most of your colleagues will judge you on first impressions. If you take control successfully, you will be unusual: many managers end up drifting with the tide.
There is plenty of advice on how to be a boss, but no one asks the team what they really want from the boss. So I have asked thousands of team members what they expect from a good boss. The results were surprisingly consistent across industries, levels in the firm, and nationality. Here are the top five things your team is likely to expect from you as a boss:
• Vision
• Ability to motivate
• Decisiveness
• Good in a crisis
• Honesty
These are relatively low hurdles over which most bosses trip. You do not have to be great to be a good boss. Here is what each of the five priorities mean:
VISION
This is the simple four-part story outlined in the last section—how to take control:
• This is where we are.
• This is where we are going.
• This is how we are going to get there.
• This is your (very important) role in helping us get there.
ABILITY TO MOTIVATE
This is where managers fail the most: managers manage upward much better than they manage downward: their boss is more important to their career than their team. Read the section on how to motivate (p. 103).
DECISIVENESS
Teams and people hate uncertainty, which leads to doubt and to fear. They also resent the rework and delay that go with indecisiveness. Even when you feel uncertain, project confidence. Always wear the mask of leadership: do not let your uncertainty and doubt spread to your team. If you have to change course, then change course: your team may grumble, but not as much as if you make no decision at all.
always wear the mask of leadership
GOOD IN A CRISIS
Crises make or break leaders’ reputations. Crises lead to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Your job is not just to deal with the crisis, but to give others the confidence to follow you. That means you must:
•
Be decisive and positive:
give clear direction and move to action.
•
Project confidence
, even if you have doubt in your heart. Wear the mask.
•
Give support
to those who need it. Avoid the blame game, leave the autopsy until later.
•
Provide air cover:
deal with the politics and noise that surround crises. Let your team get on with the work, rather than worry about the noise.
•
Over-communicate:
recognize that there will be confusion and doubt. Don’t let the doubt and the rumors build. Communicate positively, consistently and frequently.
HONESTY
This is the most divisive criterion. In the eyes of team members, managers who rated poorly on this rated poorly on everything else. Managers who rated well on honesty had a chance of rating well overall. We found that honesty is not simply the absence of dishonesty. It is stronger than that. Honesty is about trust. No one wants to work with a boss they do not trust. And for team members, trust came down to four simple tests and moments of truth:
• Can I trust my boss to do what they say?
• Can I trust my boss with my promotion and bonus?
• Will my boss be honest, open, and constructive with me about my performance?
• Can I rely on my boss to back me when I get into a corner?
If you can pass the test on those questions, you have a chance of meeting your team’s expectations of you.
Finally, note what is absent from your team’s expectations of you. They do not expect you to be charismatic and inspirational. This is just as well. Most of the bosses I have had or have interviewed would fail a charisma test. You cannot learn or acquire charisma. But you can acquire the other criteria expected of a good boss. If you meet your team’s top five expectations you will set yourself apart from most other bosses, and you will earn their loyalty.
You know that goals should be SMART:
•
S
pecific
•
M
easurable
•
A
ttainable
•
R
elevant
•
T
ime limited
SMART goals are better than the opposite:
• Non-specific: vague
• Not-measurable
• Unachievable
• Irrelevant
• No time limit
SMART goals may be simple, but applying them is not. The real questions about goal setting are:
•
Do I know the goal has been accepted and understood?
•
Will the goal be achieved or not?
The problem with managerial and office work is that it is very ambiguous. You can ask for a report by Wednesday, and you will get a report by Wednesday. It could be either a 200-page report or a two-page report, and it could be brilliant or it could be useless. The goal will have met the SMART criteria but you have no way of knowing in advance whether you will get what you want.
In practice, you have two ways of knowing how much is enough workload for anyone. First, you will probably have direct experience of completing a task similar to the one you are setting, so you should know how much effort it takes. But you do not know how much spare capacity and spare time the person to whom you are delegating has. You may unwittingly be asking a team member to work past midnight for the next two weeks. You know the workload of the goal you are setting, but you do not know the overall workload of each team member in detail.
The simplest way of managing overall workload is to ask. You know who the shirkers are on your team. More problematic are the wannabe heroes who never duck any challenge, however great. So for these people, manage their overall workload by looking out for the pizza boxes. When the office is too full of too many, half eaten, late night pizzas, you have set an unreasonable workload. And if they don’t eat pizza, look for the other early warning signs: increased irritability, tiredness, more minor errors creeping into work, and under-communciation. These are all signs of someone wilting under increasing pressure.
As ever, the best way of checking is to ask. Ask your team member to paraphrase back to you what you are asking them to do. People tend to hear what
they want to hear. You have to check that they have heard what you said, not what they wanted you to say. And then you can ask them if they agree with what you have asked them to do.
You can set a goal and, by doing so, you delegate away some of your responsibility. But you cannot delegate away your accountability. You are still accountable for the outcome. In President Truman’s words: “The buck stops here.” So make sure that the goal you set has a reasonable chance of being achieved. Once again, from your own experience, you should know what is achievable in what sort of time frame. But you need to check your own expectations. We all tend to see the past through rose tinted glasses and we forget just how hard and how time consuming it was to complete the sort of tasks we now delegate to others.
The best way of checking yourself is to ask your team member if they think the goal can be achieved in a timely fashion. Ask them what obstacles they see and what help they want. Don’t just set the goal and walk away. Your discussion about obstacles and support builds buy-in and commitment.
Of course, you then need to monitor progress and continue to support as required.
Some managers think they delegate well when they delegate all the routine rubbish and, of course, all the blame. This pleases the manager more than the team. Effective delegation is the way to better performance for the boss and the team, but it requires courage, discipline, and self-awareness.
Ten simple tips on good delegation
1. Know your value.
If you are doing tasks which you did in your previous role, you should not have been promoted. Demote yourself. You do not add value by doing the job of your team, even if you think you can do it better than they can. You must do something different from the team: organize and build the team; manage the politics; find the right assignments.
2. If in doubt, delegate.
There is very little that cannot be delegated. Ricardo Semler has built one of the biggest businesses in Brazil (Semco SA) by delegating everything: teams even decide on their own pay and conditions and hire their managers.
3. Be clear about outcomes:
what you expect and when you expect it. Even if you have to brief the team three times to achieve clarity, do so. If there is any room for ambiguity, you will be misunderstood. Do not blame the team, blame yourself: your team is not psychic and cannot read your mind. Clarity avoids rework, conflict, and loss of morale and confidence later on.
4. Be flexible about the means.
You may think you are the only person who knows how to do anything properly. But let your team surprise you: they may even come up with a better way of doing the task.
5. Let go.
Do not check every five minutes to see how the team is performing. Show some trust in your team, and if they are any good they will respond by making it happen. You will need regular updates, but if you have too many of them the team will spend all their time preparing updates for you, not doing the actual work.
6. Be available.
Encourage the team to talk through any issues they have. Do not dictate the answer to them: help them discover the answer themselves. You do not need to show your brilliance by telling them the answer: they will simply learn to depend on you for everything.
7. Stretch the team.
Pressure is good: that is how people find a sense of accomplishment, find new and creative ways of doing things and develop new skills. But if pressure is good, stress is bad. The difference is control: as long as they feel under control they will experience pressure, not stress. Delegating well gives them control and avoids stress. You will know when you have overstretched them: they will complain.
8. Delegate meaningful work
, not just the routine tasks. Do not keep all the juicy jobs for yourself.
9. Never delegate the blame
, unless you want a dysfunctional and political team. You can delegate authority, you cannot delegate responsibility: you are always responsible for the outcomes of your team.
10. Delegate the praise.
This strengthens you: it builds loyalty, trust, and respect from your team. It also shows your bosses and colleagues that you are a smart and effective boss. By delegating praise you attract praise yourself.
At some point in your managerial life, you will learn about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It will be presented as the answer to the conundrum of what motivates people. So here is a short guide to the original theory, and a more practical alternative that you can use day to day.
Maslow rightly observed that we are all needs junkies. We all need something: and once we have achieved that initial something, we move on to wanting something more. The wanting never goes away: the object of our desire simply changes. The only known cure is to retreat to a Buddhist monastery and learn the art of detachment through meditation: it works, but may not be good for your career ambitions.
Below are Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as he presented them: the italics show what those needs look like in the workplace.
1. Physiological:
food, water.
Having a job, any job
.
2. Safety:
shelter, protection.
Job security, pay, and conditions
.
3. Love:
family and friends.
Belonging to a worthwhile team and goal
.
4. Esteem:
recognized by your peers.
Recognition and success.
5. Self-actualization:
achieving meaning and purpose in life.
Leaving a legacy.
If you have no job, no income and a large mortgage, any job can look attractive. But as that need is filled, you are likely to aspire to higher things. By the time you become a CEO, you may be aiming for the huge pay-off and a knighthood/damehood before retiring: there is always something more that people want. So up to a point, Maslow works.