What Do You Owe?

I sat in front of my new boss – who became my mentor – and received some words of advice. Although it was early in my career, I was going to report directly to a division president, so he took the time to set the tone for my future.

“A company is like a pyramid,” he said. “As you move up, every decision you make affects more and more people.” Makes sense, I thought, but he went further. “The way you conduct yourself, and how you make decisions will not only impact employees, but their families, their friends, their future co-workers, and a lot of people you’ll never meet or even know about.” Being a manager is a serious responsibility.

No matter the field or industry sector, managers make their living as a result of the work done by others. The more senior the position, the more he or she owes their success to other people’s work.

So what do we as managers owe in exchange?

The obligations and Key Performance Indicators that we owe our employers are pretty easy to see and focus on. One year at annual review time, I asked my boss if, per company policy he wanted me to complete a self-evaluation. He asked, “Do you want to do a self-evaluation?”, to which I replied that I really didn’t. “Well, it really only matters what I think, doesn’t it?” he replied. And while he sounded like he was joking, I think he was mostly serious.  

The vast majority of individual contributors – and this is increasingly true with remote workers – don’t want a “supervisor” who looks over their shoulder, keeps them on task, and tells them how to perform their work. Sure, some people need that, but an expectation of a team oriented partnership is more the norm.

I think of my obligations to the people I’m managing as follows: Leadership, Sharp Tools, and Clear Expectations.

I’ll go into each of these in detail in the next few posts, but I’ll make my case for each of them here. Seems too simple? Let’s see.  

Leadership:

There’s been so much written about leadership that I won’t pretend to be an authority or an expert, but I’ve been there most of my life. If you’re in my organization, I owe you effective leadership. Full stop. First and foremost, even if I fail in any of the other areas, this one is non-negotiable.

If you’ve worked for a manager who isn’t a leader – and there are far too many examples – you know that it’s a dark and dismal existence, with no future except the promise of unpleasant surprises. You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure.

I once worked for a manager who wanted absolutely no bad news. He liked to talk about “polishing the turd”, or describing bad situations in as glowing terms as possible. When that didn’t work, he had a list of people to blame, and you just hoped it wasn’t your turn. My co-workers called it “your turn in the barrel,” a reference to rodeo cowboys distracting the bull. It sucked.

Everything hinges on leadership. Many challenges organizations face, whether that’s revenue, inefficiency, turnover, or client satisfaction are actually symptoms of a leadership deficiency.

I’ll unpack this more later, but leadership is really the only place you can start if you want your organization to be successful.  

Sharp Tools:

By “sharp tools” I don’t just mean kitchen knives, but yeah those too. Sharp Tools are the things that allow people to get their job done with a minimum amount of frustration.

Machines that work is an obvious place to start. Short-sighted managers will often resort to the duct tape model to keep things going, without understanding the organizational damage that they’re doing in the process.

The quality of the tools we provide is a measure of how we value the people doing the work.

I’ve always thought of this in an industrial setting, but when talking with a group of educators I saw the same reaction when they were talking about the curriculum they were told to use. They saw poorly designed curriculum as evidence of a school district administration that didn’t listen to them or value them as professionals. I found it even more interesting that the tools they were talking about were a six-figure investment that the administrators had recently rolled out.

Crappy tools are anything that breeds frustration.

There’s a big drawer on the Sharp Tools Toolbox that’s labeled “Clear and Accurate Information”. This tool is what allows an employee to go home at night with the confidence and satisfaction that they did the job right.

While clear and accurate information is important in co-located workplaces, it’s even more important in a remote work environment. Managers need to take extra care to guarantee that instructions and directions are clear to avoid hours spent working in the wrong direction. The best way to do that is to make sure everything is written down in a way that employees have access to it, even though that means more work for you as the manager. Well, that’s what you signed up for.

My experience providing clear information in the newspaper industry was very self-reinforcing. Although we had very streamlined processes and people knew their jobs well, there were always odd details that popped up.

Each day my team went through the instructions for the nightly production run to make sure everything was clear and understandable. Because they were caring, admirable human beings? Sure, but not only that. It was because they didn’t want to get a phone call at 2:00 a.m. to clarify a detail they had missed. It doesn’t take too many of those phone calls before you make sure the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed before you go home for the day.

Clear Expectations:

You have a job description, right? Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know?

Admit it, you laughed a little at that one.

My favorite line on my job description was the one at the bottom that read, “Other Duties As Assigned”. It was sufficiently vague that any time some random new responsibility came up I was able to laugh and say, “Oh yeah, I guess that’s what that means.”

Clear expectations are the answer to a question you as a manager could ask each one of your employees, every day: “When you go home at night, open the adult beverage of your choice and plop down in your favorite chair, how do you know you did what you were supposed to do today?”

If the answer for your organization is “Well, I guess they haven’t fired me yet, so I must be doing it right”, then you have some work to do.

Goals are better than job descriptions. Although it may seem like working backwards, set goals as the start of the conversation. The next step is to ask, “How do we get there?”  If the answer is “that’s f*cking impossible”, it’s an opportunity to talk about why that might be the case, and what needs to change in order to make the goal attainable. If the answer is “no problem at all”, it’s an opportunity to talk about maybe shooting higher.

Of course, it would be nice if it were that straightforward. I had one teammate who, when I presented goals that I thought might be challenging would respond, “easy peasy”. Wow, I thought, this is great. Nothing to worry about. Nope. Pretty soon I came to realize that “easy peasy” was code for “that’s definitely not going to happen, ever, ever, ever.”

The important thing here is that clear expectations are a conversation, not a directive. Later I’ll dive into what that conversation looks like, because there’s no one-size solution here either.

So that’s my case for the three obligations we have to the people we manage. These simple-but-not-so-simple concepts need to be at the top of every manager’s to-do list every day.

The rest is just details.