The notes of first line manager. Dmitry Artyukhin
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share details. Perhaps it is not easy to achieve in the first 2–3 meetings but step by step you should encourage people to do that.
I had many situations when I was not successful in this exercise. Perhaps I should refer to one of my worst experience here:
We started to work together with one of my peers and after some time I was offered a management role in the same team. My colleague had a lot of concerns and he was very open about that. We sat together in a room and I asked him to share feedback about me as a manager as well as to share his thoughts on future of the team. He was very straight forward by saying that he didn’t see me as a manager at all. Even more he gave the whole list of reasons why. My first reaction was just awful. I understood that he had opinion that I couldn’t change in short term. He was one of the brightest persons I had ever known and one of the best experts in our team that made his voice very powerful. I spent approximately 2 years to change his perception and change myself to be recognized by him as a good manager.
Don’t give up! Even in a situation like this. You should always remember that other people may have different experience with different managers. Sometimes the bar is very high and you as a new manager may not fit into someone’s perception about good or bad manager. The key point here – continue to listen to those who criticize you. You will find a lot of useful comments. At the beginning of your path as a new manager you will have to change a lot into your approach to work and people.
4.2 How do you behave in the office?
I like my job…. I don’t remember a day for last 10 years when I don’t want to go to work in the morning. I spend a big part of my life here and this team is a part of my world already. I would like to allocate some time to chat about behavior. This is really critical part. Many of us don’t think how much it impacts our relationships with the team. Let me share a couple of examples from my personal experience:
Once my wok desk was in a separate office space relatively far away from the team. That was calm and quite space and I liked that. After 3 months” time I realized that I missed some link with my team. I spent the same amount of time by having official meetings with the team including staff meetings, 1:1 chats etc. At the same time I missed huge part of informal talks. I decided to move back to sit close to my team.
After that case I didn’t try to seat separately any more if possible. The key point here is about being the part of this community. You should understand what is going on in your team, what they are discussing, what they feel about work, tasks, projects etc. Be careful and don’t take another extreme when you behave as a spy. You should contribute into their discussions, into their chats and be inherent part of this team.
Ask people how they are! You need to know what’s going on with them outside of work hours. This is extremely crucial. Put yourself into their shoes. If you have problems in your family or whatever else how do you find your level of motivation when you come to the office. May be you can abstract your mind from these problems but I have not met such people too much. I clearly understand that sometimes I can’t help them but I have to support them and take care of them. I would call this “personal touch”. Below you can find a few great (from my point of view) examples of managers who applied such approaches in a very smart way:
1. First example comes from one of the companies where the manager has about 100 people in staff. He allocates about 2 hours twice a week to go around and simply chat with different people in his team. This is not officially scheduled meeting. In most cases he takes some tea and walk around asking people what happens, what they think about latest news etc. Sometimes he shares some jokes or talk about funny stories. He dedicates time to this chats. The bottom line for this example – this manager wants to do that! He doesn’t have this in his scope he takes care of people who works for him. And he is interested what is going on around.
2. Second example is about a manager who bought doughnuts and delivered them to each cubical with tea on Friday every week. 1–2 mins chat with many people in the office helps him to keep in touch with the team.
3. The final example is about the manager who invited team members for short walk around the office after lunch just to have informal chat about work.
You don’t really need to replicate the same in your team. Probably you will find something unique for your situation. Anyway you should find some options applicable for your case.
I also try to work on that. This is in my agenda. I would avoid doing some special attempts to develop such relationships but having strong believe in that I simply try to follow simple rules:
А. Do not be afraid to show that you are human being. This is much better than artificial management model with clear instructions what others need to do.
What I mean here – you have life outside of work, you have hobbies, you can laugh so you have the whole bunch of feelings. This is normal! When you share with your team members that you like watching comedies or you like dogs you behave naturally. You don’t raise the wall between you and your colleagues but rather you build bridges with everyone in the team.
В. Communicate more with people. Encourage them to speak, share feedback, give inputs and proposals, and share their concerns. Make this communication open, honest and make sure you don’t use them for blaming or criticizing others. Make this communication easy to do. It means your team should have an easy way to chat with you when they have topics to discuss.
I still try to avoid any doors between my office and the rest of the team. First time when I found that quite useful was about 15 years ago:
Working into local company I had a team of 10 people and we were based in a small room all together. It was not convenient for us and we finally negotiated a bigger room. We got a lot of space and I had a small private office there. At the same time due to lack of money we didn’t have a door there after redesign. But I still felt like I had some privilege to have better office than my team. So after some time I decided to use this room for join meetings rather than a private office. That was right decision because I started to recognize that my colleagues were shine to come without knocking.
I definitely vote for pretty equal conditions when you work together. I am lucky to have experience of working with top managers who sit in the same office space in the same cubical close to you so you feel them engaged into work process.
С. Don’t be afraid to admit your faults. Be honest by saying that you made a mistake.
D. Be open and honest. People feel when you lie and when you try to dodge. Otherwise the level of trust will go down immediately.
Е. And finally always remember that trust is something that you spend years to establish and can lose it within 1 day.
4.3 Action plan after round of discussions
One of the key problems after round of discussion when the team has no clue what next steps are. Sometimes this is something that managers forget to do. I have seen several examples when different companies conduct annual survey to collect feedback or managers run exercise to collect inputs from the team and do nothing after that to share what next step is. The problem with such approach is always about some humors that starts spreading around. No one understands why they have spent time sharing their thoughts and ideas and it seems to be wasting of time. So when you decide to do that next time you will get much lower response back and few inputs.
So to avoid such negative impact I keep in mind that you need to report out your observations and identify next steps or some action plan to make clear for the team what you are going to do next. Sometime it requires some time to accumulate and build this report. I usually set up clear deadline for me to prepare such presentation and share this deadline with the team before I start collecting feedback. Even if for some reason you need more time to compile report tell honestly about that. Everyone understands that you may need to analyze data a little bit more rather than having no explanation why you promise to share details yesterday and still have no excuse for delay.
Second point is about the style of reporting out. I keep in mind two classical examples