You may have had some brilliant management training. If you did, congratulations. It seems you’re the exception rather than the rule.
In our conversations with managers, we persistently come across stories of training which was, at best, fine. Was it useful in places? Sure, a bit. Did it meaningfully help them improve in their role? No.
And it’s not just managers who are aware of this. We’ve spoken to lots of People professionals who know that their training isn’t landing right.
Given how much onus (and money) is put towards training to help managers, particularly those new to the role, why aren’t we better at organizing it?
This article reflects on all the conversations we’ve had on this topic to find the answer to this question. We also point to the successful best practice we’ve seen in other companies which will help you think about a way forward.
One of the key challenges it’s hard to prepare for as a new manager is just how overwhelming the job can feel.
Particularly at first before you’ve worked out how to adapt your work patterns to its new rhythms and responsibilities.
Beyond someone telling you “it’s a lot”, and trying to manage your expectations, we haven’t seen much good advice on this topic to actually help you deal with those pressures.
That’s until Cate Huston published her most recent blog post on ‘Energy Management for Newer Managers’. She makes the helpful distinction between two skills she says managers need - time management and energy management - and notes that not enough attention is paid to the latter.
As she says, for managers there will be certain tasks which don’t take up a lot of time - for example, a difficult feedback conversation - but which take a lot of energy to prepare for and do well. If you’re not aware of these draining tasks, you’ll schedule in too many of them, and you’ll feel overwhelmed by the pressure.
'As an engineer, often the most challenging thing to do in a given week is some gnarly problem. Carving out four hours of complete focus to make a dent in it can make a huge difference. As a manager, often the most challenging thing to do in a given week is a hard conversation. It might even be a short, hard conversation. The biggest challenge is psyching yourself up to do it, and whilst you might (arguably should) spend time preparing, often that is more about managing your own emotions in order to do it, rather than the actual work required.'
You could be great at time management (and probably are, it’s one of the reasons you were promoted) but poor at energy management, and your performance and wellbeing will suffer.
She has a great set of questions to help you identify which are the tasks which take up most of your energy (it will be different for each person) and help you organize your work patterns around it.
You can check out the piece in full here.
Required reading for any manager who doesn’t feel on top of the role (i.e. lots of us, a lot of the time).
When one manager takes over someone else’s team, there’s usually something called a ‘handover period’.
What precisely is meant to go on in this ‘handover period’ no one knows, but it’s there.
Most of the time, this lack of guidance results in a focus on the work. The outgoing manager makes sure that the incoming one knows what’s in progress so that the team keeps delivering on schedule to customers.
That’s all very well and good, but that’s only a fraction of the institutional knowledge that the incoming manager needs from their counterpart to do the job well.
What often gets missed is not the piece about keeping customers happy, but keeping team members happy and progressing. All the subtle (or not so subtle) nuances about each person’s strengths and weaknesses, their aspirations, their pet peeves, their relationships with each other, the list goes on. If you’ve managed a team for any length of time, you could probably write a novella on each of your team. This is the detail which also needs to make its way to the incoming manager.
Lisa Madokoro is a former Senior Lead in Talent Research at Shopify. She recently wrote a tweet thread on exactly this subject, and spoke about the development profiles she writes up for each of her reports which she then discusses with them and the incoming manager to ensure all the relevant details are communicated.
You can read the full thread here and she’s even made her development profile template public.
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