The Manage Fearlessly Survival Guide:
Your first
90 Days as a Manager
Cindy Flanders and Laura Gamble
Copyright © 2012 Cindy Flanders and Laura Gamble
Smashwords Edition
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
1: Establish your style (Cindy)
Chapter
2: Meet the Team (Laura)
Chapter
3: How to Deliver Feedback & Appraisals
(Cindy)
Chapter
4: How to Build the Right Team (Cindy)
Chapter
5: How to Get Organized (Laura)
Chapter
6: Meet your Customers (Laura)
Chapter
7: Just Stuff you wish you knew ahead of time (Cindy)
Appendix
A: Appraisal Form
Appendix
B: Counseling Form
Chapter 1. Establish Your Style
As a new manager, your leadership style defines the tone and culture within your team and is the foundation for your future success or failure. Before even ordering business cards and meeting your team (Chapter 2), you must decide what kind of leader you want to be.
Arm yourself with what works and understand what doesn’t by reflecting on your own experience. Ask yourself these questions:
• Who did I really like working for and why?
• Who did I hate working for and why?
Incorporate what you loved and avoid what you hated. No matter what your basic core personality is, you must devise a management style that motivates others and inspires enthusiasm about your success and the success of the team.
How do you do that?
Create the right first impression. If people meet you for the first time and walk away thinking you’re a pompous, arrogant bore, your job will be much harder. There is some truth to the adage that first impressions last forever. When meeting your new team for the first time or when taking on a new leadership role within the team- Listen! Don’t spend those precious few first moments talking about yourself. No one wants to hear a monologue about your background, pedigree, and experience. Prove why you got the job by being a great boss! Demonstrate right off the bat that you have the team’s best interest at heart - ask for and listen to concerns.
Determine what motivates. Everyone on your team will be different, each member possessing his or her own unique motivational triggers. Some want public or peer recognition, others measure success by the amount printed on their paycheck. It’s your job as a manager to determine what makes them tick and discover how to capitalize on it. The easiest thing to do is ask. If they don’t know, try different tools and see which results in the best performance.
Here’s a good tool that requires your employees to rank different motivators:
http://www.womensmedia.com/work/80-what-motivates-you-at-work.html
Become the person you’ve always admired. Who is the teacher, personal hero, mentor or boss that had the most impact on your life? Consider their style and character. What made them someone people listen to or follow? What was it about the way they communicated and made decisions that influenced you?
Write these top traits down and make them your own while retaining adaptability to the diverse motivating qualities of your team.
After determining the right style and voice for your team, evaluate if adjustments are required with regards to your boss and peers. If you are a consensus builder and like input from your team, ask yourself if that same approach is effective with your boss. Or should you more decisive? What is your boss’s style of leadership? Is he or she somewhat toxic or more like you? The answers to these questions will dictate the method needed for the various people you’ll interact with as a new manager.
It’s important to find ways to adapt to the people you manage, your peers and your boss. But don’t confuse adaptability with insincerity. Ultimately, you must remain authentic or people will see right through the façade.
Wondering where to begin as a manager? The answer is simple – start with your team. After all, your performance is no longer about you, it’s about them. That’s a theme you’ll hear repeated a lot at Manage Fearlessly, so get used to it.
If you’re thinking, “This really isn’t that important and I’ll just skip to the next chapter,” think again. If you’re not someone naturally attuned to thinking about others, work on it until it becomes second nature. When you don’t know what is going on with your people, you sink fast. So, as soon as possible, determine what they expect from you, why they come to work in the morning, and what will absolutely make them change jobs.
Here’s how to start:
Sit down with each team member and have a conversation. Sounds easy, right? Not really. The trick to executing this successfully is to do the listening, not the talking. What you hear won’t all be worthy of action. Nonetheless, you need to sit back, listen and take notes. The information learned during that meeting will give you a lot of insight into how your employees view their former boss, coworkers, the work and the customers.
To get the most out of these conversations, have three or four questions prepared to ask everyone with the same job function. When answers are fairly consistent, you can be assured that you are getting a pretty truthful account of how things work.
During this initial meeting, unless the group you’re joining is one you already know, ask general questions, such as:
What gets in your way of getting your job done?
How could we make our customers (or whoever we serve within the company) happier?
What do you like about working here?
What do you dislike about working here?
What do you expect from me as your boss?
The idea is to gather data about challenges the group faces as well as the motivations of those working for you.
Of course, there are times when a direct approach may not work right off the bat. Company cultures differ dramatically. If yours is a very hierarchical company where everyone follows a chain of command, you probably won’t get much of a response through this approach. As a manager new to both the company and the team, unless there is a very open culture, you can’t expect people to bare their souls immediately. In these cases, try using a group exercise.
Conduct a New Leader Exercise
Requiring nothing more than a whiteboard, this tool is a great way to get started.
The basic requirements are:
A room with a door.
A whiteboard, chalkboard, or large pad of paper on an easel.
Someone other than you designated as note taker.
The basic steps are:
Step 1: Instruct the team to write down all the questions they have about you while you’re outside the room. * See note below.
Step 2: Leave the room for a designated amount of time. Depending on the size of the group, ten to fifteen minutes is fine. If it is larger than ten people, you may need to give them a little more time.
Step 3: When they are done, return to the room and answer their questions.
The value of the exercise:
With the safety of anonymity, everyone’s expectations and questions of you are out in the open.
Everyone hears what you have to say at the same time.
*If the level of trust is so low that people aren’t capable of asking real questions in front of their peers, you can still implement this exercise. Ask everyone to write their questions on a piece of paper and then have someone else write them on a separate piece of paper or whiteboard. This gives the questioner some anonymity. You would still answer them in front of the entire group.
The New Leader Exercise requires you to answer questions on the fly, so be honest in your responses. This sometimes may mean saying, “I don’t know, but I will get you an answer as soon as I can,” but then be sure to do just that. Credibility is very important, and not following up damages your integrity as manager.
Don’t agree to any major changes during the exercise, no matter how hard you’re pushed. You don’t yet know what is feasible, so don’t commit to anything you may have to renege on. Instead, make a list of suggested changes to research later and discuss in future group meetings. There may be some grumbling that action isn’t being taken immediately. Reassure your new team that you will investigate the issues and act when you have enough specifics to make good judgments. Remember, you’re paid to evaluate and make decisions on behalf of the team.
Set Team Protocols
If you are the business owner, you have the ability to set all aspects of how the job is going to get done. When you are part of a larger company, you need to assess how much freedom you have in setting those guidelines. Not matter how large the group, establish certain policies:
Work hours: What are the standard times you expect people to work? You obviously need to cover the times your customers expect to contact you. How much flexibility do you want to create?
Appropriate attire: It is better to set guidelines than to have to deal with each individual’s idea of professional clothing. Be specific. As one former co-worker described the appropriate attire for a company picnic: “No spandex, no muscle shirts, and no short-shorts, because none of us really wants to see that much of each other.” If the dress code in your office is business casual, define what that means and save yourself the time of being on fashion patrol every day.
Vacations/ Time off: How much notice do you need? Can two people filling the same function take off at the same time? If not, make sure everyone knows that up front.
Set Communication Standards
Communicating what is critical
First, define ‘critical’ for your team. What can put your business or employees at risk? We recommend that critical issues be communicated to everyone at the same time. You may have to have meetings at every shift, or at different times to hit all the relevant time zones, but important matters deserve real time delivery and the opportunity to ask questions. Face-to-face meetings are great when possible, but a conference call will work just as well.
How often do things change in your business? Do you need to have regular meetings to communicate important news or updates, or can you do it as needed? While making meetings effective is a whole other topic, for now, remember this: they are best used in moderation, or their power is diminished.
Communicating things that are not time sensitive
Living in a data rich world, we often feel stuck in the median of an information superhighway with no way to get off. One of the most important functions a manager has is determining what the team really needs to know. Do not send everything that crosses your desk straight to your group! You are there for a reason and one of them is to determine priorities.
Previously, you defined “critical” as it relates to team communications. Now it’s time to determine where everything else falls on the continuum, from “nice to know” to “waste of time.” As manager, an important thing to remember is that people do not have unlimited capacity to focus. In a recent study, the concept of multi-tasking has been found to actually accomplish less than focusing on one task at a time. Keeping your team’s attention span in mind, err on the side of communicating fewer things and group messages together instead of piecemeal. Your goal is to disrupt people’s work as little as possible.
Depending on how much you have to communicate, you may want to do it daily, weekly, or monthly. Always take the time sensitivity of the information into account. For things that are not business critical, real-time dissemination is not as important. Email, voicemail, or paper are all acceptable alternatives that allow people to review the communiqué when most convenient.
Communicating with your boss
Check with your boss (if you have one) to see how often he or she expects you to communicate with them.
So, you’ve met your team and heard what they are thinking about, and they know a little more about what you expect. Hopefully you’re feeling a little less overwhelmed with a system in place for how you will communicate. Now you’re ready to assess whether you have the right talent for the job at hand…read on!
Chapter 3. How to Deliver Feedback & Appraisals
When it comes to a manager’s key tasks, providing feedback and conducting regular performance appraisals are at the top of the list. Yet, both are often avoided at all costs. That’s not a problem if you have nothing but accolades for everyone on your team, but how many managers can say that? Even if you have only two employees, there will likely be at least one instance where you will have to find a way to deliver a tough message.
Delivering Feedback
Do not adopt the common philosophy that delivering feedback in the context of an annual formal performance appraisal is enough. Doing so is wasting the opportunity to elevate performance through regular feedback. Instead, the annual appraisal should be viewed as an opportunity to augment and advance an ongoing dialogue you’ve had all year.
Delivering timely and honest feedback may feel awkward at first, but, similar to public speaking, the more you do it, the more comfortable you will become. Here are some tips to help make it a way of life:
• Upon the completion of a major task or project, ask the person what he or she did well and where there was room for improvement. Don’t wait! Real-time feedback is critical to coaching and improving or rewarding performance. Frequently, people know exactly where they excelled and failed. Following their self-evaluation, you can respond to their thoughts, but always start with what was done well. This cannot be emphasized enough. Always find something positive to say first, no matter how poor the performance.
• General, non-task specific comments should be given regularly. Set up a time to have one-on-one conversations with those on your team. If you manage people in different locations, conduct these sessions by phone, but never by email! Depending on the size and location of your group, these meetings can be either once a week or once a month; at minimum, they should be quarterly. If you have feedback from customers or those within the company, this is the time to share it. Again, begin every session with positive points!
• Lead by example and create an open environment by beginning sessions with a request for feedback on your own performance. There is nothing wrong with asking, “How do you think I’m doing?” Always be sure to thank your team for their remarks.
The Appraisal
You may be asking yourself, “If I’m providing regular feedback, why do I need to sit down and complete something so formal?” It’s because you need a way to document performance. Strong performers will want a record of their successes and, as a manager; you will need a record of poor performance.