Manager
Fundamentals
10 Simple Practices to Help
Your TEam Win
Contents
Managers: The Critical Leverage Point........................................................1
Practice #1: Explain Company and Team Priorities...............................3
Practice #2: Set Expectations......................................................................4
Practice #3: Reinforce Commitments Weekly.........................................5
Practice #4: Ask for Insight..........................................................................6
Practice #5: Encourage People to Share Problems..............................7
Practice #6: Meet Well..................................................................................8
Practice #7: Share the Scoreboard...........................................................9
Practice #8: Give Real-Time Feedback...................................................10
Practice #9: Debrief Every 90 Days.........................................................11
Practice #10: Help Employees Grow......................................................12
Final Thought
Managers:
Critical Leverage Point
The
Of all the factors that influence organizational health, the effectiveness of managers takes
a top spot. These professionals, from the executive team down to the frontline, are
critical leverage points in the organization.
One single skilled manager can do an immense amount of good for an organization. She
can unlock her team’s full potential and serve as a conduit to the rest of the organization,
causing a halo effect that improves everyone’s performance. But by the same token, one
rotten manager can infect and weaken large groups of people. He can demoralize his
direct reports, push away A-players, piss off his peers, and fail to communicate missioncritical information up the chain of command.
A recent Gallup headline succinctly describes the ripple effect that managers have on
their employees: “Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement.”
More anecdotally, we’ve all heard the very true statement that people most often leave
their boss rather than their job.
If you’re a CEO or executive, how would you rate your managers as a whole? Do you
have a strong, self-reinforcing network of managers—or are a few bad nodes crippling
performance downstream? If you’re a manager, how do you think you’re doing? Are you
empowering your direct reports and helping them do their best work?
Some troubling numbers suggest that there is significant improvement to be made in
how most managers support and retain their teams:
Over half
of US workers are
considering a new job
in 2016
(Indeed.com).
Only 21%
of employees align
their work with
company priorities
(CEB).
Over two-thirds
of US workers are
disengaged
(Gallup).
Only 21%
of employees say they
feel valued at work
(TinyPulse).
Yikes. What can we do about this?
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Managers:
The Critical Leverage Point (cont’d)
Fortunately, most underperforming managers aren’t malicious or hopelessly
incompetent. As long as the manager has the will to learn, the fundamentals of effective
management can be learned and coached—no magic formula or oozing charisma
needed.
What You’ll Get Out of This Ebook
We wrote this ebook because we believe there are a few simple, repeatable practices that
characterize managers who are cherished by their immediate teams and recognized as
assets to the broader organization.
Here’s what we hope you’ll come away with after reading:
•
Ideas you can act on today. Each one of these practices are things you can start on immediately. We want to help you take action quickly, not lay a bunch of theory on you.
•
Ideas to apply regardless of your management style. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove once
said, correctly, that “a given managerial approach is not equally effective under all conditions.”
There are many different management styles that work to varying degrees, based on varying
personalities and circumstances, but the ideas presented in the following pages apply universally. We’ve attempted to extract the common DNA that all great managers share, not force
a particular approach on you.
•
Solutions for 21st-century work. A lot of bosses are stuck in the Stone Age of management. They head up a team of talented marketing professionals, for example, as if they were
managing drones on an assembly line. The manager of knowledge workers faces very different challenges than the factory supervisor—including work product that is hard to quantify
and measure, employees who understand the details of their work better than management
does, and the overarching need to breathe a sense of purpose and mission into employees’
responsibilities. Therefore, these practices are built for today’s reality, not yesterday’s.
•
A resource for your organization. If you’re a manager, we hope this guide sparks ideas for
how you can help your team win as much as possible. And if you’re a CEO, HR head, or other
leader, we hope you’ll share this guide broadly, down to your first-line managers. When you
clarify the behaviors you value in managers, you set the stage for a consistent approach and
higher overall performance.
Ready? Let’s get started.
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1. Explain company and team priorities.
In the olden days, when workers simply executed predetermined processes over and
over, employees didn’t really need to understand the big-picture aims of the company.
Henry Ford’s workforce did their jobs well without thinking much about the subtle
interactions between their roles and what the organization was trying to achieve.
Not anymore. Today, employees crave a sense of purpose in
their work, and you need them to make decisions that align
with top-level strategy. Here are two steps to support them:
• Share the company’s stated priorities. Hopefully your CEO sets and shares objectives for the
organization on a regular basis, and communicates about which opportunities are true priorities. Be sure to share this information with every
member of your team. (If company priorities are
unclear to you, seek out guidance from someone
up the chain of command.)
• Translate company priorities into quarterly
team objectives. Now, put company priorities in
the context of your team: what handful of objectives need to be completed this quarter for the
team to be successful? Write them down, make
sure they are measurable and attainable, and explain how they tie in to the broader aims of the
business.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking your employees don’t need to know this stuff. Failing to explain what the company and team are trying to achieve is the first step toward
disengagement, poor decision making, and bottled-up insight (and toward the famous
“mushroom management”—keeping people in the dark and feeding them manure.)
Sample set of quarterly team objectives
• Roll out refreshed onboarding materials
• Conduct 5 customer interviews
• Deliver fast, enthusiastic support to each and every customer
within an hour of contact
• Hire 2 new team members
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2. Set expectations.
One of the most common complaints employees
have about their managers is unclear
expectations—they don’t have a set of specific,
mutually agreed-upon goals. According to Gallup,
only 12 percent of employees strongly agree
that their manager helps them set performance goals. The other 88 percent are less than
clear on what their boss expects of them—and
they’re a lot likelier to be disengaged.
The second practice of an effective manager is,
thus, to help the employee establish a specific set
of goals for each quarter. Three to five goals per
person is a good number to aim for.
“
A goal properly set
is halfway reached.”
—Zig Ziglar
Two guidelines here:
• Give them the first crack. Let the employee draft a set of goals first. If they understand company and team priorities, they will almost always come up with an
effective set of performance goals for themselves—and may even come up with
something you never would have thought of.
Linda Hill of Harvard Business School describes the dynamic to aim for in the collaborative goal-setting process: “A manager’s job is to provide ‘supportive autonomy’
that’s appropriate to the person’s level of capability.” In other words, give them freedom within appropriate boundaries.
• Tie goals to the big picture. Talk with the employee about the specific ways their
goals will enable the team and company to succeed; this is the “line of sight” that
goal-setting gurus often talk about. Also discuss any horizontal dependencies: which
colleagues rely on this employee to perform well?
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3. Reinforce commitments weekly.
The worst fear of many managers is earning the label of micromanager.
Nevertheless, effective managers must ensure that their employees stay
focused on the commitments made during the goal-setting process (Practice
#2). How do you do that without coming across as a nag who doesn’t trust
people to get their work done?
It’s very possible to reinforce employee commitments without breathing down
anyone’s neck or being a helicopter boss. Try this approach:
• Document the employee’s goals. This
means doing more than writing them
on a sheet of paper. Set up a system for
keeping goals front and center. Software
can help, or you can simply print them
out and have employees post them near
their working spaces. Having the goals
recorded and visible keeps the employee reminded of them and can also reduce employee stress—they don’t have
the feeling that they’re forgetting something important.
• Check in weekly. Briefly check in with each employee once a week and
revisit each goal. You don’t have to say, “Okay, tell me where you’re at with
everything you’re doing.” Instead, briefly touch on each goal and ask, “Are
we still on track to meet this goal on time?” If the answer is “No” or “I’m not
sure,” ask about what has changed and whether support or resources from
you or other colleagues could get the goal back on track.
Using this approach, your employees reorient weekly to their real priorities,
allowing them to distinguish between the urgent and the truly important. They
can say no to lower-impact tasks that may crop up in a typical week and stay
accountable for the commitments they have made.
Recommended read
Why Leaders Need to Ask:
‘Is That a Promise?’
strategy + business
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4. Ask for insight.
The people on your team hold a trove of insights about the business. If you make
the all-too-common mistake of bottling up their ideas, perspectives, and knowledge, you open yourself up to a lot of missed opportunities—and a lot of nasty
last-minute surprises.
As a manager, you often can’t see the same opportunities or issues that your employee sees, even though these insights may be of material value to the business.
When you look at many of the classic business failures over the last twenty years,
it’s common to read that someone in the organization knew there was a problem
that could have been averted but there was no effective system for communicating
that problem up the chain. (We also have a whole show about out-of-touch head
honchos: Undercover Boss, now nearly one hundred episodes strong).
Follow these tips to surface business insights from your team members:
• Don’t just put out a suggestion box. Research shows that passive methods
of collecting insight don’t yield the best results. Instead of hoping people
come to you, be proactive and ask specific questions (“Are you facing any challenges right now?” “What could we be doing differently?”).
• Ask about the future, not the past.
Each of your employees has a unique
vantage point on the organization, and
they may have gems of insight about
where things are headed. The weekly
check-in (Practice #3) is the perfect
time to open the door for future-focused
insight. If the employee has
a hunch one of her goals won’t be
completed as expected, you
need to know ASAP.
• Show that you’re listening.
There’s nothing worse than a boss who
shuts down ideas from employees. Take
the time to assess what you hear from the
team and act on it as appropriate. If you
decide not to act on something an employee tells you, explain why—and that you’ll
continue to monitor the situation going
foward.
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5. Encourage people to share problems.
You’ve probably never outright said, “Don’t bring me a problem without a
solution!” to your team. But if you’re implying it—acting annoyed, frustrated, or
dismissive when an employee brings up an issue or asks for support—you can
stifle many of the insights discussed in Practice #4.
So, as you gather the insight of your employees, encourage them to bring up
problems they see, even if they have no idea what the solution us. The harder
it is for your employee to speak up on a certain topic, the more important it is
for you to hear what they have to say.
Getting people comfortable with raising their hand when they see a roadblock
will take ongoing reinforcement from you. No one likes admitting that one of
their goals is falling off track (maybe a project is way behind schedule due to
a change in scope) or pointing out an organizational dynamic that is impeding
success (maybe the marketing team is struggling to equip sales with useful
collateral). Show the team that you value the hard discussions by doing the
following:
• Thank employees when they speak up. If one of your employees has
the courage to point out an issue, thank them for bringing it to you. It’s
hard to speak up, and rewarding that behavior will signal to the employee
that you care more about understanding the team’s reality than about not
rocking the boat.
• Follow up on what you hear. As with any insight you get from an employee, your follow-through is critical. Paraphrase what you’re hearing back to
the employee, and give your thoughts on the issue. If you fail to act (or don’t
clearly explain why you’re deciding not to act), the employee will keep future
problems to herself.
Recommended read
“Don’t Bring Me Problems—
Bring Me Solutions!”
Harvard Business Review
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6. Meet well.
Who doesn’t hate a boring, pointless meeting? In this article, Basecamp
cofounder Jason Fried gives an excellent summary of the meeting dysfunction that
plagues much of corporate America:
“
When meetings are the norm—the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss,
debate, and solve every problem—they no longer work. Meetings should be
like salt—a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured
recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many
meetings destroy morale and motivation.”
Don’t lose your team’s goodwill and performance by running meetings that are bad,
too numerous, or both. A few pointers:
• Set the purpose. This advice is Meeting 101, but it’s still widely ignored by managers. Before each meeting you schedule, make sure you have communicated
exactly what the purpose of the meeting is and what you hope to accomplish. If
you struggle to articulate the objective, consider whether it needs to be a meeting at all.
• Give it a hard stop. Realistically estimate the time needed and keep the meeting to that window. Shorter is often better, as returns tend to diminish in the
second and (hopefully not) third hours of sitting around a table.
• Don’t let one or two attendees dominate. The working styles of your team
members will vary to a great degree; make sure that you don’t let the extroverts
run roughshod over everyone else. Curate the discussion by asking for input
from those who haven’t spoken in a while, and if one person goes off on a tangent, bring the discussion back to the core issue.
• Beware of seeking consensus. As manager, you want to get input from everyone on your team before you make decisions (see Practice #4). That does not
mean that meetings are a place to take the average of everyone’s opinions and
find the perfect middle ground—down that path is mediocrity.
• Record action items. As you make decisions in the meeting, write down (or
assign someone to write down) what has been agreed upon, what actions need
to happen next, and who is responsible for them.
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7. Share the scoreboard.
Do you keep your staff updated on how things are going—for the company and for the
team?
You hear a lot about “transparency” these days, but for all the hype, many managers aren’t
up front with people about whether the company and team are meeting their goals. They
don’t communicate successes or challenges consistently, leaving their employees feeling
cut off and out of the loop—like they’re playing in a soccer match but have no idea what the
score is.
Instead, help your employees feel included and empowered by sharing the following:
• Company performance: If possible,
share the company’s top priorities (see
Practice #1) and then give regular updates on how the company is performing
against them. Are we meeting our revenue goal? Is the new product still slated
to ship on time? Is customer churn down
as hoped?
You may be limited in what you can share
with employees by what is shared with
you. But as long as the information isn’t
explicitly sensitive (a coming merger, perhaps), be up front with everything you
know.
• Team performance: Similarly, give regular updates on how the team you lead is performing against its own goals. Celebrate wins, but be frank on any issues you see, explaining how you plan to address them and who can help with it.
You don’t have to give your employees a full slide deck of company financials or share salary
information across the team to benefit from transparency. Just ensure that everyone on
your team knows how the company and their team are scoring—and what needs to happen
to secure the win.
Recommended read
“A Winning Culture Keeps Score”
Harvard Business Review
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8. Give real-time feedback.
Do your employees feel like they’re working in a vacuum, with little indication, good
or bad, of how they are performing? Does the only real feedback they get come in
a stilted annual performance review that covers 6–12 months? Don’t let that be the
case on your team.
• Jump in. When you see an opportunity for feedback, give it right then. The impact will be greater if your observation comes to the employee soon after their
action.
• Praise in public and private. If you see something that warrants a shout-out,
don’t hold back. Depending on the employee’s preference, call out the employee’s action in a team meeting or team email, or pull them aside and let them
know they did a good job.
• Have the courage to correct. Many managers tend to push formal employee feedback to the positive side of the spectrum, fearing they will disengage
the employee by criticizing their work. To the contrary: research has found
that most employees actually prefer corrective feedback and feel it helps
them do their job better. It’s uncomfortable to give negative feedback, but it’s a
necessary counterpart to praise.
“
The number-one reason most
Americans leave their jobs is
that they don’t feel appreciated.
In fact, 65% of people surveyed
said they got no recognition for
good work last year.”
—Tom Rath & Donald Clifton
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9. Debrief every 90 days.
Those annual performance reviews we mentioned on the previous page?
They’re notorious for being not only awkward but also generally unhelpful for
everyone involved.
Nevertheless, formal performance discussions between manager and
employee have their place. Here’s a way to whip a bloated traditional review
into a lean, mean debrief that delivers actual value to employees and to the
business:
• Four times a year, not once
a year. Do you remember what
any one employee was working
on six months ago? How about
nine? Can you say anything
meaningful about work completed that long ago? Probably not.
Keep the pace brisk by arranging performance reviews once
a quarter rather than once or
twice a year.
Recommended read
“6 Things Your Employees Want from
Performance Reviews”
Inc.com
• Tie it to goals, and give examples. Subjectivity and unfairness in manager feedback is one of the things that frequently irks employees. Sidestep this pitfall by structuring the discussion around how they performed
against agreed-upon goals (see Practice #2), and pull out concrete examples to illustrate any points you make.
• Point ahead. Your goal in this discussion isn’t to rehash the past. For every point you make, extrapolate what this means for the future. Give the
employee pointers on how they can improve their performance, whether
it’s further pursuing a strength or mitigating a weakness. And the more you
can individualize coaching to their personal working style, the better; tools
like StrengthsFinder and 5 Dynamics can help.
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10. Help employees grow.
As you know, each one of your employees is a complex human being
with his or her own unique set of interests and ambitions in life. As a
manager, you’ll be most effective if you can find common ground
between the employee’s longer-term goals and the team’s objectives—
and do what you can to support your employee down the professional
path that interests them most.
If you do this well, you’ll create value for your company and for the
employee at the same time. Screw it up, and your most promising
people will be out the door pronto.
• Ask about their career aspirations. Whether during performance
discussions or casual chats, find out what makes your employees
tick. What’s her favorite aspect of her current role? Where does she
see herself a few years down the road? Bring this up more than once
a year; quarterly debriefs (Practice #9) are a great time to do so.
• Give them one learning/development goal each quarter.
When you help your employee set performance goals each quarter
(Practice #2), consider recommending that one goal be related to
learning and development, whether it’s reading a book, completing a
course, shadowing a more experienced colleague, or something else
you both agree will help them grow as a professional.
• Don’t micromange; do microtrain. Don’t let that previously mentioned fear of micromanaging keep you from fully equipping your
staff with the skills and knowledge they need to do their jobs. Onthe-job training (including helping to clarify decision rights for
each role) is very different from insisting on holding a capable employee’s hand.
• Reward key players with opportunities and responsibility.
Employees crave learning/development opportunities, and these
are a better long-term motivator than monetary rewards. Show your
top performers your appreciation by investing more in their development or increasing their responsibilities.
Companies that offer comprehensive training have
218% higher income per employee than those with less
comprehensive training.
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Final Thought
Bookstores, websites, and conference agendas are chock-full of
advice for managers. It’s a testament to how tricky this role can be,
and how much there is to say about it.
In the end, every manager must find his or her own path to
excellence, but we hope the building blocks laid out here will help
you establish the core disciplines of managerial skill—the
repeatable actions that will lead your team to high performance.
We’ll leave you with another quote from Intel’s Andy Grove, who
once described a “good, solid management approach” in these
inspiring words: “energetic and committed people sitting down
together, looking at problems, and figuring out ways to solve them.”
Good luck!
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Manager support from Khorus
When one manager fails, many other
people in the organization suffer.
aligning with your direct reports and the rest
of the organization and making sure your
team is performing at its peak.
Use Khorus to prevent that from happening.
This easy-to-use software platform serves
as the manager’s right hand in fulfilling all
her core responsibilities—including the ones
covered in this ebook.
If you’re a CEO or HR head, deploying Khorus
in your organization gives you unprecedented
visiblity across the management team, and
helps you feel confident that your managers
are using a consistent approach.
If you’re a manager, using Khorus will help
you breathe easy. You’ll have one place for
Click here to set up a demo!
Set and align team goals
With goals recorded in Khorus,
everyone’s on the same page—up,
down, and across the organization.
Gather weekly
insight
Aggregated insight from your team
shows you how goals are trending, and
alerts you to developing issues.
Grow talent
Streamlined, value-focused reviews
and ratings let you see your talent in
depth—and give them regular,
relevant feedback.
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