My previously posted school of thought was focused on how to develop and wield your vision for your organization. Once that’s sorted, many managers want to focus on growing their people. Where the above school of thought was focused on building the best boat and recruiting the right rowers to row the boat, this section is focused on taking your athletes to an olympic level of performance.
As a new manager, the most important part of taking care of your team and helping them grow is your relationship with that person. Learn about who they are: what their goals are in life; why they work at your company; why they’re on your team.
This will enable you to do two things:
- Align their job on your team with their own career goals.
- You want to help this person move forward / ahead in their careers in the way they want. What they want is way more motivating to them than what you want.
- Align their job on your team in the way that will facilitate the most growth / impact. This is more company-specific, and requires some thoughtfulness regarding the intersection of their strengths, desires, and the business needs.
Aligning that person’s job description and expectations with their own growth and their impact in the company is the highest levered thing you can do. It sets the scaffolding for the system you’re operating. Here are some tactics that can be helpful for operating that system:
- Set up weekly/biweekly cadences with each individual on the team.
- Make sure there is dedicated time to talking about the person, not just the work. Whatever system you have to set up to ensure that is fine. The work will always get done. It will always end up being talked about. It’s very easy for the person to go undiscussed for too long, and for you to fail to take care of the most important part of your business: the humans.
- It’s worth re-discussing the higher-level goals with the person somewhat frequently:
- Why are you at this company? Why are you on this team? Is this still the best team for you to be on? How do you want to grow? How can I help you achieve the growth you desire? This is important because people grow and change over time, and you don’t want to be operating on an outdated growth-thesis for the person.
- Of course, not everyone knows exactly how they want to grow. So many people will value your thought partnership in helping to author their growth path. One of the easiest ways to do this is help them understand growth paths that others have taken, and introduce them to those people in your network.
- Of course, you’re not pandering to the person.
- You still work in a business. That business has to be successful. Hopefully the business is set up such so that the individual is motivated to care about the success of the business (profit sharing? equity ownership?). So it’s also important to level-set with the person about what you can and cannot help them with in the scope of what the business needs are etc. For example, if there’s a particularly crappy job that needs getting done: someone has to do it. Personally, it’s important for me to show people that I also eat pain on a regular basis, so that we all suffer together when needed.
- Pushing people is also extremely important. If you don’t push someone to achieve more, do more, they won’t grow. Provide lots of positive feedback (read: How to Win Friends and Influence People, on criticism). But also provide constructive feedback that helps that person grow. This could be a topic of an entire post, but it’s critically important that you provide people with specific and useful feedback that helps them get better over time.
This will be an ongoing project of mine as I seek to refine and improve. I would love for you to share your thoughts on the topic with me.