How to be a good manager (Still exploring) - Part 1: Learn to rely on your team

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Dear readers,

Thank you for coming here.

I started my series “How to be a good employee to increase your salary 10 times in 10 years” a few weeks ago, based on my actual experiences and thoughts as an individual contributor.

I am glad to have received some feedback from my readers saying that the series is helpful.

I stepped into my current managerial role as a senior consulting director about 9 months ago. While I am still exploring how to be a good manager, I have gathered some thoughts and learnings.

Initially, I planned to start this series “How to be a good manager” in a few years when I have enough experience.

Then it came to me “Why wait?”. I could share my thoughts and learnings along the way. It may not be that insightful or even structured.

But this is a great place to record down my thoughts and better still, I could have your feedback along the journey.

So here it goes. My first post in this series: “How to be a good manager — Part 1: Learn to rely on your team”

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Today is the first working day after the China Golden Week holidays.

For the last working day before the holidays, I gathered the team in a meeting room and assigned work to each of my team members and told them to arrange their time themselves, as long as they could complete the work and send to me before 9am today.

On that day in the same meeting, I also scheduled a review with the team at 11am today so that they know the importance of sending out their work by 9am.

My intention was to give my team flexibility to arrange for their long holidays. Therefore, the work assigned could definitely be completed within one day and the requirements should be clear as the work was nothing new.

The team welcomed the arrangement, so I believe they understood my intention for them to have great holidays and rest.

And in return, I expected quality work. I was also secretly hoping that they could appreciate my care for them and therefore deliver even better work than usual.

While I did receive all their work by 9am today, some last night and some this morning (but none before the holidays), I was not impressed by the quality of their work.

The analysis was not insightful enough; the messages were not crispy; the support clearly could be stronger with more details readily available in the database; the layout of the slides was not carefully planned and aligned…

I was a bit upset.

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I knew I should not do the work for them. That was the mistake I would not commit again.

But I was not sure how best to express my frustration to the team. Should I show my anger and deliver a heavy message? Or should I pretend to be patient and just tell them how to improve?

After some thinking, I decided to step back and make the review a light one, where I would ask every team member to share the difficulties they face, the information they still need and the next steps they are going to take.

There are 3 reasons:

1. They know the requirements and my standards as they have done this before. And I believe they are able to see why the work needs improvements and how to make those improvements. So there is no need for me to reiterate that.
2. We still have some time before the deadline, so I can afford to spend one more day for the team to improve their work.
3. I have decided to let them present their own parts during the management meeting, to make it directly clear that they need to take responsibility for their own work.

As a result, I had one of the most relaxing review ever. The team did most of the talking and they picked up most of the improvement points, with me adding in the few they missed.

And they did seem refreshed after the holidays and ready to make the improvements today. I have already seem them acting to collect more data etc.

Overall, I think everyone was pretty happy.

I could not help thinking what if I just let out my anger and delivered a “negative” message. Maybe they would agree with what I said and the improvements would be made. They probably would not feel so happy and motivated.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I had three take-aways:

1. The team members are not stupid and there is no need to point out the improvement points every time you see one. They probably already know them and are on the way to implement them.
2. Trust your team and let them do their work. If needs be, provide support and emphasize that they are responsible for their work.
3. Always try to plan for some buffer so that if one or more team members could not deliver, there is time to rectify.

Till next time!