On business and entrepreneurship pages, lots of articles cover startup growth, angel investing, finding your niche, using automations, tools and so on.
Oddly, they share relatively little content on people management.
From the point of Soft skills, this is one of the more demanding and often frustrating aspects of leadership and there should be a lot more content about it.
I had the joy of getting military leadership training. They rush you from leading 0 to 50 people within four months. Only at a later stage outside the military I also had to do the hiring, onboard and firing of people. Luckily I already had some practice and the time to take it one step at a time. Most of the self-starters I know do not have such luxury. They get thrown into leading positions and suddenly have responsibility for 20 plus people.
Here are nine points that you learn along the way 👇
1) Have high standards and hire the right people for the right role.
Never settle with someone simply because you need to fill the role fast.
Be clear in the job description about what skills are required. What will they do, and how will it be measured. Build an interview plan that specifically and objectively tests that.
One tip I learned when onboarding a fleet of volunteers for the Impact Hub Network was to use separate interview panels that assess against the same metrics. There, I would ask other company colleagues to separately chat with the interviewee as well and then made a quick debrief whether we gave the volunteer a 👍 / 👎, before we spoke to each other about them.
With this, we often had different opinions that led to thumbs up or down, and it helped me single out people who tried to be people pleasers.
(2) Onboard employees properly.
There are a million things new employees don't know: about the team, the role, the company, processes, where to get this and that info, why have you been doing this and that, where you keep that info etc. Help them find their way around.
My girlfriend started as a business engineer just a while ago. They threw a large project at her the second week she worked there. No explanations and no help. It almost made her quit again.
To avoid this, I usually have an onboarding plan covering key topics, especially for positions with high turnover rate / like the volunteers I onboarded.
Assign people on your team to help put materials together and let them walk the new ones through it. I am not talking about reading down documentation or presentation.
When I worked my first job in pharmaceuticals, they wanted me to read more than 70 documents with 6-20 pages each about quality standards. I could not remember a single word after a week.
Better have them look at a project with a work-godmother/godfather that can explain how it comes to be, why this is here and why this and that is important.
Share the onboarding plan with them and help them understand the logic behind your processes. Let them add points to the list where they feel they need more introduction and help. This reinforces self-accountability - their first job is to get onboarded, after all.
Don't forget the alignment check in each week - where are they on track, where are they behind?
(3) Set and share clear and documented expectations with them on their first day.
If people are not performing the way you want them, make sure first to know what you want them to do. They can not read your mind.
Be specific.
Write it down.
Co-sign it and refer back often.
Suppose your mind is also super full from buzzing in the strategic and planning spheres of your business. In that case, you need to be even more attentive to how and what you communicate.
Expectations should cover things like:
- Key day-to-day responsibilities (if any)
- KPIs and targets
- Company conduct/behaviour (cultural values, norms, ethics and so on)
- Weekly reporting updates
This is clear and measurable, which saves you a lot of time and energy in the long run.
4) Give specific, actionable feedback frequently
(both positive and negative).
Many people avoid giving difficult feedback because it's awkward and wants to avoid hurting others' feelings. I believe in radical honesty and showing people that you actually and personally care will automatically create more direct feedback; you can read more here.
A great framework around having a feedback culture can also be found in the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott. In a nutshell, the X-axis shows the willingness to be direct, and the y-axis is the degree to which you personally care. Good managers aim for the top right quadrant, direct and personally caring.
Critical and negative feedbacks are hard. Thus, you start with establishing trust and show you have the person's best interests at heart. Tell them that you want them to succeed and that you want to help them in any way that you can. And that you see stuff that needs work.
Be specific with feedback and give it often; don't just have yearly performance reviews. Take the time to draft input on projects, presentations and even emails they've sent, and shape a feedback culture that shows them that they can and shall give feedback to other people.
What project did they absolutely crush? Where could they be more specific? How could they have better communicated?
Positive feedback, in particular, is undervalued.
Give lots of positive feedback - it has a compounding effect in that it builds momentum. It makes the person receiving it strive to be even better.
If you tend to forget, create a repeating block and reminder in your calendar that you use specifically for feedbacks.
I do it frequently and first hand, and also ask others for immediate feedback or input. And I only ask more questions if I genuinely did not understand their point. I take it in, take notes and reflect on it later when I have time.
(5) Be a manager, not a micromanager.
Assigning projects and constantly intervening along the way is a recipe for your employee walking away from you. It eliminates the employees desire to innovate a solution, and it kills any motivation to figure it out for themselves.
Instead, define the outcome you want ("what") and let them figure out the "how". In the military, we called it sharing the intention (Die Absicht, in German:)
If I give an order that, for whatever reason, they can not follow, I tell the guys my intention. They then find a way to work around and make it happen - even if it uses different tools, a different path or location. The outcome is what matters.
The output I ask for needs to be specific, and the considerations to keep in mind need to be realistic, like integration, which team has to work with it and so on.
Then leave them alone and see what product they bring back. Usually, it is different from what you had in mind. But they will learn more, and you probably too.
(6) Encourage and be open to upward feedback.
The feedback culture applies to managers as well - if you don't know how your team feels about you, how can you ever hope to improve?
A feedback culture requires a lot of trusts, and naturally, people will avoid being direct with you if you are their boss. Thus, you need to create a safe space to do it.
A way could be to have your team aggregate collaborative feedback on a board to share with you when you enter the meeting.
I would take that feedback away as homework and present it back to my team how I would address it.
I once led a section of ca 60 infantry people. After three weeks, one of my sergeants told me he found it disturbing how calm I always was - during work, during exercises and combat training. He wished me to show some anger and more emotion.
That was entirely unexpected for me, and I had to sit down with my mentor to talk it through even.
Giving and receiving such feedback should be your goal. It should be feedback that can be treasured.
7) Be a champion for your teams' personal success and development.
Where do they want to be one year, two years from now? What subject matter do they want to learn next? What is the promotion they are working towards?
Work with them to draft a plan to get there and revisit it every ~ eight weeks.
Managers who are not genuinely invested in their employees' development and growth are probably among the main frustration points for most employees.
Create 'stretch' opportunities for them - projects which develop new skills. Maybe also introduce them to mentors. If they're ready to move up or on, fight for their promotions!
(8) You can not solve everything
Managing a team can be taxing at the best of times and downright frustrating at the worst of times. You will make mistakes (as will your team), and it's rarely possible to keep everyone happy at all times.
I had a colleague that worked pretty much against me because she thought she could do better. It ended in her micromanaging people that worked in both our teams, and their performances dropped within days. At some point, they knocked at my door to ask if they could switch to a different project.
While you can (and should) positively influence your teams' success and happiness, you cannot and should never control every facet of their satisfaction with their role, development, the company, etc.
Do your best and get better, but also except that you can't solve everything.
If someone wants to move up to a managing or lead role, but there is none in your company and none planned, you can not keep them happy, and they will leave at some point to find such a role — nothing to be sad about.
(9) Confront hard decisions sooner than later.
If it feels like it isn't working out, it's not. You owe it to them to give precise feedback and an opportunity to get things back on track. Typically these things are time-gated (for example, 45-90 days).
After that time, you review the metrics and then that's it, a hard yes or no.
Letting people go sucks, but waiting half a year to make a decision that you already knew the answer to is way more destructive. It is detrimental for you and the team. Most of the times, people know that things are not going well. It is rarely only the case that they will be astonished about a confrontation. That is why you give them time to re-align.
Keep investing in yourself
Keep reading books, seek feedback and keep evolving. What worked last year may not work tomorrow. Similarly, what worked at the previous company may not work at the next one. Markets and environments change, behaviours, and trends change.
For instance, Covid forced most companies to re-assess their leadership tools and strategies. As the firm's many informal knowledge exchanges were suddenly missing, they needed to find out how their people work and how to lead and measure them. This meant massive leadership changes for a lot of companies out there.
Keep investing in yourself. Find what is essential and build on that.
Be aware of the effect you have on people.
Remember the old saying, "You can't manage people, but only yourself."
Cheers
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