My pinned thread on Twitter is a running list of things I’ve learned about management over the years. I think it’s pretty good! This document is not that – It’s an excerpt of a document I share with my new managers at American Bridge 21st Century, as the first step of making a transition from a talented researcher to a manager of a small team. A lot of that has to do with forming the right mindset, and deciding what to take responsibility for, and ownership of.
So, in that sense, it’s a particular document for a particular time for a particular organization. But I think it has some utility beyond it’s original purposes, so I’m sharing it here.
Take Responsibility For The System Your Team Operates Under
The key insight, for me, of managing is that there are no hard and fast rules for human interaction or how organizations work.
Sure, there are norms, there are expectations, there are guidelines. But you need to be aware that part of your job as a manager isn’t simply to exist within a system that someone else has created – it’s to do what you can to modify those norms and rules and guidelines so they work better for everyone.
Setting Goals: People Need To Understand Why They’re Doing Things
At the most basic level, you need to know why you do what you do. What is the basic long term goal of your entire job? On a campaign, this is easy: win. In a more institutional DC job, determining your long term goals takes a lot more effort – and at the same time, you need to make sure your goals line up and work in sync with the other teams with which you interact, and they need to know what your goals are. Anyway, from your big picture goal, you work down to a few smaller goals: What are you going to do, broadly, and when are you going to do it.
This all sounds fluffy and philosophical and unimportant to the daily grind of getting stuff done. But it’s not. The main activity of being a manager is making decisions. I cannot stress enough how difficult it is to make the right decisions if you don’t have big picture goals in mind – you’ll come back to this day after day, so get it set from the beginning. Otherwise you’ll have no idea why you’re doing the things you do.
Setting Priorities
There is always more to be accomplished than can actually be accomplished. One of the most frustrating things of this kind of work is that you’ll always be able to identify more work you should be doing.
But if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.
If you’re making decisions about what needs to be done, there’s going to always be some element of having to shoot down good ideas. This is why it’s so important to set goals, as mentioned above. If you know, in the big picture, why you’re at work every day, you’ll be able to know which ideas to say no to. Without those big picture goals, your decisions will be random or emotionally based, which is fine in the short term but won’t get you anywhere in the long term.
Communicating Effectively Across Teams
As a manager, you’ll deal with other teams, and you won’t be the boss of them. To the extent that you can all be on the same page about what you’re doing and why you’re doing those things, everyone’s life will be much easier. This doesn’t always need to come from structured sitdown meetings or even anything like that. But if you make an effort in your conversations to explain your decisions and why you made them, it’ll go a long way towards getting everyone on the same page.
Managing Expectations
Especially when dealing with higher-ups and other teams, there’s a natural tendency to overpromise. After all, you’re skilled, your team is skilled, and offering people what they want to hear feels good.
You need to learn to fight this trap. The iron laws of work are that
- Everything takes longer than expected
- Something always goes wrong This is not an indictment of you and your team, it is a simple fact of the universe. As a manager, you must always keep in mind the gritty reality and difficulty of actually accomplishing anything, and work hard to manage the expectations of those around you.
Under promising and over delivering takes away from the upfront gratification of promising people everything they could possibly need, but it makes everyone’s life much easier in the long run.
Being Confident in your skills
The key component to managing expectations is being self-assured. If a major component of your job involves explaining to people that the things they’re asking for are actually very difficult to accomplish, after a while it’s easy to lose confidence in your own abilities. “After all,” you may think, “if I was any good at this, I wouldn’t be lowering expectations all the time.”
But that’s not how it works. The fact is that as researcher and a manager you have a rare combination of skills that not a lot of other people have. You know things that other people don’t know. You accomplish things that other people can’t accomplish. As long as you always have this in mind, you’ll have the self-confidence to say no when it needs to be said.
Training, Investing In Your People
It is usually true that you’ll be better at accomplishing tasks than your team. This isn’t because you’re smarter than them, or more talented. It’s because you have a perfect vision of what you anticipate the end result will look like, and what it’ll take to get there. But your team cannot read your mind, so they’re at a disadvantage regardless of how skilled they are.
The best, most important thing you can do to your team is to be constantly teaching them. It will almost always be more difficult to teach someone to accomplish something the way you would do it than it will be to do it yourself in the short term. But you must fight this. Your workload will very quickly become unsustainable if you don’t invest in your team’s ability to learn how and why to do complicated tasks the way you would.
Build time into your projects for this kind of teaching and learning. It doesn’t come natural to people - least of all me – but unless your researchers can do work unsupervised and on their own, your work will be unsustainable.