Start Here
Unpacking Your Manager Role
Saying someone is a manager tells you little about what they do or where they spend their time. Different companies lay out these duties differently; managers within the same company (or department) sometimes have vastly different jobs. As a manager, having mismatched...
Addressing Complaints, Part 1: Taking Action
Addressing complaints is an essential part of a manager’s job. By keeping their finger on the pulse of what’s bothering people, managers can act as an early warning system for higher levels of management. By addressing their people’s concerns, managers can improve...
Addressing Complaints, Part 2: The Limits of Authority
Addressing complaints is essential to a manager's job but can quickly become overwhelming. Part One of this series shared a technique for sorting through people's concerns. It also showed how to use your authority effectively to address some of them. But people often...
Addressing Complaints, Part 3: Saying No to Requests
Telling someone something they don’t want to hear is never fun. When someone points out a problem causing them real pain, you likely want to do something about it – particularly if you’re their manager. Saying no when someone asks you to fix something is often a...
Managing Up
Managing Up Is About Partnership
For a long time, “managing up” rubbed me the wrong way. The way that people frequently used the phrase brought to mind judgment, manipulation, and deception. It seemed rooted in a belief that your manager didn’t understand how work got done. Just as I thought...
Asking for Clarity from Your Boss
Working with other people is hard – for a variety of reasons. One of the promises of working together is that you can help each other to get things done. One of the biggest obstacles to doing this is not sharing a brain. Asking for clarity helps you avoid the trap of...
Feedback
Ground Your Feedback in Mutual Purpose
Many managers struggle to give effective feedback. They spend hours carefully crafting their message only to have it fail to land. What they neglect to notice is that feedback is at least as much about the relationship as it is about the message. One of the keys to a...
Performance Feedback Requires Clear Expectations
“One of the people I manage is underperforming. I need to give them feedback about how they aren’t meeting expectations.” I hear this often from managers, and I get curious whenever I do. The instinct behind it is good: Managers need to address underperformance. In...
Change
Share Information, Not Anxiety
“I don’t want to distract the team. They don’t need to worry about this.” That’s what my boss—the head of engineering at a rapidly growing startup—told me when I asked him how he would share information from top management about our revised expansion plans. His job,...
Communicating Change Effectively and Humanely
“I can tell this is hard for you all to hear. I know it’s harder for some of you than others. It’s not my first choice, either. However, it makes enough sense, and it’s the direction we’re going now. We’ll take some time to work through how we feel about this. Then we...
Getting Aligned Through Shared Understanding
“We want to know how aligned people are around the new product development strategy. How can we do that?” A group of senior leaders at a software company asked me this question as I was helping them to prepare for their annual kickoff meeting. They’d just completed a...
Delegation
Three Delegation Myths
Delegation is an essential practice for managers. In any organization, one of the vital functions of management is to distribute and coordinate work among the group. However, delegating well requires understanding what delegation is and isn’t. Here are three common...
Setting Clear Expectations: Delegating without Micromanaging, Part 1
Managers rely on others to get work done, making delegation an essential skill. When they delegate poorly, it can lead to accusations of micromanagement. For people and in some organizations, the threat of being thought of as a micromanager is terrifying. At the same...
Monitoring and Steering: Delegating without Micromanaging, Part 2
Delegation isn’t a “fire and forget” activity. As a manager, you can delegate decision-making to your direct reports, but you can’t delegate away your accountability for the outcome. The key is delegating without micromanaging. Effective managers monitor and guide the...
Teams
Empowering Teams to Stay Out of the Soup
Teams rarely have a shortage of complaints. Most teams have plenty of ideas of what’s going wrong and numerous suggestions for addressing them. Noticing what’s getting in the way of great work is a sign of a healthy team. However, they often focus too much on what...
Not All “Teams” are Real Teams
Few words in the corporate world are abused and misused more than “team.” All the people who report to the same manager? They must be a team – even though their work doesn’t require them to collaborate. All the people working on a product? They must be a team – even...
What is a High-Performing Team?
“Oh, my teams are definitely high-performing.” I’ve heard this from countless managers in numerous organizations. Sometimes I wondered where they were keeping all the low-performing teams. Understandably, managers responsible for developing teams want to be seen as...
Conflict
Retrospectives Are Real Work, Too
“We don’t have time for a retrospective. We have ‘real work’ to do.” How many times have you heard this? It comes up frequently in the classes I teach, I’ve heard it more times than I care to count. It frustrates me, and yet, I understand where it comes from. This...
Navigating Team Conflict with the Waterline Model
Conflict is a challenging topic for many people to navigate. It's a natural part of working together in groups, yet in the midst of it, it can feel terribly dysfunctional. There's no shortage of ideas about how to work through it, and there are lots of tools...
How Deep Do You Ask People To Go?
Some of my most spectacular failures working with teams have come from going deeper than I needed to. One particularly memorable retrospective ended with a product manager declaring, “I’m done talking about my feelings.” (It was not my finest moment.) Yes,...