Being a Better Manager
This year will be overwhelming and tiring.
In this context, it’s tempting to draw the curtains and hide out until ‘it’s all over.’ Yet, as famous baseball player and coach, ‘Yogi’ Berra, once put it, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”
Of course, all great journeys have a good soundtrack, so I thought you’d enjoy this amazing playlist of the best of 2020’s jazz, that was generously compiled and shared with me by Mark Rosin, CEO of the South African Music Rights Organisation.
This week’s letter focuses on making the most of your year.
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/STRATEGY
Julie Zhuo joined Facebook as their first engineering intern. At that point, they employed less than 50 people. She spent 14 years in the business and between 2012 and 2020 held the roles of Director and then Vice President of Product Design.
Her book, The Making of A Manager: What To Do When Everyone Looks To You, is a good read to start the year.
She describes it as being for “new managers thrown into the deep end, overwhelmed managers…managers dealing with fast-growing teams…” Notwithstanding her description, whether one is starting out on one’s management journey or you’re an executive with decades under your belt, Zhuo helps one focuses on the fundamentals of management, and returning to the basics is always enriching.
I loved that her book is packed with anecdotes and suggested approaches, right down to specific questions one can consider asking.
I find myself returning to specific chapters when preparing to tackle a particular challenge. Not necessarily because I agree verbatim with each of Zhuo’s formulations, but because her writings and reflections provide a place I can test and shape my ideas.
She describes how every January she maps out where she hopes her team would be by the end of the year. She creates a future organisational chart, mapping what she believes is the desired end-state for the year and then analyses her existing team’s capabilities against that future vision.
It is a great way to start your strategy planning for the year.
Here are some of the questions Zhou uses to formulate her hiring vision and strategy:
- “How many people will I add to our team this year (based on company growth, expected attrition, budget, priorities, etc)
- For each new hire, what level of experience am I looking for?
- Which specific skills of strengths do we need in our team?
- Which skills of strengths does our team already have that new hires can stand to be weaker in?
- What traits, past experiences, or personalities would strengthen the diversity of our team?”
Chapter 8 “Making Things Happen”, seemed appropriate to dip into a little deeper at this time of the year. She suggests the following steps to create a plan that results in strategic action.
- Start with a concrete vision
- Create a believable game plan
- Craft a plan based on your team’s strengths
- Focus on doing a few things well
- Define who is responsible for what
- Break down a big goal into smaller pieces
- Perfect execution over perfect strategy
- Balance short-term and long-term outcomes
- Define a long-term vision and work backwards
- Take a portfolio approach
- Talk about how everything relates to the vision
- Good process is ever evolving.
She shares an anecdote about her experience of writing her book. The publishers gave her a year to write. She thought it was more than enough. In fact, she thought she’d finish it in six months. In the end, she found herself writing frantically from month nine and submitted a partially completed draft at the one-year mark. Sound familiar?
When it came to the second draft, instead of setting a distant abstract goal – ‘write a book’ – she broke the objective down into a far smaller unit of action – ‘edit two pages a day.’ She got it done.
Her anecdote reminded me of BJ Fogg’s formulation, “Motivating towards an abstraction doesn’t yield results”.
This is as true for businesses and is it for people. Strategy is ultimately intentional action.
Fogg is the founder of the Behaviour Design Lab at Stanford and is the author of Tiny Habits, Amazon’s No.1 Business and Leadership Book for 2020.
I wrote about Fogg’s work in Change Your Life With Tiny Habits.
If you, or someone you care about, struggle with turning intention into action, these quotations from his book will provide some inspiration.
/SELF
I’ve received a lot of messages thanking me for sharing How To Conduct An Annual Life Review.
As a quick reminder, credit belongs to NowNovel and DIYLegal founder, Brendan McNulty, who shared it with me. If you’ve used it, please do thank him for his generosity.
Thank you to all of me who’ve shared your reflections, it’s enriched my take on it and I’ve enjoyed the diversity of your experiences. I may publish my own version for 2022.
What struck me both from your comments, as well as my own experience, is how much there is to be grateful for.
When one pauses to reflect, the beautiful and heartfelt moments just keep bubbling up. I found myself returning to that part of the review several times to add new memories that had surfaced.
It also struck me how easy it is to forget.
There were parts of the year that I struggled to remember. In those instances, I went back to my diary and to my journals. I was so grateful for those entries. They brought back part of my year, indeed of myself, that I might otherwise have lost.
Whilst I loved the review component of Schlafman’s audit, I felt that the strategy component was a little too abstract – drawing inspiration from Zhuo and Fogg, I felt that it wasn’t sufficiently rooted in action.
Here are three tactics that I use to ensure that my intentions turn into action:
- Get a year planner and map out major markers in that. It could be board meetings, school holidays, milestone birthdays for friends and colleagues, dentist appointments, eye tests etc. It very quickly helps you see both opportunity and potential conflicts.
- Map your intentions onto the calendar and commit. How often haven’t you started each year by planning to do something – a visit to a family member, a course, a retreat – and then the year ends and its not done again. Put it in the calendar and, where practical, pay for it.
- Know how you will invest your time. Get as detailed as possible. I commit to spending 600 hours a year in reading and research to support my coaching practice. Assuming a 46-week working year, this means that I need to spend 13 hours a week. To fill that time productively I need to commit to what books are worth reading, what podcasts are worth listening to etc…My best days start with walking, meditation, and journaling. That means my first appointment time needs to accommodate that.
Part of the strategy plan asked what new skills you’d add, what more one would do. I decided not to add anything new. This year is going to be tough. I have decided that I want to use this time for going deeper and for consolidating. Our culture breeds a relentless push to do and have more. I am not sure that always serves us. Sometimes, and definitely now, we are best served by doing less.
/SOUL
The Gifts of Reading is a remarkable book.
In its first incarnation, it was an essay published for free by Penguin and author, Robert MacFarlane. The proceeds went to the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, an NGO that does work saving migrants’ lives in the Mediterranean.
His essay was read by Jennie Orchard, a long-term supporter of the literacy and education project, Room to Read. It inspired her to approach 23 authors, with the proposal that each of them would write and donate an essay about ‘the gift of reading’. The essays were in turn assembled into The Gifts of Reading, the proceeds of which go to Room to Read.
MacFarlane’s writing recounts the books that were gifted to him and what they opened in his life. He quotes Lewis Hyde, telling us that “Great art offers us images by which to imagine our lives and once the imagination has been awakened; it is procreative: through it we can give more than we were given, say more than we had to say.” He goes on to note that, “(a) gift can be transformative and the act of giving encourages the ongoing circulation of generosity”.
It is a beautiful formulation which inspired me to do this…I’d like to share the Gifts of Reading with some of you, so I’ve decided to gift three copies to this community. If you’d like to be included in the draw for the book, please email before the end of Wednesday.
I hope that your week brings you the opportunity to be generous. Being generous with the gifts that you have will make this year one to celebrate and remember, despite the hardships that it brings.
Best wishes
Karl
PS: If you’d like to know more about my coaching practice, please click here
(This letter was first published on 17 January 2021)