Managing a team for the first time: What did I learn?

After almost 3 years, my first (but not the last) experience as a manager comes to an end. So it’s time for me to look back and write down what this amazing experience brought me.

I knew it would be quite a challenge but I didn’t imagine that, if you want to do it properly, the team management part of the job would be so time/energy consuming!

I’ll try to summarize what I learned and how I was forced to counter-intuitively evolve to become (hopefully) a better “people manager” or at least a less bad one.

On the paper, my plan was quite simple:

• Apply what I learned from the (very) good managers I met
• Ban toxic behaviors noticed in some of the (really) bad managers I faced
• Empower my team members by being as honest/transparent as possible

Overall, I stuck to the plan, even though it wasn’t a straight line!

Economical and social interactions have always interested me so I already had devoured a lot of content before I started. One of my all-time favorite books is “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, by Daniel Kahneman (2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on decision-making). In a nutshell, this book explains why we can’t trust our intuitions and need to make a tremendous, sometimes even impossible effort to reach a rational decision (explaining also why marketing can be so efficient). I truly recommend this book, even if you’re not considering a managerial position.

There are a lot of amazing examples and advice, so let’s focus on the two I used to improve my management skills:

1. WYSIATI is your arch-enemy!!! This acronym stands for What you see is all there is, meaning that we tend to make our judgments and impressions based on the information available to us. Unfortunately, we don’t wonder enough “well, there are still many things I don’t know”. Simply, we assert what we do know. As a manager, this attitude will be your worst enemy when assessing the performance of an employee: “(s)he is late in the morning, never says anything during team meetings and results are barely average -> (s)he is lazy so let’s terminate his/her contract.
2. This bias is getting even worse when you tend to dismiss your “unknown knowns”: Things you think you know but actually don’t and ignore you don’t. In the business world, when you start a sentence with “How complicated can it be to … ?” there’s a high probability you’re in this situation.

What’s the common point between those two pitfalls? Humility, or to be precise, the lack of it. And we’ve all been in this situation…One of the reasons is that “failure” is not accepted in our cultures.

When you get a new position, from trainee to CEO, the generic advice people are given is “Fake it until you make it”. There is of course some truth in it, but I’ve realized that the best way to create a safe environment for a team to grow was to simply say “I don’t know” or “I’m sorry”. Plain and simple. No bullshit explanation or excuses to ease the pain, dodge the bullet or blame someone else. Why?

• Admitting you ignore something or you’re wrong signals your team that they can comfortably do the same. You remove unnecessary pressure from their shoulders and move to a more constructive exchange
• If you’re never wrong or ignorant, that can only mean 2 things: (1) you’re really really deep in your comfort zone, or (2) you’re blatantly lying to yourself, and probably a lot of people!

Another reason for that is that managers are often depicted as omniscient beings, a mix between McGyver, Hanibal Smith, and Chuck Norris (Yes, I grew up in the 90s). That’s obviously not the case.

You are NOT supposed to

• Know everything
• Always be right
• Be a better specialist than your team members

You are expected to

• Recruit the best team (Like in sport, you don’t want the best players in absolute, you want to best players than can work together)
• Put your team members in the best conditions (tools, equipment, knowledge, confidence, etc.) to perform and grow
• Shield them from negative externalities (aggressive customers or colleagues, overload of information/tasks/processes, etc.)

In the end, your responsibility is to bring the team to around 90% of the objectives. Any results below this level are your failure, anything above is their success.

Even with the best intentions, you will do mistakes and face situations you will poorly handle. It happened to me and lead me to do some research to prevent another “negative event”.

That’s how I discovered “Radical Candor” from Kim Scott, an extremely big gun at Google (https://firstround.com/review/radical-candor-the-surprising-secret-to-being-a-good-boss/)

According to the author, you only need two traits to be successful as a manager: “Care personally” and “Challenge directly”. Combined, they will allow you to reach “Radical Candor”. It might sound a bit cryptic but it’s actually really concrete and impactful.

Let’s see how it works:

The vertical axis is what she calls the ‘give a damn’ axis / the horizontal one being the “willing to piss people off” axis. As you can see, this methodology fits perfectly with my second goal of putting the team in the best possible conditions.

So, I tried to use 4 principles from this book:

1. Get the team to trust me

After some months, I found myself in an uncomfortable position of being more a colleague/friend than a boss. It was an unfortunate consequence of my will to become a reachable boss, not the kind of one that you could talk to only with a 2 weeks in advance notice and that would be condescending. Unfortunately, being too close with my team members gave the impression that I was favoring some (the extrovert ones with whom I could more easily chat) while cornering the quiet ones. It was of course not my intention (see point #4) but I had to act:

• I reduced my informal chats in the office
• I set up more frequent one-to-one (from bi-weekly to weekly)
• I brought more structure (process) to our weekly meetings by asking the team to write down the topics in a shared document
• I applied points #2, 3 and 4

The results came quickly and positively. A couple of months later, I asked the team if they noticed a change and what they thought the reason was? They all figured it out and were happy with it, but also felt we could add more informal chats without hurting the dynamic. I was relieved and agreed to this!

2. Develop a (constructive) feedback culture in the team

Ar first I was a bit afraid that more feedback could quickly result in a clash contest, Eminem style, so I went very carefully into it, explained the goal and the tools. I even printed out the graph above and displayed it in our office.

To my surprise and relief, it had quite the opposite effect. It ended most of the “bitching” between colleagues (or they went on but I lost track of them). There were 2 tricks (almost magic) to achieve this:

• Asking them to also give some feedback about my job
• Asking them to come up, not only with a critic but also with a suggested solution. If possible/relevant, this solution should include action from their side. It’s a completely different story to say to someone “Could you do X and I can support you by doing Z”, instead of just saying “your job sucks mate”

Of course, it’s not an overnight process, you have to push them to get those feedback. For me, it was a weekly task. When I didn’t see any feedback in our weekly shared document, I came back to them and requested some.

3. Challenge and congratulate in the proper way

Following the previous point, providing some context and a potential solution helps a lot. But the key to proper feedback is precision and instantaneity. You have to provide feedback asap, especially if it’s a negative one!

There are a lot of feedback methodologies on the market. Mine was a tweak of the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) one. I would explain that in a certain Situation, they Acted in a certain way and that Resulted in a positive/negative way. It was factual, precise, and could be proven if needed.

As you can imagine, it was sometimes a bit intense but since I could provide precise details, it was generally accepted (not always agreed, but hey, that’s life).

My biggest surprise was that positive feedback was sometimes the most difficult to acknowledge. Not because of false modesty, but because I decided to share those positive ones, in front of the team, to motivate everyone (I could do so without risking a fierce competition because each one of them had a different market so the 1-to-1 comparison was almost impossible). The reasoning from some employees was “Hey, they’re gonna be jealous and come at me whenever they can!!”. It of course never happened because I always found a way to congratulate each one of them regularly. That’s the great advantage of having a world-class team!!!!

4. Bonus: Keep in mind that whatever I say, it will turn into “My boss told me” so be extremely cautious

This one is really, really difficult to handle. To better explain the topic, here is a quote from Kim Scott

“You don’t have to be crazy successful like Bob Rubin or Steve Jobs to have a bigger impact than you intend to as the boss. Early in my career, I said to a salesman who tended to wear black shiny shirts, “I sure do like a man in a white oxford.” I was chagrined to see that the very next day he showed up in a white oxford, and for every day for a week after that. Of course, I had been dropping a hint. But I was new to being a boss and totally unused to having people take my hints so seriously.

Often when you’re the boss you might say or do something you expect to be blown off, whereas in fact you’ve moved way further out on the “challenge directly” axis than you had intended to.”

For me, it was maybe the most challenging one because I really love to crack jokes and tease people. But it wasn’t Olivier teasing A or B, it was a Team Lead teasing an employee, another manager, a Director. Luckily enough, the company wasn’t too hierarchical and I reduced quickly how many jokes I would crack per meeting!

I end this article with one single piece of advice, try to collect as much feedback, information, opinion as you can and build your own style. If it’s not sincere, it won’t work and you might be the last one to notice it…

To be continued…