Managing to Change the World

by Alison Green

Culture is made up of and reinforces the hundreds of daily signals about “how we do things here.”

  High-performing managers create cultures that blend a deep rigor (relentless pursuit of results, a high bar for performance, scrutiny of ideas, accountability, transparency and commitment to continuous improvement, and mission integrity) with positive engagement (positive sense of energy, shared sense of ownership, real sense of mission, and low drama). And it’s all authentic; this is truly how things work.

  Powerful ways to reinforce culture include leading by example, explicitly articulating the core values you expect all staffers to hold, discussing those values during the hiring process, creating rituals, and having meaningful consequences for performing in accord with the culture.

  Additional Reading

  Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

  James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), especially “Cult-Like Cultures” (pp. 114–139).

  W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy,” Harvard Business Review, Jan. 2003.

  TOOL 4.1

  SAMPLE STATEMENT OF CORE VALUES

  The Management Center Core Values

  Impact We obsess about the results of our efforts, we are brutally honest with ourselves about what’s working and what’s not, and we constantly strive to do better.

  Above and Beyond We hold ourselves to a very high standard and do whatever we can to help our clients and to get results.

  Realness We talk like real people and make things as simple and straightforward as possible.

  Humility We are deeply on our clients’ side and we approach them with tremendous respect for the difficulty of their work and appreciation for what they bring to the job.

  Optimism We bring a sense of possibility to our work, acting on the belief that change is possible and largely within our control.

  1 R. Lizza, “Battle Plans: How Obama Won,” The New Yorker, Nov. 17, 2008.

  CHAPTER 5

  MANAGING THE DAY-TO-DAY WORK OF YOUR TEAM

  Structures to Bring It All Together

  This first part of this book has focused on managing work—more specifically, delegating specific projects, using roles and goals to hand over broad responsibilities, and using culture to manage all the things that fall in between the cracks. In theory, it’s all pretty straightforward, but in practice, it can be a lot harder. You might have half a dozen staff members, and for each of them, you might have agreed on multiple goals and have added several specific projects for each of them. You want to follow the principles of setting clear expectations, staying engaged, creating accountability and learning, and adapting to fit the context, but what does that look like day to day when there’s so much to stay on top of?

  We’ve found that there are two very helpful tools that make it significantly easier to manage the day-to-day work of your staff members and ensure that it’s connected to the big picture goals you want them to accomplish:

  Weekly one-on-one check-in meetings. Having a regular time to touch base with each of your staff members individually about their work keeps you focused on their results and creates a place for you to check on how projects are progressing, serve as a resource to them, and agree on prioritization. In short, regular one-on-one check-ins give you a forum for management.

  Monthly step-back meetings. Because it’s easy to get caught up in the rush of day-to-day work, having a set time each month, or at least each quarter, to step back and talk about the larger picture will ensure that you don’t lose the forest for the trees and neglect topics like progress toward big picture goals and development needs.

  These two types of meetings can serve as the glue that holds together all the elements of managing work that we’ve discussed so far, so we’ll spend the bulk of the chapter on them. We’ll also touch briefly on a few of the more specific, and trickier, topics that arise: managing remote staff, managing other managers, and managing areas of work you know nothing about.

  WEEKLY ONE-ON-ONE CHECK-INS

  Check-ins, periodic meetings between a manager and a staff member to discuss ongoing work, serve a variety of purposes:

  Advancing individual projects. By spending a few minutes with each of the major items on the staff member’s plate, the manager has a chance to ask probing questions, spot areas of concern for further work, and serve as a resource to the staff member. Often the manager’s “one-level-up” perspective allows her to fairly quickly suggest solutions to problems that the staff member may have overlooked.

  Balancing priorities across projects. By looking across all the work on a staff member’s plate, managers can help their staff focus on the most important pieces and can suggest areas that the staff member might deprioritize. Without check-ins, it’s easy to overlook when a staffer’s workload is too heavy or too light, when a staffer is focusing too much time on one project at the expense of another, or when a staffer is letting less visible tasks fall through the cracks.

  Coordinating the team. Managers can spot ways in which different staff members’ work intersects and can ensure the different parts of the team act in concert. (Regular staff meetings can help with this too.)

  Providing feedback. In theory, managers should provide feedback in the moment, but it’s sometimes easier to do this during a regular check-in meeting than in the rush of daily work. Check-ins give you a time to reflect on what’s gone well recently (“Great report to the board—let’s discuss why that went so smoothly!”) and what didn’t meet expectations (“Let’s talk about what went wrong with the phone banking and what you might do differently next time”).

  Connecting personally. Staff members need to know that you care about them as people, and having a regular time to meet outside the course of daily work gives you a better chance to ask about their morale, as well as their lives outside work.

  WHAT ABOUT STAFF MEETINGS?

  Staff meetings are best suited for communication and coordination, not individual management. Make sure your staff meetings aren’t simply check-ins with one person after another; do check-ins individually, and save staff meetings for conversations that truly involve the entire group.

  Putting Check-In Meetings into Practice

  Putting check-in meetings into practice is easy: simply let your team know you plan to start holding them, and get them on the calendar. Here are a few details about how things might work:

  How frequently should you have check-in meetings? In our experience, a weekly check-in meeting works well for most employees, although more experienced staffers might need less frequent discussions. However, we wouldn’t recommend meeting less frequently than every other week. During intense periods of work with tight deadlines or with newer staff, you might meet more frequently, even daily.

  Who should attend? Typically a check-in meeting is between just you and the employee. Unlike department meetings or staff meetings, where the goal is more about fostering coordination and communication across a team of staff members, check-ins work best when they are one-on-one.

  How long should the meetings be? The length of the meeting will vary, but in general, allow between thirty and ninety minutes per meeting, depending on the complexity of the staffer’s work and her needs.

  Making Check-In Meetings Effective

  Check-in meetings are such a powerful tool that you’ll begin to see better results just by implementing them as a regular practice. But here are a few ways to get the most out of them:

  Think beforehand about what you want to get out of the meeting. This sounds so obvious that we hesitate to say it, but few people actually do it. Taking two minutes in advance to think through what you are most worried about and what you want to focus on can have a big impact.

  Use an agenda. Again, this sounds obvious, but we see practices to the contrary all the time. Meetings are much more p
roductive if you don’t walk into them cold. Preparing for a check-in can run the gamut from asking the staffer to e-mail you an agenda beforehand to taking a minute at the beginning of the meeting to agree on what topics to cover. Tool 5.1 provides a sample check-in meeting agenda.

  Stay focused. Check-ins are one of your key management tools, so make sure to fully engage during the meeting. In fact, make sure everyone at the meeting puts their cell phones away. We’ve both been guilty of sneaking a glance at e-mail during a check-in, but we’ve also learned that resisting the temptation and staying focused saves us time in the long run.

  Keep track of items you want to raise. Although ideally the onus should be on the staffer to make sure you cover everything that needs to be discussed, it’s ultimately your responsibility to make sure nothing is overlooked. Develop a system for keeping track of check-in topics that come up during the course of business. This could mean jotting them down on your weekly action list (see Chapter Eleven), or you might keep track in your electronic calendar. Not only will this help you remember important topics, but when your staff members see that you don’t forget about things that are supposed to have happened, they’ll feel more accountable and will keep better track themselves.

  Make sure the next steps are clear. Few discussions should end without an agreement about what should happen next, even if it’s just, “Let’s both think this over, and then you should bring it up again next week.” It can be especially useful for your staffer to e-mail you a summary of everything that was agreed to, or at least for her to give you a verbal recap of next steps at the end of the meeting (just as you would ask for a repeat-back when delegating a single project).

  Include a human element. Take a few minutes to make a personal connection and find out how the person is doing generally. How is the person’s life going outside work? Now is a good time to ask about significant others, kids, and nonwork interests.

  Adjust your approach to the staffer. Some staffers need you to be more directive and hands-on, whereas with others, you can switch into more of an ancillary mode, perhaps asking how you can be helpful. Or you may learn that one staffer needs help in not losing sight of the big picture, while another needs prompting about specific items that may be getting lost.

  BIG PICTURE STEP-BACKS

  Ideally your check-in meetings might include discussions of progress toward larger goals, morale, development needs, and lessons learned, but in reality, these larger topics often get pushed aside in the press of day-to-day business. So set aside one check-in each month to focus on these issues (some managers we know hold them the first Monday of each month). If monthly is too much, you might do them quarterly, but generally you wouldn’t want to do fewer than that.

  GETTING BENEATH THE SURFACE

  As we discussed in Chapter Two, you’ve probably had the experience of asking a staff member how a project is going and receiving a simple “good” in response. Where do you go from there in order to get beneath the surface and understand what’s really happening?

  If you simply run down a list of projects without digging deeper, you’re likely to miss important information about what obstacles might be looming and how you might be a resource to your staff in avoiding them. Here are some questions that can help you get beneath the surface:

  What one or two things would make this week a success for you?

  How do you know you’re on track?

  How are you checking to make sure that’s working?

  How are you handling X [a specific element]?

  What seems to be working well? Why do you think that’s working?

  What could go wrong? What are you most worried about?

  Have you thought about what you’ll do if Y happens?

  What’s most important out of all those things?

  What makes you say that?

  What kind of data do we have about how that’s working?

  Roughly how much of your time are you spending on that?

  What’s your timeline for that?

  Can you give me a specific example of that?

  Can we take one specific instance and talk through how you’re approaching it?

  Why don’t we role-play what that might look like?

  What does your agenda for that look like?

  What other options did you consider?

  During these meetings:

  Pull out the staffer’s goals and discuss how her progress is matching up against them. Is she on track to meet her goals? Where does she need to restrategize? What has she put aside while working on something else but should be moved to a more active status again, or vice versa? See Tool 5.2 for a handy check-in sheet to use here.

  What lessons has she learned from recent work, and how might she apply them in the future?

  What might you both be able to do to help the staff member develop further? (Chapter Seven discusses staff development in depth.) WHAT ABOUT WRITTEN REPORTS?

  We’re not huge fans of written weekly reports that summarize a staff member’s current and upcoming projects, because they can become a bureaucratic drain on valuable staff time. We’d rather see managers manage to big picture goals and apply the tips we’ve provided to get the most out of check-ins. However, we know some managers who swear by written reports, arguing that having a comprehensive list of everything on the staffer’s plate can prompt both of them to ask questions or raise issues about tasks they might not otherwise think about.

  If you do decide to use weekly reports, keep in mind that the goal is to put you and your staffer on the same page and make sure the staff member brings you up to date on priorities and identifies topics for later discussion, not simply require the staff member to document where her time went that week.

  In some cases, you might also check in on how the staff member is doing both personally and with the job. Is she happy? Frustrated? How is she feeling overall?

  OBSERVING THE WORK IN ACTION

  As powerful and important as weekly check-ins and bigger picture step-backs are, don’t forget that they’re not the only way to check on progress. You should get out from behind your desk and see things in action too. Often what you see looks different from what you pictured when you were just talking about it. Finding ways to observe the work in action can give you a much deeper understanding of how plans are really playing out.

  SPECIAL CHALLENGES

  Implementing regular check-in meetings and periodic big picture step-backs will make a dramatic difference in your ability to manage the work of staff members. However, what if your staff member isn’t just down the hall but across the country or even on the other side of the world? Or if she is a manager of staff members herself? Or working in an area that you don’t have much expertise in? Let’s take a look at how to approach these additional challenges.

  Managing Remote Staff

  If you’re managing staff members who aren’t in the same physical location as you, give special consideration to how to make the relationship work smoothly. Here are four tips we’ve found that make remote management go more smoothly.

  1. Establish a clear system for communications and stick to it. If you leave it informal, regular communication is less likely to happen than with someone who’s physically in the building with you. For instance, you might decide that you’ll have one regularly scheduled phone meeting each week, won’t rely on e-mail for complicated issues that arise between meetings and will instead will get on the phone to hash them out, and will have the staffer come to your headquarters for a few days at least twice a year.

  2. Create ways for remote staff to stay connected. Since it can be harder for remote employees to know what’s going on in the office, pay special attention to ensuring that they’re included in communications.

  3. Create opportunities for in-person interaction. This is key for building trust and getting to know each other. If you have an entire remote team, try bringing them together several times a year.

  4. Find ways to see remote staff in a
ction. You can do this by joining some of their phone calls, going on joint field visits, or shadowing them for a day in their own office. This is essential to know what’s really going on in the field and to help you serve as a resource to your staffer. In addition, when your remote staffer knows that you’ve seen her world firsthand and that you understand its dynamics and challenges, it can dramatically increase the trust between you.

  Managing Other Managers

  Another challenge you may confront as you gain experience is managing others who themselves manage people. When the person you’re managing is a manager herself, part of her job is to get work done through other people. Make sure, then, that you’re managing her as a manager, not just as an individual contributor. This means that you should pay attention to the results her team is producing, and not solely to what she is doing directly herself, and that you should focus on building her skills in such areas as how she delegates work to others, how she hires and fires, and how she transmits your culture to her staffers.

  So instead of, or in addition to, asking about how’s she’s spending her own time, ask about her team. Who is working on what? How is she managing Maria on that project? How is it going? How does she know? What is she doing to make sure Maria stays with the team for another year?

  Here are more examples of the kinds of questions you might ask when managing other managers:

  How are you managing Josh on that?

  How are you making sure Josh is on track?

  Should we make sure you and I are aligned before you go back to him on that?

  What is Josh’s plan for X?

  What are you most worried about in terms of how Josh will handle X? How are you taking that on?