As a manager, unless you are working in a very tiny company you will most likely have access to an HR department to handle some of the back-end paperwork for your team. You might not know it, but being an employer is a complex process in terms of government regulations and laws, taxes, etc. There are many laws, both state and federal, that govern how employers treat their employees, what they can and can’t ask in interviews, and how employees are classified for tax and overtime purposes, and every other topic you can imagine.
If you had to know all about HR in order to be a manager, in addition to everything you need to know about your industry and your team’s function, it would be overwhelming. But it’s a good idea to at least have a basic understanding of the HR function so you know what questions to ask and when to seek guidance and additional information. Here are just a few of the primary functions of the HR department in most companies:
Benefits – In order to attract and retain employees, many companies offer benefit packages ranging from health insurance and paid time off all the way up to funded pension plans, company cars and travel allowances. Because of privacy laws, HR is required to restrict access to specific information, and as a manager you won’t be allowed to see or be aware of those details. Even small companies have access to an incredible range of choices in terms of how benefits are structured and delivered. While you might feel like you know all about your company’s benefit packages, you probably want to refer your team members to the HR department if they want more information about eligibility, availability and cost of various programs.
Compensation – While getting paid might seem like the most basic part of the HR job, it can actually be incredibly complicated. Each person has a unique set of deductions depending on the number and type of benefits they receive, their tax status, etc. Online payroll services have streamlined this process for small businesses, and many larger businesses outsource payroll to service providers rather than handling it in house. As a manager it’s important to make sure that new hires carefully review their first paycheck to be sure everything is correct. It can be hard to correct things like social security number errors later in the process.
Performance Management Framework – Many companies have a defined structure for reviews and performance management that managers are responsible for implementing. Be sure to understand when you are expected to provide structured feedback, and what form that feedback should take. In addition to a framework, if you have challenges with an employee, you will definitely want to bring in HR to help you manage the situation efficiently. For much more on that, feel free to read my post on handling terminations.
Compliance – As I mentioned in the first paragraph, there are all sorts of laws that apply to companies the employ and pay workers. From OSHA safety regulations to the Fair Labor Standards Act to the Affordable Care Act, the regulatory environment of running and managing a company can be extremely complex. One aspect of the HR function is to understand and provide guidance or consult legal counsel around these many regulations. As a manager there is no way you can keep up on them all, and you are far better off asking your HR team if you have questions or concerns about how to handle a specific situation.
HR and managers are a team working together to define and foster a strong culture that supports employees as they do their best work. Having a good relationship with the HR department will make you a better manager and keep you from making mistakes with big consequences!
This is what teamwork and collaboration looks like at its best:
This is what it looks like at it’s worst:
Here are three signs you are stuck in a collaboration sheep cyclone:
You have a recurring meeting and the agenda items haven’t changed in over a month
You propose a ridiculous idea as a joke and at least 1 person says “great idea”
Your results don’t change even though everyone is “working hard”
What do you do to break out of the cycle? Here are some things to try – I’d love to hear what works for you!
Cancel Meetings – The best way to get out of a rut caused by meetings is to cancel them and then reform (if you need to) with a fresh agenda and a new set of goals.
End a Failing Initiative – Sometimes a project has died but no one wants to admit it. Take a hard look at your team’s portfolio and if you identify a failed project, reboot it if it has to get done or get rid of it if it’s just wasting everyone’s time and sucking the energy out of your team..
Try a Change of Scenery – Schedule an offsite and get everyone up out of their chairs and into a fresh perspective. Revisit your goals and how they are aligned with the organization.
Now it’s your turn – what breaks you out of a sheep cyclone?
Starting a new job with management responsibilities? It can be overwhelming. The good news is there are plenty of tools to help you be successful in your new management role. Here are a few of my favorites:
The American Management Association – The AMA is a great source for leadership and management training and development. They have seminars and events as well as books and podcasts that cover every imaginable topic.
The Dale Carnegie Institute – One of the original and still most respected management training organizations, the Dale Carnegie Institute offers training resources for every level of manager and provides courses in many locations and formats.
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) – The SHRM has courses, forms, interview tips and tricks and loads of articles to help you find your way in a new management role.
Franklin Covey – The Franklin planning system combined with Stephen Covey’s powerful tools for time and priority management can be a huge help as you try to keep up with new responsibilities and new priorities. Offering both training and tools, Franklin Covey is a great place to start if you are feeling overwhelmed and need better ways to get a grip on time management.
David Allen – Getting Things Done is David Allen’s process for time management. It’s a different mindset than Franklin Covey, and if your inbox is raging out of control, it’s worth understanding GTD to get yourself organized and get ahead of the game.
Mind Tools – This great site has both training and tools to support you as you grow your leadership skills. A full suite of great info to help you get off on the right foot!
Wally Bock’s Working Supervisor Support Kit – Wally Bock is a veteran in the leadership development space. His leadership kit will give you the benefit of two decades of leadership training and support for new managers.
Evernote - You never know when a great idea or a solution to a nagging problem will come to you. Evernote lets you grab clips of articles that inspire you, jot down ideas or take quick voice notes and share them across all your devices so wherever you are, your ideas can come with you.
Dropbox - Similar to Evernote, Dropbox is an essential tool for keeping documents (like draft meeting agendas) or other key items someplace you can access from anywhere.
LogMeIn – When Evernote and Dropbox aren’t enough and you really need to access your work computer to use an application on the network or look at something you can only see from your work PC, LogMeIn can be a lifesaver.
What tools do you use to keep you organized on the go?
Last week Cy Wakeman released her new book The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace. I want to start by applauding Cy for pulling no punches as she delivers her perspective on how to be successful at work. It comes down to one thing and really only one thing – taking accountability for your own behavior.
How many times have you participated in a “huddle and whisper” session after a meeting? How many times have you blamed your situation on your boss, your company, too many goals, the phase of the moon, or really anything except your own behavior? If you’re honest, the answer is probably “too many”. From page 1, Cy delivers a strong and compelling argument for purging those habits from your repertoire and building new ones based on her five simple rules:
Don’t hope to be lucky, choose to be happy
Ditch the drama
Your action not your opinion adds value
Change is opportunity
Succeed anyway
For me the most compelling part of the book was about 1/3 of the way in when the author talks about quitting without leaving. From her last book Reality-Based Leadership she introduces the statistic that 68% of employees quit every day. They just don’t leave. They quit trying. They check out. Great managers spend a lot of time trying to build an environment where employees can feel checked-in and engaged, but managers can only do 50% of the job. The other 50% is up to the employee. And if you don’t want to be where you are, don’t be surprised if your performance reflects it.
There are some excellent tools and questionnaires in The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace and since only you will see the results, there’s no reason not to be completely honest. Cy does a great job helping to define and show clear examples of the values and behaviors that high performers should be shooting for. If every employee took these to heart we would quadruple productivity in the workplace.
I’m sure not everyone will take advantage of the opportunity this book presents because it doesn’t allow for any excuses. There ARE bad bosses and bad workplaces and tough situations in the world, and it’s much easier to blame our circumstances instead of ourselves. But I applaud Cy for rejecting the idea that someone else is to blame for our own situation.
Did you read The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace? What did you think?
Last Friday I attended a presentation by Charles Jacobs, author of Management Rewired. It was a fantastic talk about how our brains work, and particularly how motivation works (or doesn’t) in the workplace. I walked away with a brand new understanding about management that’s incredibly simple and important to the happiness of employees.
Let’s talk about motivation for a minute and think about the conventional wisdom on how to improve employee performance. If you manage by the old-school “command and control” model, the answer is “tell people what to do and they do it”. But I doubt you do manage that way since it has become abundantly clear that it’s totally ineffective. More recently managers have shifted to a feedback or coaching based model. Agree on goals, set target behaviors that you want your team members to exhibit, and then give them timely feedback:
Positive reinforcement for good work
Constructive criticism for areas that need to improve
So praise doesn’t improve performance (although it does prevent it from deteriorating – people do like to be appreciated for what they do and they notice if they aren’t) and negative reinforcement makes things worse. What’s a manager to do?
Well first off don’t throw out all the feedback. Positive reinforcement can and should be used when someone is learning a new skill. Let’s take dolphins as an example. Have you ever seen a trained dolphin perform? They do some unbelievable tricks, and if you ask the trainers how they do it, they’ll tell you that it’s 100% positive reinforcement. Any behavior the dolphin exhibits that the trainer doesn’t like, they simply ignore. This process is called conditioning in the world of psychology. And while we can certainly condition our great team members to follow the rules, it doesn’t lead to innovation or high performance, mainly because humans are a bit more complex than dolphins when it comes to motivation.
So now on to what does work:
What makes people feel engaged and happy is self-direction.
If I order my tasks based on what I think is the best use of my time, I’m much more likely to work hard and do a good job. If my boss comes and gives me a list, in order, of what she thinks I should be working on I’m much more likely to want a cup of coffee and to start polishing up my resume.
Specifically, Towers Watson concludes that organizations must create policies and practices that make it possible for employees to better manage their workload, live more balanced lives and exercise greater autonomy around how, when, and where they get their work done.
What it comes down to is having choices. Workers who feel like they are free to choose their own direction are more willing to be accountable for the results, work harder and better on the tasks that they choose, and are more likely to describe themselves as happy in their jobs. This is especially true for high performers. In a recently released survey by Custom Insight, the top 20% most engaged employees listed autonomy as the 5th most important driver of engagement, and the top 10% listed it as the second most important driver, coming in just behind “personal expression”. In other words great people want the ability to speak up about what they think is right, and they want the freedom to act on those ideas.
How do we do it? How do we create an environment where team members feel like they have choices, feel like they have control, feel like they can be self-directed?
Stop telling, start asking.
Do you know that if I tell you to vote you are less likely to do so but if I ask you if you plan to vote, you are 25% more likely to head to the polls on election day? Asking is powerful and shifting the conversation from telling to asking can have a dramatic impact on your team’s performance. Employees who participate in decision making are more likely to fully commit to and support those decisions. Wouldn’t you rather have everyone on your team fully supporting the goals and direction of the team?
So how does this look and feel in the real world? Let’s see it play out:
Scenario 1 (Old School Command/Control Method)
Manager: Pat, come into my office! (Closes the door) The TargetMart project numbers just came back – the results are horrible! You’re demoted to individual contributor. If your next project results are this bad you’re fired. Got it?
Pat: Got it. (Thinks “I’d better spend all my time and energy on finding a new job and keep my head down until I can get out.”)
Scenario 2 (Feedback Method)
Manager: Pat, can I see you for a minute? (Closes the door) The results are back in on the TargetMart project and the numbers weren’t what we hoped for. It looks like you did a great job on the final deliverable but you went way over on hours that we couldn’t bill to the client. In the future you need to do a better job of making sure the hours you put in are in line with the project estimate.
Pat: Thanks for the feedback boss! (Thinks “Too bad the guy who quoted the project didn’t have any idea how long the work would take.”)
Scenario 3 (Engagement Minded Method)
Manager: Pat, do you have a few minutes to talk about the TargetMart project?
Pat: Sure – can I just finish up this email and then I’ll meet you in the conference room.
Manager: So how do you think things went?
Pat: I’m glad you asked – it was a tough project. I think the sales team might not have had the information they needed to build an accurate scope of work. We ended up having to go way over on hours and I’m sure we didn’t make the money we should have. The good news is we managed to keep the customer really happy and I have some ideas on how we could work with Sales earlier in the process to make the scope more accurate so the next project of this type goes a lot more smoothly for everyone.
In real life I’d bet that the project wouldn’t have gone off the rails at all in scenario 3 because there would have been communication earlier in the process. But just imagine yourself as either the manager or Pat in these scenarios. Do you feel like the engagement minded method could work in your organization?
I’d love to hear from you – what are some ways you have created choices in your workplace? How did you change the conversation from telling to asking? Let’s talk about it!
It took me a long time to read Give and Take although not for the reason you might think. While I did find that Adam Grant has a tendency to repeat himself from time to time, overall I found the book to be thought provoking. I often put it down to consider a point and observe my colleagues and myself in action to see if I observed the same things the author saw in his research. So this review has been a bit delayed, but not because the book was not interesting or compelling, but rather because it was so applicable and observationally accurate in my day to day life.
The premise of the book feels both natural and surprising. The idea of a spectrum with “givers” at one end (those who offer time, resources, connections and energy to help others with no real intent or focus on reciprocity) and “takers” (no explanation needed) on the other makes great logical and intuitive sense. The surprise (spoiler alert but a small one since it happens in the first chapter) is that the givers end up at both the top and the bottom of the success range. As Dr. Grant explores these themes, he draws us in with stories and then expands on the observations with research and data. This is the new model (pioneered by Malcolm Gladwell) for books of this type and for good reason. It’s fun to learn new ways to look at our relationships and at success.
Cleverly there are no quizzes in the book to show whether you as a reader are a giver or a taker (although they are available on the author’s website). And of course everyone I talked to about the book identified with the givers and empathized with the idea of being too giving. While the author does focus primarily on the benefits and pitfalls of the givers which is consistent with the theme of the book, it did leave me wondering whether it’s truly possible to change from one category to another or if this simply allows takers to disguise themselves a bit better.
Overall Give and Take was a solid read with some great insights for both work and life. Did you read it? What did you think?
In 2011 Mumford and Sons broke out after their appearance on the Grammy’s. After watching them, a friend of mine quipped:
Too bad Mumford didn’t have any sons who played drums…
It’s tempting as a manager to think about the elements you need on your team and worry about the skills you don’t have. You might think you need just a few more people, just a few more players to make your team perfect. You start to believe that if you match some framework of what the ideal team looks like, everything will be easy. Maybe you don’t need all those elements after all. Maybe your team already has everything in place to be successful. Maybe you just need to believe that these things are plenty:
Passion
Commitment
Communication
Talent
Maybe you have exactly what you need right now even without a drummer…
I’ve never come up with a great idea sitting at my desk going through my to-do list. My best ideas come when I do one (or more) of these things:
Walk away from the problem – Sometimes when you leave something alone for a couple of days, you see it from a different perspective and you see a solution that wasn’t obvious before.
Talk to someone – Just explaining a problem to someone else might show you something you haven’t tried or help you see something you’ve missed. And if you don’t see it while you’re talking, the other person may see it or may have ideas you haven’t considered.
Go for a walk – There’s something about walking that makes your brain work. I have some of my best ideas out in the woods where I can’t actually do anything about them. When you unplug from all the distractions (including your ipod) and just let your brain work, sometimes it comes up with amazing stuff!
Read - This is not just shameless promotion for bloggers either! There are a lot of smart people who have been through what you are going through and many of them write about it. There are tons of wonderful resources to help you solve just about any problem. Read books, read articles, subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, whatever floats your boat. Just keep adding fresh ideas to your head and sooner or later you’ll find someone who has been where you are and thought about the situation differently.
It’s easy to think that everyone else knows something you don’t know. But a lot of being a good manager and a good leader is about solving problems by using your own common sense. How do you solve tough problems? What are your favorite resources?
Your first day on the job as a new manager can be nerve wracking. New responsibilities, new expectations, and everyone looking to you for leadership when you don’t even know where the bathroom is yet. So what do you do in your first days and weeks as a new manager to start things off on the right foot? Here are ten great questions to ask:
Who is on my team? While it may be obvious who is part of your team and who isn’t, it’s a really important question to ask. Often in addition to the people who directly report to you, there are others who either partially report to you or whose assistance and support you will need in order to be successful. Find out who your direct reports are as well as anyone else who is a resource or an ally.
What are our goals and targets? In some companies this will be easy to learn and well articulated. In other organizations it may be complicated or unclear. What are the goals of the organization as a whole? How does your team fit into that picture?
What deadlines and deliverables are coming up? If you’re stepping into leading a team in an organization you’ve just joined, you need to find out what your team is supposed to produce in the near future and when it’s due.
Who are the influencers? Every organization has them – they might be managers or they might not, but knowing whose ideas carry weight within the organization is an important first step in learning the political landscape. The best way to learn who has influence is to go meet with other people in the organization. If you are in sales, talk to people in finance, in production, in support, or whatever other teams exist around the company to learn who’s who.
How can I help? One of the best ways to build strong ties and relationships in a new organization is to offer help. In Adam Grant’s book Give and Take he shows that giving can be tremendously beneficial in building a network of allies who are willing to help you whenever you need it.
Coming into a new organization, especially in a leadership role is a big challenge. What kinds of things have you found helpful when you start out as a new manager?
