Dear first-time manager... (Or, 7 ways to be a new kind of leader)

Dear first-time managers,

What a month it has been. All three of you have made the leap from being stellar individual contributors to your first manager role. Congrats! ??

As I leave Lessonly, you’ve all been on my mind. You’re on the frontline of the future of our business. And in the whirlwind of hiring, hitting goals, making decisions, sitting in lots of 1:1s, you probably won’t feel like you have a lot of extra time to spend thinking about how to be a really great manager —but it's the foundation that all the other things get built on top of.

I have no doubt that you have the skills and competence to do your assigned jobs. But meaningful leadership (AKA Better Work) is not just about the operational, but the relational as well. Since I won’t see you daily anymore, I wanted to share seven principles that have helped me as I've figured out the messiness of leading people over the first decade of my career. Most likely, none of them will be new to you. But I hope this note brings them more into focus as you go about your daily work.

1. Become a servant

The most common visual model for organizational design is a pyramid—and your first inclination as a new manager might be that you’ve got some newfound power because you’ve moved up a level! And in some ways you do. But flip that pyramid on its head. Your people don’t exist to serve you, you exist to serve your people. Helping others succeed, and thinking more about them than yourself, is your new prime directive.

The prerequisite for a truly great team is humility. The most world-changing collaboration happens when humility is rampant. And humility isn’t reserved for the leader alone. When every member of the team is focused on the success, well-being, and empowerment of their teammates — rather than on receiving recognition — the best ideas and results rise to the surface.

Paradoxically, the best way to accomplish amazing things on a team isn’t being amazing: It’s being humble.

2. Help people grow

“I want you to become so good I can’t keep you.” That was Kyle Lacy's commitment to me during my Lessonly interview. And I believe that should be every manager's goal—to help people grow. The best leaders I know aren't the cape-wearing heroes who win by being smarter, better, faster, stronger (all the “-ers”). The most effective leaders I know are more like gardeners. They’re constantly tending the garden that their teams and people are planted in.

• Fertilizing here with encouragement and advice
• Pruning there with feedback and hard conversations
• Watering with new hills to take and opportunities to grow
• Picking weeds by addressing the barriers to better work

So tend an environment that allows for growth. That offers people new challenges and opportunities. That helps them find their next career growth step. Let’s sign up, over and over again, for the humbler work of sore knees and dirty fingernails that leads to an ecosystem where our teammates (and the results they create) can flourish and bear fruit.

3. Act like an owner, but give away the keys

You may have heard former Marine Jocko Willink tout the need for “extreme ownership.” The idea is that those who want to lead take radical responsibility and ownership for whatever—or whoever—is in their charge. You should feel TOTAL ownership of your team and everything related to your team's success. But, don’t become a helicopter manager in the name of extreme ownership. Your teammates need to feel that same level of ownership over the results of their own work.

I once met with an accomplished restaurateur who told me that his management secret was that he didn’t have the keys to any of his own restaurants. He wanted the store managers to feel ownership of the store, so they had the only keys. That small action conveyed meaningful trust. In the same way, push the feeling of ownership down towards others. As your teammates show ability, relinquish control incrementally to give them opportunities to feel the healthy weight of ownership for their piece of the business.

4. Give away credit

We all like a little praise. It’s nice to succeed and be recognized for it. But when praise comes, don’t be a sponge, be a mirror. The sponge leader soaks up praise for himself. This leader uses the words “I” or “my” a lot, and all too often fails to publicly recognize the contributions of their teammates. The mirror leader reflects praise back to her team. When success strikes, her first thought is to celebrate the accomplishments of others — and tell anyone who will listen. She uses phrases like “we”, “they”, or “the team” and her own contributions are an afterthought— if they are mentioned at all.

A mirror leader is humble enough to know they are better with their team, and confident enough to offer others the credit. Giving away credit and celebrating others is free. Do it liberally.

5. Be willing to be waylaid

Being a manager will likely mean that you’ll feel a little busier! You’ll have more time in meetings and maybe some more pressure to hit a team goal. In the midst of this, prioritize both organized time with your people (i.e. 1:1s, team meetings), but also ad hoc time with them. Embrace the beautiful inefficiency of meaningful connection. "Waste" time hearing about their day, their weekend, or that story that has absolutely nothing to do with work—and tell some of your own. Jump on an impromptu Zoom call with them to work through a tough problem. Get off topic. Be goofy for a few minutes of the meeting. Give them a call or a text just because. Put forth the extra effort to connect with them as a human, not just as an employee. You won't regret it.

6. Foster psychological safety with vulnerability

One of our most primal instincts is the ability to differentiate between danger and safety. While danger looks a lot different for us than it did for our ancestors—it still effects each of us at work. When we miss our quarterly goal, get a cryptic message from a boss, or have relational conflict at work, you might feel a bit unsafe. We feel tense, on edge, distracted, nervous. But it turns out that when we feel safe, we relax. We're more positive and patient. Our capacity for creative thinking and deep work expands. As leaders, we have countless opportunities to be the non-anxious presence in a room—to provide perspective, communicate reassurance, and give the team confidence that they can be bold and safe at the same time.

Psychological safety and vulnerability are inextricably linked. When we lead with vulnerability, being willing to share our own feelings, concerns, and shortcomings, others feel safe to do the same. When we are willing to let down our armor and give others a glimpse of our imperfection, it gives our teammates permission to do the same—and that's when we're all freed to do our best work.

7. Choose to be courageously candid

There's a courage gap in the modern workplace. We often default to conflict and tension avoidance—but so many of those moments are missed opportunities to have a difficult conversation and come out the other side better. And in fact, you're doing your teammates and the organization a disservice by avoiding saying the hard thing, just for the sake of comfort. As Kim Scott notes, caring personally and challenging directly is the best way to give feedback and make progress.

When you do have conflict, recognize the difference between relational conflict and task conflict. Most of the time, your boss' critique of your work isn't about you, it's about the task (and same with you and your direct reports). Rather than allowing the conversation to feel like two people against each other, try to reframe conflict as you and the other person on the same side of the table against a problem.

So have courage. Courage to say what you really think. Courage to disagree and have conflict. Courage to try something different. Courage to bet on a new strategy. Courage to test and fail, over and over again. Courage to make sense out of ambiguity. Courage to initiate relationship with your teammates. Courage to be positive when things seem hard. Courage to care for yourself. Here’s to a little more courage today for all of us.

Wrapping up

If you've made it this far, thank you. These 7 principles have rattled around in my brain for years, and while each one of them has much more nuance than a couple paragraphs can allow, they've been helpful to me. I hope they help you too.

I showed this to a friend earlier this week, and he suggested a summary of this far-too-long note: "Love is the best leadership attribute." Love isn't a word we bring into work a lot, but when you treat your people with empathy and compassion and intentionality and care—that's love. I hope you find your own version of that to show your current and future teammates.

You'll be great at this—I believe in you.

Ben

P.S. Thanks to some of the books that inspired this note

• Multipliers by Liz Wiseman
• Radical Candor by Kim Scott
• The Answer to How is Yes by Peter Block
• Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet
• Dare to Serve by Cheryl Bachelder
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
• Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
• Do Better Work by Max Yoder

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Originally published on my blog, battaglia.xyz, where I write about what I'm reading and learning.