Leading Your First Team: A Short Guide For New Managers

As a recently graduated IESE MBA and AB InBev's GMBA program, I thought people would seek me for business mentorship. I was wrong. They asked about leadership.

Excited, I've always said yes.

I knew, however, the young managers were not exactly seeking leadership. They usually asked, "Charles, I'm getting my first team. How do I do it well?"

I've taught many people over the years about leadership and there are many books on this topic. I think most overcomplicate it. Leadership should be simple. For new managers, here are 5 frameworks and practices to start this journey.

1. Understand the Competence-Likable Matrix

After my first two years in the military, I realized were 2 types of officers:

1. Officers that were always happy, fun, and likeable
2. Officers that were tough and extremely competent

But neither style resonated with me. What happens to the likable officer when you had to give tough news? What happens to the morale of teams if they never enjoy training, lack positive feedback, and never laugh to cope with challenges?

Thus, I conceived of leadership as a 2x2 matrix of likability and competence.

Entering any leadership position, we will be medium to low on competence and neutrally likable. Everyone starts here and begins the journey of building rapport and expertise in their role.

Once comfortable, we reveal more of our personality and style of work. If we're extraverted and open to experience, we emphasize collaboration and team spirit. And this is enjoyable. But it does not build a trustworthy and reliable team under pressure.

The team must be tested by storms. These tests are where competence enters the picture. Competence is simply the ability of your team to depend on your decisions and guide them to beneficial outcomes. Repeated demonstrations of good decision and positive outcomes proves your competence and builds trust.

We don't always have the luxury of proving our competence over time. But more often than not, we will have about 3 to 6 months to learn and prove our potential competence.

Second, it's important to acknowledge two things in this model:

• There are no "bad" boxes besides the bottom-left corner (unlikable-incompetent)
• The other 3 boxes are all appropriate depending on the circumstance

Here's a few examples:

The leaders I respected most in my career had some likable qualities while also being competent and reliable under pressure. They were not nice when I screwed up, nor were they jerks. They were comfortable with decisions that made me unhappy and pushed me beyond my current capabilities. They supported me in my failures and ensured I learned from them. As a result, I respected and trusted their judgement - even on their worst days.

Choose upfront to value competence. Reveal your likable side over time. Your team will respect you and appreciate your leadership.

2. Define Your Values & Work-Style

Many teams write culture and values statements. They plaster them on the walls and some of them actually live them. At AB InBev, we had a strong culture with broadly defined principles for the organization. However, it's not enough. Every manager must define their team's culture.

Managers define "the way we do things around here". (ref. Brene Brown).

When I first took over my commercial team, I realized the company's values lacked the specificity I needed to determine whether someone was capable of operating in my team.

So I phone my mentor and executive coach, Craig Chong , who recommended a wonderful little book called How to Be a Great Boss by Wickman & Boer.

"How to Be a Great Boss" proposed a simple framework:

• look at your best people,
• reflect on the qualities you most appreciate in them,
• define and explain why those qualities, habits, and ways of working make them effective.

After a long weekend of reflection, I landed on 5 qualities and guidelines to operationalize our values (the book recommends 3 to 5 qualities maximum).

1. Structured Communication: I knew with 20+ countries and many stakeholders we needed to be very structured in how we managed everything.
2. Responsive: Sales teams move fast. If they send us something, we need to respond the same day or give a timeline for expected action.
3. Useful and User-Friendly Tools: When you're providing data, tracking, and recommendations using KPIs you need to make the information useful, easy to navigate, and actionable. Otherwise, sales teams will not use it.
4. Professionalism: Sales teams can be passionate. We must never lose our cool, even when our sales teams pressured and overwhelm us.
5. Best for the Business: Sometimes, short-term decisions are made at the expense of the long-term ones. We are guardians against this thinking without senior management approval.

All of these values are easily understood with clear implications for "what right looks like."

If your values do not correspond to behavioral impact, they are not good enough. Values are your foundation. Take your time to get them right. Once you do, your team will understand and operate by them forever.

The most important thing about values is to ask the question, "What does this look like?" If you cannot describe it behaviorally, then it's not enforceable within the team and during performance reviews.

3. Build Routines: Run Meetings That Matter

The start of any team will be uncomfortable. Your meetings will be awkward for the first few sessions. The purpose of meetings may be unclear and people will be uncertain about what information to bring.

You can do this differently.

First, you can make every meeting have a clear purpose and agenda. Ensure people know what is expected of them at the meeting. Schedule them at the same time and reoccurring interval to build consistency.

In your first position, I propose you have three reoccurring meetings:

1. Weekly Huddle (60 minutes): Designed to kick-off the week, capture key news from customers & stakeholders, review performance indicators and task completition, resolve issues, and identify next steps of key projects.
2. Quarterly Projects Definition (90 to 120 minutes): Every team and company will have 3 to 5 important projects to complete each quarter. Tt's important to define these projects, review their status, and eliminate blockers.
3. Monthly Performance Review (90 to 120 minutes): Even if you review your dashboards and KPIs weekly, it's important to zoom out and review the state of the business each month. "Are we achieving our financial goals?" "Have we planned sufficient sales activities?" "Are we progressing on key projects as expected?" You're responsible for your team's success.
4. Adhocs (non-regular meetings): These are topic and project-specific meetings. Don't overcomplicate them or build routines around them. Focus on always having a purpose, agenda, and decision to be reached each meeting.

Second, meetings do not require complicated charts and figures. I planned out quarterly projects in a simple Excel I copied from my former boss, Christophe Stevens . This made it easy to review each project's status, blockers, next steps, and current or adjusted due date.

Once you had these meetings in place, your challenges will change from implementation to sustaining excellence.

Challenge #1: Maintain your standards and ensure team members bring you the data you request. They will adapt and appreciate your support and clear expectations.

Challenge #2: Always brief the purpose, agenda, and information or data you expect them to bring to the meeting, especially if it requires time to collect. Without this guidance, you are setting yourself and them up for failure.

Challenge #3: Be open to modify your weekly huddle. As the head of operations my biggest issue was not KPI achievement but workflow and task prioritization. Therefore, we spent the majority of the meeting discussing individual to-do lists.

If you'd like a guide for better meetings, I highly recommend "Level 10 Meeting" EOS material by Gino Wickman.

4. Standardize & Document Key Processes

One of the biggest wins you can do for your teams in the first 90 days is ensure they are not reinventing the wheel for every task. Identify the 80-20 of recurring processes, paperwork, and presentations and document your team's learnings.

This saves time, reduces errors, and ensures everyone's on the same page.

• Identify Repetitive Tasks: Bucket all your processes. Any process that you do monthly, weekly, and daily is a prime candidate for standardization.
• Develop Documentation: Create clear and concise documentation for these standardized processes. This could be in the form of a powerpoint, flowcharts, or a well-formatted excel.
• Training and Onboarding: This is the one everyone misses! You need to train people on new processes. At the training, do it live with someone based on a real use case to ensure adoption.
• Define the Timeline: Unclear deadlines and timelines are recipes for disappointment. Without deadlines, people will assume the task can wait.
• Gather Input & Refine the Process: Standardization is not a one-time event. Always check with people who will use the process before launch. Adapt, inform stakeholders, & relaunch.

Let's review a quick example.

A common request from our sales teams were pricing to launch a new product or pricing for a new customer. Sales needed to know the lowest price threshold and the recommended price. Revenue Management was responsible for providing the proposal.

Since this was a monthly occurrence between Revenue Management and Sales, we standardized an Excel template, checked our proposal with the most experienced key accounts, and launched the new process and templates in a 30-minute onboarding call.

Warning From Experience: As a leader, your team will often think they are too busy to standardize things. This is a lie. One of the best 48 hours I spent with my team was taking 2-days to standardize our top 5 processes. Those 48 hours solved weeks of future pain.

Define your standards and drive adoption as efficiently as possible.

5. Demand Structure & Reliability: Model It Then Expect It

Looking at the job market now it's quite competitive. Your reputation is important and a primary benchmark of your capability as a manager will be your work-style. Stand out with structure and reliability.

Structure simply means that you have a reason-based approach to how your operate in meetings, work, and day-to-day interactions. This is similar to being organized but demands the additional abilities of critical thinking and communicating in step-by-step logic that's easily understood.

Second, become reliable. A reliable person is one known for getting jobs done. In my first year in the country manager position, I struggled to get jobs done. We had 50% vacancies and numerous changes. I did not adapt fast enough and could not be relied upon to deliver the sales. The following year, we identified our levers of success and built sales routines to execute against them. As a result, the Danish business got off to a roaring start.

In summary, I believe managers should do their best to:

• communicate in a structured and logical manner
• become a reliable person, known for getting jobs done

Lead both in word and deed.

Conclusion: There's More Than One Leadership & Management Philosophy

Leading a team is both challenging and rewarding.

Your team members will bring you the highest highs and the lowest lows. The great ones will change you as a person, challenging you to improve yourself and your management capabilities.

My parting advice is this: "Start with trust and clear expectations." Don't be afraid to stretch them. You have the unique opportunity to be a benchmark manager for your team. Don't take that for granted. Enjoy it and appreciate them. When they don't play by the rules, give them 3 chances, then let them go.

Life is short. Managing great people makes it feel longer and more meaningful.

Good luck being a manager!

-- Charles

*Important article from Brene Brown I recommend on operationalizing values - https://brenebrown.com/operationalizing-your-orgs-values/