Wave’s Guide to Empowered Management - Part II
In the first?part?of this guide, you learned about what an appropriate management posture entails and how to adopt it. If you missed it, you can read it here:
In this second segment, you’ll gain clarity on how you can provide your team with an understandable and coherent structure and maintain it over time. After all, a posture without process simply isn’t as effective.
Part II: Providing clarity through processes
When building your processes, it is important to keep in mind that you’re creating a setup in which:
Building this frame starts early, and can be broken down into two distinct timelines:
Before a new joiner begins
After they have integrated the team
1) Before - Recruiting & Onboarding
→ Recruiting
Everything begins with recruiting the right people and making sure everyone is aligned on what they are supposed to do. This is critical for both the team members and the manager. A clear job description that describes the expectations and responsibilities of a role is essential in ensuring that everyone is on the same page.
Often, managers’ expectations lack clarity, and they expect their reports to fulfill a need, requirement or task that has been formally expressed. In order to avoid frustration and dissatisfaction on both ends, and promote a healthy working relationship based on mutual understanding from the get-go, job descriptions should be sure to include:
"You will be responsible for dealing level 1, 2 and 3 PII breaches within our code"
“Will be working in a fully remote setting, with regular communication via online chat and video platforms. This requires extra attention to detail and nuance and communication savvy to keep healthy, caring and empowering working relationships.”
“Accountability, strives for excellence, always mindset, takes initiative”
“You will be working on the launch of our new web app which will require a throughout knowledge of HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and frameworks like Bootstrap, as well as liaising with different squads, meeting tight deadlines, bringing bold new ideas to the table.“
Each of these elements will not only help the recruitment process itself, but provide a clear trusting context over the duration of the recruitment stage and pave the way to a well-aligned onboarding process.
→ Onboarding
When a new hire begins, it is important to keep in mind that they have very limited knowledge and understanding of your company, your ways of working, and your team dynamics. If you ask the new hire to start the position on Day 1 without context, there is a high probability that they will miss the mark, and in doing so, you may be setting them up to fail.
Onboarding is a crucial period to get a person up to speed, both on the role itself, but also on how you and the team work, together and apart. The employee should be able to use this period to gain clarity on what is required in their role, and what is the expected behavior in your team.
Being explicit about your ways of working and your expectations for their role is key, and will allow the new recruit to become functional and proficient in each than simply assuming they will pick things up, or learn through observation.
This period can also be used to investigate your new hire’s style and identify their zones of comfort/discomfort. This can be done through observation, but also by asking powerful questions like:
You can also answer the questions yourself and make notes.
Onboarding your new hire can be compared to teaching a child to swim: first, you hold them, then you let them try things, and only afterward do you leave them alone while you remain nearby.
The onboarding plan should be organized over a 2-month period, with a progressive understanding of what the role entails, and with regular checkpoints with you (daily first, then weekly). A first step can involve asking your managee to shadow you or someone else on the team. However, the plan should always include a balance of first-hand action and prepared written documentation, allowing them to learn at different levels and serve as a base for them to refer back to at a later date.
New hire and manager’s 30-60-90
A 30-60-90 is a desired outcomes plan written in SMART format when a new hire hits the 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day mark.
You can build the 30-60-90 for the new role before the recruiting process starts. This will help you envision success for the role, making it easier to communicate with an applicant. A CEO can also come up with their own 30-60-90 to think about how they can best ramp up for this role.
What are the things that I can control from day 0 to 60 to set them up for success? The answer may be to identify key success criteria and get historic engineering close rate from HR by day 30.
Although the process as a whole may require a substantial investment of your time, it’s important to be available for your report in the onboarding stage in order to create a base of trust. They need to feel they can ask you anything, though it is important to remain vigilant that you’re creating the root for accountability and not dependence.
2) After - Organizing your rituals
Individual and collective rituals are essential to defining the right frame to work with your team. They’re also fundamental to organizing your time efficiently and avoiding ongoing queries and requests from your subordinates.
Two main rituals are essential to a structured and coherent team process, and can vary in length and frequency:
→ 1:1 Meetings
These meetings are essential to remaining up-to-date on your reports’ ongoing projects, reminding them of their priorities, providing expertise to help them unlock complex situations, and sharing your feedback.
These interactions can be weekly or bi-weekly and should range from 30 minutes to 1 hour in length. Be mindful not to cancel these important meetings. If you can’t run it - reschedule it for later that week.
These meetings provide the opportunity to better channel your interactions with your direct reports and avoid constant soliciting on their behalf. They are meant to allow both of you to step back and should be structured in the right way, ideally prepared in writing by both parties.
Structure sample
1 Check-in
This is the chance for you to check in on your employees and see how they’re feeling—both in and out of work. Dedicating at least a few minutes to ask your employee the following questions can be an opportunity to show you care and that you can listen:
领英推荐
2 Call-back
This stage promotes reflection on your last meeting's action items to see what has evolved and what has stayed the same. It’s important to maintain a common thread to promote accountability.
3 Overview of ongoing projects/topics
The goal here is to support your team member and enable any deadlock to be broken if needed. It’s not about taking the problem on your shoulders, but simply working towards resolving it together.
4 Specific items to discuss
Both parties can add items to the agenda, though the majority are preferably added by the team member.
5. Feedback
It is important to open a space for both parties to express themselves by giving and receiving feedback.
Giving feedback:
Requesting feedback
6 Expectations
Be clear on expectations you set for the time until your next meeting, focusing on things like priority level, deadlines, and how will successes be measured.
During these meetings, it’s important to take notes in a shared document on which you can identify action items and next steps at the end of the meeting with an owner for each. This creates clear takeaways for both parties and reminds you exactly what you need to do before the next meeting.
→ Team Meetings
Group gatherings are paramount to providing a shared vision and understanding of the team’s goals, objectives and responsibilities, and are equally essential to creating a pleasant and respectful working environment where trust is forged between team members.
Team routines can be structured around:
Each meeting should have a defined leader (person preparing and leading the event) and note taker.
General Meetings
Allow the team to spend time together and are important for sharing information and identifying group blockers. They are typically held at the beginning of a cycle (week, project, etc.) and should always follow a pre-defined agenda and unchanging structure:
Meeting Structure
“Meme Monday.”:?Ask everyone on your team to share a quick (and appropriate) image or gif that captures how their weekend went.
These meetings can be:
→ Resolution Meetings & Team Working Slots
These meetings are sporadical and are planned when there is a need to make a collective decision or work together on a specific subject. They require preparation in advance in order to define key questions and an efficient structure. Assigning a note-taker is primordial to keep records of key decisions and ideas, and can be closed with a final 5 minutes focused on defining clear next steps.
→ Social Events
These events are, of course, optional, however, they contribute greatly to building and cementing your team’ spirit and can be organized by different team members. They are even more important in remote settings. For example at Wave, we organize online game sessions with the team.
Conclusion
As a manager, fine-tuning both your posture and process is integral in building and maintaining a trusting relationship with your direct reports. It’s what will allow you to push your team to meet your success metrics, and even surpass them, without losing top talent in the process.
It’s important to keep in mind that this is a learning process. You’re probably going to make mistakes as a manager. But when you do, it’s important not to feel discouraged. Learning is a process, as much for someone in a leadership position as in any other role.
A few key things to remember as you move forward as an empowered manager:
That’s how Wave supports our clients: by providing them with simple and actionable frameworks like the ones you’ve seen in this document and by helping them reflect on their daily practice of management, and adjust their process and posture along the way. Very often, after covering the basics, we reach more complex issues, such as:
“I’m feeling uncomfortable about talking about X with my report” (handle conflictual situations)
“I’m struggling to delegate X tasks” (delegation)
“I don’t like to be “the boss” of my former colleagues” (legitimacy)
These issues go beyond the scope of frameworks, and take us to a place where coaching can have a more powerful impact.
“To sum it up, this week off has allowed me to realize […] that our work together has become essential for me because it contributes to my balance and how I’m able to challenge myself in order to grow… ” - alias Cocoa Leopard, CEO
We at Wave invite you to experiment with these techniques and frameworks over the coming weeks, introducing them into your role and workplace progressively.
After doing so, we invite you to please share your feedback on what has worked and what has been more challenging.
And if you went so far in this Guide, we’ll be happy to offer you a gift via DM to benefit from 3 months of coaching at a (very) discounted price. Just comment on this post asking for the Code!
We look forward to hearing from you ツ