A guide for future managers #

As individuals are hired into an organization, they are typically screened first and foremost for “hard skills”. If you’re an engineer, do you know how to code, architect a system, or evaluate the tradeoffs of any particular implementation? If a financial analyst, do you know how to build a discounted cash flow model, or reconcile income statements to cash flows? Hard skills compose the tactile interface through which employees interact with technology and systems.

“Soft skills”, on the other hand, refer to the social interface through which employees interact with other people. Soft skills, for example, include clarity of communication, responsiveness, courtesy, discretion and amiability. Hard skills and soft skills collectively form the basis for how we as individuals interact with the outside world.

There is also the question of how we manage ourselves. Are we diligent, organized, conscientious, detail-oriented and resourceful? Or do we drop the ball, hit roadblocks, and procrastinate? For lack of a better word, I often call these “professional skills”.

Individual contributors - the people responsible for delivering work product - must be proficient in hard, soft and professional skills in order to succeed on the job. Without these core skills, employees will face friction when dealing with technology systems, other people, and their own work habits.

As an organization grows in size and employee count, it also needs people to coordinate and align all the individual contributors doing the work. These are managers. 

Managers exist to solve the problem of coordination failure, a problem whose cost, thanks to Metcalfe’s law, grows quadratically as the organization scales. They do this by securing alignment, both within their team, and between the team and the broader organization.

The axes of organizational alignment #

As Patrick Lencioni explains in The Advantage, organizations which struggle with alignment are “unhealthy organizations”. Just as a person can become unhealthy from an internal lack of alignment and balance, so too can an organization. Symptoms of misalignment include team siloing, withholding information, undermining others, half-hearted agreement, and working around the system instead of working with it.

Lencioni writes: “Most organizations exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them. Healthy ones tap into almost all of it.” This is because parts of a misaligned organization deliberately do not share information, pull in opposite directions, and ultimately produce drag on firmwide productivity.

Although Lencioni does not mention these explicitly, I believe there are four primary axes against which teams can become misaligned. They are:

1. Ability
2. Personality
3. Ideology
4. Incentives

If certain team members are unable to perform at the level of others, they will - despite their best intentions - contribute less, lower standards and throttle team productivity. When outperformers realize that average performance is below them, they intentionally pull back from their potential. Most compensation systems are ordinal rather than ratio-based, meaning that the degree of outperformance (ratio) is not rewarded as much as being “a top performer” (ordinal). Managers must ensure that all team members, when adjusted for level, contribute equally to avoid the appearance of certain individuals not pulling their weight.

Team members can also be misaligned in terms of personality. If some people are vocal while others tend to demur, this can create unspoken conflict within the team. The same goes for those who market themselves versus those who are self-effacing, those who are more analytical versus those who are more emotional, and so on. A manager must be careful to ensure that no single personality dominates, and that different personality styles respect one another.

Team members can become divided due to ideology. I define ideology as axiomatic differences in belief systems which are often, at a fundamental level, irreconcilable. I have seen software engineers dig trenches on engineering matters such as mono- versus multi-repo, static versus dynamically typed languages, and manual versus self-documenting code. When faced with ideological differences, managers should generally appeal to the majority, then ask dissenters to disagree and commit.

Finally there are incentives. If team members are not incentivized - for example, they are not rewarded proportionately for quality work - then they will become demotivated and lower their quality of work. The most obvious example here is compensation, but there are other ways to incentivize staff, including work-life balance, remote flexibility, choice of projects, and choice of manager. Managers should ensure that incentives align between team members and the broader organization.

Across all axes - ability, personality, ideology, and incentives - managers must aim to reduce internal variance. If variance grows, it will create a lopsided and unbalanced team, eventually bifurcating into separate “sides”: our way versus their way. To reduce variance, managers must listen to their team, understanding each individual’s abilities, personalities, ideologies and incentives, and ultimately create a work environment that integrates all.

And if that was not enough, there is more. The firm as a whole has its own average ability, personality, ideology and incentives. An individual team cannot fall out of sync with the greater whole. Therefore, a manager must create alignment not just within the team, but also between the team and the wider organization.

Managerial skills for future managers #

Managers should be born out of individual contributors. That is to say, they have excelled in the soft skills of communicating upward and laterally throughout the organization, the hard skills of successfully operating technology and systems, and finally the professional skills of consistently delivering valuable work product. 

These are table stakes. Without fluency in these foundational skill sets, managers inevitably drown in the complexities of people, projects and systems. Many a corporate blunder has been committed by promoting individuals who are not proficient in all three.

But as leaders of a team, managers must acquire additional skills, and these constitute “managerial skills”. Managers must inspire a team, align a team both internally and externally, deliver consistently on a portfolio of projects, and build relationships with various stakeholders throughout the firm.

If I were to distill it into a checklist, it would look as follows:

(1) Managers are able to pitch a compelling vision

Managers are able to “find their own work”, observing the product and organization as a whole, then determining where there are opportunities for growth.

Just as a consultant or investment banker constantly pitches work to potential clients, managers must too pitch potential projects to stakeholders. The manager solicits ideas on what would be valuable to the organization, then generates excitement over what can be built.

Managers always need a handle on the vision for each project. They formalize this vision into a clear roadmap with monthly, quarterly or annual milestones to demonstrate progress. When people get stuck on the day-to-day details, managers keep the team and stakeholders aligned on overall direction and the “why” of it all.

(2) Managers reliably execute on the visions they pitch

While salesmanship is certainly part of the manager’s toolkit, the pitch must ultimately convert into results, otherwise the manager will develop a reputation for making empty promises.

Here, in the execution stage of a project, are where a manager’s individual contributor skills shine. Managers need to be able to closely audit the work produced by their team, and in some cases, serve as a backstop for the actual work to be delivered. 

In addition, managers will need project management skills. As they are no longer responsible for just one or two projects, but instead a large portfolio of projects, they will need to stay organized and apprised of key information and dates relating to each project.

(3) Managers align disparate groups of stakeholders

Within any organization, there are various audiences to consider, each with their own level of interest and involvement in the projects you work on. These will primarily be:

• Your direct manager (and their manager)
• Your direct reports
• Clients and internal stakeholders
• Collaborators and partners
• The broader organization

Oftentimes, people will focus on making just their manager happy, or just their stakeholders happy. Such a narrow focus on any one stakeholder often comes at the expense of other stakeholders. The real skill is to make all stakeholders happy at the same time.

How can this be achieved? First and foremost, it is achieved by doing good work. Delivering good work will earn the respect of key stakeholders, and over time, this will materialize as a good reputation.

Second, it is achieved by not biting off more than you can chew. If you make promises to clients or your manager which cannot be reasonably delivered by your team, then once again you will have traded off satisfying one set of stakeholders at the expense of another. 

Third, it is by being overly communicative with all stakeholders on plans, timelines, status updates and changes. I often tell my team that the litmus test of success is that “nobody should ever be surprised”. If you make a commitment to a client that someone on your team is surprised to hear about, then that miscommunication will materialize into misalignment as to what was promised versus what can be delivered.

“Nobody should ever be surprised” extends beyond simple work plans. If good work is delivered and the client is happy, this feedback should be delivered upward, inward and outward. If your manager or the broader organization would be surprised to hear about all the good work being done by your team, that is likely an indicator that you were not communicating enough.

(4) Managers raise the bar for the team

When a team is small, stakeholders are used to working with the manager directly and become accustomed to the quality of work delivered. As a team grows, the manager is responsible for delivering the same quality of work, even if they themselves are not the one doing it.

Therefore, a manager must invest heavily in the training of team members. They must shadow and observe how work is done. They must audit and quality control final deliverables. They must coach and give feedback when things could be improved. They must formalize guidelines and host group trainings to ensure that everyone doing work has a clear sense of the standards expected to qualify as “good work”.

Most importantly, managers must have a clear, opinionated sense of better and worse ways of doing things. They constantly wonder how things could be better. Collectively, these become operating principles for the team, and they compose the standards against which team members are evaluated when work is performed.

Wrapping up #

Being an effective manager requires a broad array of skills. Managers must not only be able to deliver good work - as indicated by proficiency in hard, soft and professional skills - but they must also be able to manage and coach a team of people responsible for doing the same.

These “managerial skills” come down to (1) understanding and pitching the “why” of work being performed, (2) consistently delivering good work, (3) communicating and aligning with all types of stakeholders, and (4) raising the standard of work within one’s team.

When done well, managing teams serves as a reliable “factory” in which compelling visions are reliably delivered by motivated and aligned teams.