Starting a New Reporting Relationship Off Right

The first thing that happens when you start managing is that you take on people as direct reports. These may be people you’ve been working with for a while, or they may be completely unknown to you. As you go through your management career, you’ll repeatedly experience having someone new start to report to you. How do you get to know this person quickly so you can manage him best?

Communicating with Your Team

Regular 1-1s are like oil changes; if you skip them, plan to get stranded on the side of the highway at the worst possible time.

Marc Hedlund

Different 1-1 Styles

Now that you have these 1-1 meetings scheduled, what should you actually use them for? I’ve seen several distinct styles of 1-1 meetings, and the type of 1-1 that’s most effective depends as much on the manager as it does on the managed.

Good Manager, Bad Manager: Micromanager, Delegator

Jane has given her tech lead Sanjay a big project to manage. It needs to be done by the end of the month, which should be fine, but Jane is worried that the deadline will slip. So she starts attending all of the standups that she normally doesn’t go to, and asks questions directly of the team about their blockers. She looks through the project tickets and makes a bunch of comments, and even reassigns some of them to other team members. When she discovers that Sanjay and the product manager decided to deprioritize a feature, Jane decides that it’s time for her to take over the project, and she tells Sanjay that from now on she will be managing the day-to-day.

It’s no surprise when, despite the fact that the project shipped successfully, Sanjay tells Jane that he feels like he doesn’t want to be a tech lead anymore. In fact, he seems pretty low-energy, and his normal engagement and hard work are replaced by him leaving early and saying nothing in meetings. Her best team member has become a low performer seemingly overnight. What happened?

Micromanagement creeps up on you. A high-stress project that can’t be allowed to slip seems at risk, and so you step in to correct it. You delegate something, but then discover that you don’t like the technical choices the team has made to implement it, so you tell them to rewrite it. You force everyone to come to you before making decisions because they just can’t be trusted to do the right thing, or there have been too many mistakes and you always end up paying the price.

Now, let’s take a look at Jane’s colleague, Sharell. Sharell has given Beth her first big project to run. Sharell knows that this project needs to ship on time, but instead of sitting in on every meeting and tracking every detail, Sharell works with Beth to determine which meetings she should attend, and helps Beth understand which details to escalate to Sharell. With this support, Beth feels confident running the project, but also knows that Sharell has her back, and when things get stressful toward the end of it, Beth enlists Sharell’s help to cut scope and get the project out on time. Beth leaves the experience feeling more confident, and ready to take on bigger projects and work harder for Sharell.

Jane’s and Sharell’s decisions highlight the subtle differences between the micromanager and the effective delegator. Both Jane and Sharell are attempting to delegate the management of a high-priority project in order to train a new leader on their team. However, Jane ultimately never gives up control and undermines Sanjay, while Sharell makes it clear to Beth what the goals are and what her responsibilities are, and provides support and guidance to help Beth succeed.

The hardest thing about micromanagement is that there are times when you need to do it. Junior engineers often thrive under detailed oversight because they want that specific direction. Some projects go off the rails, and you occasionally need to override decisions made by your reports that could have big negative repercussions. However, if micromanagement is your habit, if it’s your default approach toward leading your team, you’ll end up like poor Jane, accidentally undermining the very people you need to be growing and rewarding.

Trust and control are the main issues around micromanagement. If you’re micromanaging someone, chances are you’re doing it because you don’t trust that a task will be done right, or you want to very tightly control the outcome so that it meets your exact standards. This happens a lot when talented engineers become managers, especially if they pride themselves on their technical skills. If your value to the team has shifted from the thing you’re good at (writing code) to the thing you don’t yet know how to do well (managing people), it can be tempting to treat your reports as if they should be mini-mes. When a deadline slips, as it inevitably will, you view it as a failure to control the situation precisely enough, and so ratchet up the attention. You catch something not going the way you expected, and it seems to reinforce your belief that micromanaging the team is an appropriate use of your time.

Autonomy, the ability to have control over some part of your work, is an important element of motivation. This is why micromanagers find it so difficult to retain great teams. When you strip creative and talented people of their autonomy, they lose motivation very quickly. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you can’t make a single decision on your own, or feeling like every single piece of work you do has to be double- and triple-checked by your manager.

On the other hand, delegation is not the same thing as abdication. When you’re delegating responsibility, you’re still expected to be involved as much as is necessary to help the project succeed. Sharell didn’t just abandon Beth—she helped Beth understand the responsibilities in the new role and was there as needed to support the project.

Practical Advice for Delegating Effectively

It’s important to remember that being a good leader means being good at delegating.

Creating a Culture of Continuous Feedback

When I say performance review, what goes through your head? Do you cringe? Do you roll your eyes about the wasted time, or groan at the thought of doing all the work? Do you get a rush of fear over what surprising new flaws you will hear about? Or do you get a little bit of nervous excitement to hear what people think about you?

If performance reviews make you shudder, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, the review process is not something that every manager takes seriously or handles in a mature way. Now that you’re managing people, you have a lot of power to shape the experience your direct reports have with reviews. That experience starts long before the reviews are written. It starts with continuous feedback.

Continuous feedback is, more than anything, a commitment to regularly sharing both positive and corrective feedback. Instead of saving these kinds of comments for the review cycle, managers and peers are encouraged to note when things are going well and raise issues as they happen. Some companies have started to adopt software that makes it easy for teams to provide continuous feedback and track that feedback over time, but the most important thing is that the team has adopted a culture of providing feedback frequently. For you, as a new manager, getting into the habit of continuous feedback is training you to pay attention to individuals, which in turn makes it easier to recognize and foster talent. You’re also practicing the art of having small and occasionally tricky conversations with individuals about their performance. Few people are comfortable with providing one-on-one praise or correction, and this helps you get over the feeling of awkwardness.

There are some steps you can take to be great at giving continuous feedback:

1. Know your people. The first required part of successfully giving continuous feedback is a basic understanding of the individuals on your team. What are their goals, if any? What are their strengths and weaknesses? At what level are they currently operating, and where might they need to improve to get to the next level? You can get some of this knowledge by reading their previous performance reviews if you have them, but you’ll also want to sit down with every person on your team and ask for his or her perspective on all of these questions. This understanding gives you a baseline you can use to frame your feedback, and helps you find some things that you might want to focus on.

2. Observe your people. You can’t give feedback if you aren’t paying attention. If anything, I think the best outcome of attempting a continuous feedback cycle is not necessarily the actual feedback generated, but rather that the effort forces you to start paying attention to the individuals on your team. Starting this habit early in your management career, while you still may have only a few people to manage, helps you build up those observational muscles. Practice looking for talents and achievements on your team, first and foremost. Good managers have a knack for identifying talents and helping people draw more out of their strengths. Yes, you’ll also want to look for weaknesses and areas for improvement, but if you spend most of your time trying to get people to correct weaknesses, you’ll end up with a style that feels more like continuous criticism.

   Sometimes it helps to have a goal, so task yourself with regularly identifying people who deserve praise. Adopting a habit of positive recognition forces you to be on the lookout for things to praise, which in turn causes you to pay attention to what individuals are bringing to various projects. You don’t have to do this in public, but every week there should be at least one thing you can recognize about someone on your team. Even better, look for something to recognize weekly for everyone who reports to you.

3. Provide lightweight, regular feedback. Start with positive feedback. It’s both easier and more fun to give positive feedback than it is to give corrective feedback. As a new manager, you don’t have to jump into the deep end of coaching first thing. Many people respond better to praise than they do to corrective feedback, and you can use kudos to guide them to better behavior by emphasizing the things they’ve done well.

   Positive feedback also makes your reports more likely to listen to you when you need to give them critical feedback. When they believe that their manager sees the good things they do, they’ll be more open to hearing about the areas where they might improve. It’s best to give critical feedback quickly in the case of an obvious misstep, but continuous feedback is more than in-the-moment corrections. Use a habit of continuous feedback to talk about things that don’t seem to be going well as you start to notice them, rather than waiting until the review cycle to have uncomfortable conversations.

   Bonus: Provide coaching. Ultimately, continuous feedback works best when you, as a manager, pair that feedback with coaching. As situations arise, use coaching to ask people what they might have done differently. When things are going well, praise them, but also make suggestions as to what could be even better in the future. Coaching-based continuous feedback means going beyond a simple “good job” to really engage with the details and form a partnership with your direct report where the two of you are working together to help her grow.

   Why do I list coaching as a bonus? It’s not always a core need for doing the job well, and there will be many times when you don’t have either the qualifications or the capability to provide the coaching that everyone on your team needs. Coaching is most important for your early-career team members, or those who have the potential or desire for advancement. Many people will be content with doing the job they know how to do well, and as long as they are doing it well enough, it’s not a good use of your time to try to coach them. Save your valuable coaching time for those who are receptive to it.

Performance Reviews

Continuous feedback, even if it’s just regular recognition for good work, is an important tool in the hands-on manager’s toolkit. However, it’s not a replacement for a more formal, 360-based performance review process.

The 360 model is a performance review that includes feedback from, in addition to a person’s manager, his teammates, anyone who reports to him, and coworkers he regularly interacts with, as well as a self-review. For example, an engineer with no direct reports might solicit reviews from two other engineers on her team, the new hire she was mentoring, and the product manager she works with. Performance reviews take a long time because you need to give and receive feedback from many different people. As a manager, you then have to gather all that feedback together and summarize it for the person being reviewed.

Performance reviews reward the time spent by providing a valuable chance to synthesize a bunch of information about a person. Beyond that, 360 reviews give you at least a high-level view into what other people are thinking about your direct reports. The self-reviews give you a sense of what your people believe about themselves, their strengths and weaknesses and accomplishments over the year. Writing the summary review gives you the chance to focus for longer than a few minutes on the individuals and look at the big picture over a longer period of time. All of this should help you see some patterns and trends that you might overlook in the process of day-to-day continuous feedback.

Performance reviews go wrong because people aren’t given time to prioritize working on them, and many people find them hard to write. They go wrong because we tend to remember and overemphasize things that happened most recently, and forget about the things that happened six months or a year ago. They go wrong because we all suffer from various biases of which we may or may not be aware, and we tend to review people through the lens of those biases, criticizing some people for behaviors that we don’t even notice in others. All of these things are true, and you will probably see all of them play out. Despite all that, this process is incredibly valuable, and you as a manager have the opportunity to make it more or less valuable depending on how you approach it.

Cultivating Careers

One of my most critical promotions happened during my time in finance. The finance world has a strange way of giving out titles. Drawing from the days when firms were built on a partnership model, there tend to be only a few “public” titles: Associate, Vice President, Managing Director, and Partner. The Vice President title is a critical leap. Achieving it is (or was) a sign that a person has proven herself worthy of building a long-term career at the firm. Therefore, the time it takes you to get a VP title is a strong signal for your future success, and getting the promotion is a complex process that’s done only once a year and run by the senior managers.

My manager explained this to me twice. First, when I got my own VP promotion, he walked me through all of the materials we’d be gathering to support my case. Projects shipped, yes, but also signs of leadership, and work that pushed me beyond my immediate team. The second time I went through this was when I prepared the packet for someone who worked for me. We gathered all sorts of evidence, including the letter the candidate got commending him for being the floor fire warden. Both of these promotions were successful, but I have no doubt that we succeeded at least partially because my boss/mentor knew exactly how to play the game.

If you’re a manager, you are going to play a key role in getting people on your team promoted. Sometimes it will simply be up to you to determine who gets promoted, but more commonly promotions will be reviewed by your management, or a committee. So you’ll not only need to have a good idea about who deserves to be promoted, but you’ll need to make a case for their promotion as well.

What does this process typically look like? Generally, you’ll look at the people on your team a couple of times a year, consider their job level, and ask yourself, are any of these people close to the next level? In the case of the early-career staff, the answer is likely to be yes. These days, people fresh out of college tend to get promoted at least once in their first couple of years on the job, because they’re often hired in at an “up or out” level.

To clarify, take the example of Famous BigCo. Famous BigCo hires engineers out of college at level E2 (level E1 is reserved for interns). Famous BigCo has a policy that an engineer who shows no sign of advancing past level E2 after two years at that level doesn’t have a future at the company. It has this policy for levels E2–E4, but at E5, you can stay forever.

So, if you have a team of E2s and E3s, you need to be preparing them to be promotable every couple of years. Fortunately, this is usually straightforward. As long as you don’t stop them from getting promoted, they’ll be moved forward by the process. Your job with this group is to make sure that they’re learning how to estimate their own work, getting it done roughly within the estimates, and learning from their mistakes. The evidence for promotion often takes the form of projects or features they’ve completed independently, participation in on-call rotations or other support, and engagement in team meetings and team planning.

The important thing for you to start doing now that you’re in management is to learn how the game is played at your company. Every company has its own variation of the promotion process, and you’re probably in this role because you survived it. If you don’t know how it’s done, ask your manager for advice. How are these decisions made? How early do you need to start preparing packets? Are there limits on the number of promotions that can happen in any given year? As you learn how to play the game, I encourage you to be fairly transparent with your team. When members express the desire to be promoted and they don’t have a strong case for promotion, telling them what goes into the process will help them understand what they may need to change.

You should also prepare yourself to start identifying promotion-worthy projects and trying to give those projects to people who are close to promotion. You, as the manager, are in a good position to identify what’s coming up for the team. Depending on how work gets assigned, you may either directly assign these projects to people, or encourage people to volunteer for projects that are a stretch goal for them. Keep an eye out for opportunities for your team members to stretch themselves and grow.

This work does start to change the more senior your team becomes. Many people will not continue to advance past a certain level, at least not within the same company or team. There are fewer opportunities for people to show the kind of leadership or breadth of impact needed to get promoted as they become more senior. Sometimes there is nothing you can do about this, except perhaps to refer them to other leaders in different parts of the company for mentoring or guidance. As much as it might hurt you to lose them, they may be better off in another team or even another company with new challenges.

Many companies expect you to be acting at the next level before you get promoted to it. This practice exists to prevent the “Peter Principle,” in which people are promoted to their level of incompetence. It also signals that there’s room for another person acting at that level on the team. Keep this in mind as you think about your team’s careers. If there is no growth potential on your team because there’s no room for people to work at a more senior level, it may be a sign that you need to rethink the way work is done in order to let individuals take on bigger responsibilities.

Challenging Situations: Firing Underperformers

One of the hardest things that any manager must do is to fire someone for underperformance.

This is difficult to write about because so much of the act of firing employees is dictated by HR departments these days, even at small companies. There are good and bad things that come out of this, but arguably the nicest thing is that you, as a manager, will have a process and procedure to follow. Upon hearing that someone is underperforming, many companies will have you write the person a document called a performance improvement plan. This is a set of clearly defined objectives that the person must achieve within a fixed period of time. If she manages to achieve them, then she is taken off the plan and all is well; otherwise, she’s fired. Depending on the company, such a plan might actually be an effort to turn an employee around, but often the plan is written in such a way that the person can’t possibly hope to achieve the goals in the allotted time, and it’s just a generous way of giving someone time to look for another job before being fired.

Whatever the procedure is at your company, the process of coaching someone out should begin long before any performance improvement document is filed with HR, and long before the actual act of firing. One of the basic rules of management is the rule of no surprises, particularly negative ones. You need to understand what a person is supposed to be giving you, and if that isn’t happening, make it clear to her early and often that she is not meeting expectations.

The ideal is that you know exactly what job she is supposed to be doing, and if she isn’t doing it, you can say, “You aren’t doing X, Y, and Z. Do more of those things.” Of course, like all perfect circumstances, reality is rarely so simple.

A common, straightforward scenario is closer to the following. Your employee, Jane, has been with you for a few months. She seemed a little bit slow in the onboarding process, but you gave her the benefit of the doubt; the code base isn’t in perfect shape, and there’s a lot of business jargon to learn in a new hire’s first few months. However, it’s been six months, and when you look back over that time, you see very little in the way of achievement on Jane’s part. In fact, the few things she has done have not gone well—they have been very late, very buggy, or both.

This situation sounds straightforward on paper. Tell Jane that she is not meeting expectations, that her work is too slow or not well done, and give her a strict deliverable. But Jane has excuses, of course, and some of them are believable. The onboarding wasn’t good. Her first month was interrupted by the company party, and then you were out for a week on vacation, and she has not had anyone to ask questions of. In fact, it sounds a little bit like the issue is you and the team, not her at all.

This situation is why you start giving feedback early and often, and keep records of the feedback you’ve been delivering. Feedback, positive or negative, should be a conversation. If you avoid tackling negative feedback until it builds to a boiling point, you’re going to be met by a pile of excuses, and then what do you do? Some managers will ignore the excuses at their peril, and lose employee after employee to an unwelcoming team that fails to onboard, coach, and give clear goals to employees. On the other hand, some managers will accept any excuse until problems can no longer be swept under the rug, and the team is furious at management’s inaction with regard to the lagging employee.

You’ll always need to have a record of negative feedback to fire someone in any environment where HR is active and a standard performance improvement plan is required. If you have no HR, I suggest that you still give people clear improvement feedback in writing, with a timeline for improvement, and have them acknowledge it in writing as well (email is OK). Not only does this protect you legally, but it helps you treat your employees fairly.

A final warning: don’t put anyone on a plan whom you wouldn’t be happy to lose. Most smart employees will take this formal warning as a sign that the organization is not a good fit for them, and leave as quickly as possible. I once heard a story about a great engineer who was put on a surprise performance improvement plan by his manager after someone in the organization complained that he had bowed out of a project. This manager, who had not been paying any attention to the situation and had approved the engineer focusing elsewhere, gave in to pressure to set up a plan that served to do nothing but poison any goodwill the engineer might have had for his manager and the company. It’s no surprised that the engineer resigned soon thereafter, despite having easily achieved the goals of the improvement plan.

Assessing Your Own Experience

• Have you set up regular 1-1s with your direct reports?

• When was the last time you talked to your reports about their career development? If it was more than three months ago, can you make sure to put this in your next 1-1s?

• Have you given feedback to your reports in the last week? When was the last time you handed out kudos in front of the team?

• When was the last time someone behaved in a way that needed correction? How long did it take you to give corrective feedback? Did you give the feedback in private, or did you do it in public?

• Have you ever been given a performance review that felt like a waste of time? What was it missing that could have made it more valuable?

• What was the most useful piece of performance feedback you ever got? How was it delivered to you?

• Do you know how the process of promoting people works in your company? If not, can you ask someone to walk you through it?