First steps in learning management

Dear Bob …

I’ve been working in I/T for over a decade, and have lost a fair amount of my passion for the hand’s-on work that I’ve been doing. A new opportunity for me has come up at a different company, and I’m strongly considering accepting it. The deal is that the new job will be about 80% hand’s-on work, like I do now, and about 20% management.

I’ve been told that it’ll involve leading a team, doing performance appraisals, career counseling, and pretty much what you’d expect from any typical management role. The issue that concerns me more than just a bit is that my current job experience doesn’t include any management background, and I’m a bit nervous about where to start as a new manager.

I don’t know exactly how this new job will work out, but it’s very possible that the company would immediately put me in charge of a team, and not necessarily give me time to grow into the role. I am excited by this challenge because I feel that it’s time for my career to go in a different direction than it has in the past. But, once again, I don’t know where to start.

The closest I’ve come to managing would be in a mentoring capacity. I’ve helped numerous new employees at my current employer learn how to do their jobs, as well as what processes they need to follow, and how to do so. The environment I’m currently in has a lot of processes, and it tends to overwhelm new employees, so I’ve been assisting them for a while. This has been very rewarding for me, and I hope to translate some of that into skills I can use in this new job.

Any advice or suggested reading materials to help me get off the ground would be very much appreciated.

– Soon-to-be management newbie

Dear Newbie …

First of all, thanks for letting me plug my book, Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World. You should find it helpful, I’d think, and it has the advantage of being short.

I’ll try for an even shorter version. You’ll have two responsibilities – leading and managing.

Leadership is about building a healthy organization capable of doing the work well. It’s about creating a compelling account of a desirable future state, a clear understanding of the purpose of the organization, making sure the right people with the right skills, knowledge, and the right frame of mind are in place to achieve it.

Management is about the work. It’s about setting specific goals, ensuring the right processes, procedures and practices are in place for getting work done, establishing clear criteria for determining whether it’s done properly and well, and holding individuals and teams accountable for getting things done and done the right way.

As a newbie manager I’d recommend focusing most of your attention of just a few issues:

* Make sure everyone understands the priorities, and that the guidelines for setting priorities are clear.

* Schedule regular team and individual meetings. The former is so everyone knows what anyone knows – status of work in progress; new items that have come up and so on. The latter is to go over each individual’s assignments, issues, areas needing development and so forth.

* Debrief every major piece of work that gets done by your team. This has two big benefits: In terms of team “culture” it makes it clear that it’s okay to not be perfect, but it isn’t okay to be satisfied with the status quo. And in terms of team effectiveness, it’s the single biggest factor in making sure that instead of making the same mistakes over and over again, your staff will find a new, more sophisticated set of mistakes to make every time.

* Make sure you meet with your manager on a regular basis to communicate plans, status and priorities to make sure you’re shaking the right trees. Managing up is at least as important as managing staff, and getting out of sync with your manager is more fatal, more quickly, than getting out of sync with your staff.

* Care about the people who report to you. They’re individuals, and each is the star of his or her own movie. Managers who treat employees this way get the most out of them. Those who treat them as supporting actors and bit players don’t.

There’s plenty more as you get the hang of things, but this should get you started.

Good luck. And as a parting thought, here’s one way to look at things that might help: IT professionals are accustomed to thinking in terms of engineering sound solutions. If you think of your management role as “organizational engineering” it will help you think in terms of what buttons and levers you can push and pull to move an organization in the direction you think it should go.

– Bob

——–