According to the CMI, 82% of managers who enter a management role have not had any formal management or leadership training. It’s little wonder that as a result, many of us struggle to adapt to the world of management.
On the other hand, this presents a huge opportunity for those of us who make the extra effort to seek out and, most importantly, apply what we learn as fledgling managers. Ideally, we’d be prepared for the role of being a manager prior to being given the job, but the next best outcome is to get as much effective training after you become a manager.
It’s a sad thing to say and a sorry reflection on the industry, but if you can do this, it will put you ahead of the vast majority of other managers out there who try to learn everything on the job.
Not just that, but you only really need to focus on developing four core skills in order to be ahead of most managers. Of course, you should seek out as much knowledge and experience as possible, but if I’m being truly honest, you’ll cover 90% of the day-to-day problems that a manager faces by learning about the following:
- Running effective one-on-one meetings.
- Creating personal development plans.
- Giving and receiving feedback.
- Carrying out difficult conversations.
Now, it’s not as simple as reading a few articles on each one, but this level of focus will help you hugely on your journey to become a more effective manager.
Let’s look at the fundamentals of where to start with each one.
1. Running effective one-on-one meetings
I truly believe that the ability to run effective one-on-one meetings is a cheat code to being a great manager. If you are able to get them right, they make every other problem much, much easier to solve.
Even putting that to one side, one-on-one meetings help you with lots of things, including:
- Supporting your team with day-to-day issues and blockers.
- Giving space for your team to talk about their problems and worries.
- Taking time out of the day-to-day whirlwind in order to talk about career progression.
- Showing your team that you care about them and their engagement at work.
Getting started with one-on-one meetings
In terms of how to structure one-on-one meetings, I’d recommend using three types:
Workload
These focus on day-to-day work and are designed to ensure that your team has everything that they need to get work done, meet their commitments and deliver work to a high standard. Typically, you should do these weekly and each one should last 15-20 minutes.
Progression
These focus slightly more on the bigger picture and are designed to take some time out of the day-to-day work that you do and to talk about the team’s career progression, goals and ambitions. They can take place every month or so and usually last 45-60 minutes.
Reviews
Finally, these types of meetings zoom right out and look at someone’s progression in their role and will be for you to discuss things such as steps towards promotions, pay rises and any other big milestones. They take place every quarter and usually last about 60 minutes.
Further reading: A Manager’s Guide to Running Effective One on One Meetings.
2. Creating personal development plans
Everyone needs to know what the next step in the progression is. It can be a big or a small step, but no matter what, a key part of being an effective manager is helping to map out what those steps are.
Beyond this, the plan will show them how they can move forward with those steps and attach a timeline. This helps set their expectations and ensures that they’re compelled to carve out the time to work on the steps.
It’s also important that your team member trusts the format and regularly checks it. There is little point in using a document that they only ever check every month or worse, every quarter when their review comes around.
Getting started with creating personal development plans
There are a bunch of different personal development plan templates that you can use to get you started here. But fundamentally, the template that you use isn’t important. What’s important is structuring a plan so that it achieves the goal we’ve talked about – showing someone their next steps, how to get there and when.
The plan should include:
- Objectives
- Timelines
- How their work and objectives tie in with the team and company
- What help and support they require
- Next actions and owners
You should lead the creation of this plan but also heavily lean on your team to populate and commit to these areas.
Further reading: Personal development planning articles.
3. Giving and receiving feedback
Your core role as a manager is to get the best out of your team. This means that you perform at their best and are always looking for ways to improve what they do.
This simply isn’t possible without feedback.
No one is ever perfect and even the best performers can get even better.
Therefore, your ability to give (and receive) feedback is key to all of this.
Getting started with giving and receiving feedback
Whilst this skill is one that can’t be learned overnight, you can certainly take some short-cuts that will help you get to where you need to be sooner.
First and foremost, you should learn that you need to adapt your feedback based on the type of feedback that you’re getting. It’s often said that when you give feedback, you should focus on the problem, not the person.
Whilst well intentioned, this isn’t really possible because all feedback has the potential to be taken personally.
Therefore, the question really is: just how personal could it be?
A good place to start is to think about the scale of feedback types which you can see below and read more about in this post.
Further reading: A Cheat Sheet for Delivering Effective Feedback in the Right Way.
4. Carrying out difficult conversations
The final key component of a minimum viable manager is the ability to carry out difficult conversations. At the very least, an effective manager knows why it’s important to never, ever avoid difficult conversations.
Managers who are too nice will often avoid difficult conversations because, frankly, they are afraid of upsetting someone and / or afraid of being disliked as a result of the conversation.
Having said that, I totally understand why this happens and in the past, hesitated a lot over carrying out difficult conversations. It took me a bit of time to learn that by not doing them, I was making everything much more difficult for myself and the rest of the team. Potentially the whole company.
Getting started with carrying out difficult conversations
Aside from having the right mindset we’ve discussed above, i.e. knowing that avoiding difficult conversations is exactly the wrong thing to do, you can get started by learning how to approach and structure these conversations.
If you can do this and take the appropriate steps to plan a conversation, you’ll find it much easier to deliver, it will achieve the desired outcome and almost certainly reduce your own nervousness that will appear ahead of the conversation.
One basic way to structure your conversation is to go through the following steps.
Be very, very clear on what you’re going to talk about
Know exactly what you want to talk about any why. Get all of your facts prepared and know how you’re going to talk about them.
Learn their story, exploring their perspective
Be prepared to listen. Ask them for their perspective on what you’ve talked about and ask them more questions if needed so that they not only feel heard, but so that you can get any extra context and information.
Express your views and feelings with clarity, honesty and respect
You need to deliver the message in a way that is received well and one of the key ways to do this is to stick to these principles. If you aren’t clear, cover things up or appear disrespectful, the entire message will be lost.
Address the situation together, given what you’ve learned, what’s next?
Prepare what good next actions will be, discuss them in the meeting as well and agree upon next actions, along with a timeline.
Do your part, but hold them accountable for their part too
If you have actions, be sure to do them. But overall, you need to hold them accountable for anything that they’ve agreed to do as well. The easiest way to do this is to define a deadline for the action and then arrange a follow up meeting to check in on how these actions are going.
Further reading: How to Approach Having a Difficult Conversation with Someone.
Now, I know that the minimum viable manager still has a lot of work to do! And that’s kind of inevitable because being an effective manager is hard and takes effort.
But by starting with these four areas, you’ll be ahead of most other managers and be able to deal with the vast majority of issues that you’ll face in your day-to-day role.
