Friday, February 7, 2020

Turning Good Personal Habits into Strong Management Practice


by Nick Charney RSS / cpsrenewalFacebook / cpsrenewalLinkedIn / Nick Charneytwitter / nickcharney

We all know that there seems to be a lack of support for employees transitioning to the executive cadre, but there is a similar lack of support given to employees making the transition into management roles. As a manager I'm responsible for a team of seven, myself included. In all honesty, learning how to manage other people effectively has definitely meant some muddling through. Lucky for me, my team has been pretty forgiving over the past couple of years as I learned the ropes. Lucky for them, I am someone who comes to the job with the mindset of being people inclined. I'm interested in management culture, I wrote a playbook on how to be more innovative, and my expectations of my team's approach and performance can be gleaned therefrom.

There's still much for me to learn about managing other people effectively. That said, there's a couple of things know to be true, for example, managing a team is a constant renegotiation of the terms to which everyone has either explicitly, implicitly, or complicity, agreed to come together under. That a team's culture, it's modus operandi, is constantly in flux. That it obviously changes when people join or leave but that it also changes to accommodate even small variances in how or to whom work is assigned to, what stories are told, and what stories people tell themselves. Misconceptions and a lack of clarity can be culture killers, I err heavily on the side of transparency and inclusion, tempered with honesty and a willingness to share my own feelings of (at different times) powerlessness, frustration, disagreement, but also empowerment, pride, and jubilation. I've been criticized for being too open and honest with my team, but I disagree with the criticisms based on the strength of those relationships. Being both physically and emotionally available to my team consistently throughout the work week (and at times beyond it) for both their professional and personal well-being is by far the most exhausting, challenging, and rewarding part of my job. We spend too much time together to be anything short of family, so we need to be functional. That doesn't mean that we always agree, or that we can't improve, it just means that we have a strong enough foundation to do those things in safe and productive ways. I was frustrated a few weeks ago and everyone on the team knew it, they quietly got together, wrote a very thoughtful card and organized a lunch for me. I've never been a part of a team that was as thoughtful, let alone been privileged enough to be at the helm of it.

As I embark further down this people management journey and start to look at (and yes, apply to) executive positions, I am focusing even more attention on turning good personal habits into strong management practice. Below are some of the tools / approaches we're using in the team right now. Remember, this is all in flux, we oscillate often, try new things, etc.

Flexible Work Schedule 

We have recently created a weekly schedule that outlines when each of us will be in the office and when we will be teleworking (and over what hours). We are pairing this with phone number and a ground rule that we are to call anyone teleworking in the case of urgent requests, and that those calls will be answered and/or returned promptly. We will share the schedule / contact numbers with those who need it up the chain and make a hard copies available outside our offices to help deal with the passersby that might prefer to pop in on an item and be (unintentionally, and unfairly) frustrated to find us not in our office. The schedule acts as a baseline for our flex work but can be modified on a week to week basis. We are aiming to have modifications to the schedule known at least one week in advance for planning purposes. We also want to retain a critical mass in the office and have all committed to being the office on Wednesdays for our weekly moderated team meeting (detailed below). Within the flex work package, we have employees working compressed hours and in other cities.

Weekly Moderated Team Meeting 

We diagnosed the need for an alternative approach to team meetings because they were largely caucus style meetings that weren't getting the best out of the team as a whole. We started a discussion about how we ran meetings, shared some reading, and decided to try to move to moderated format. Admittedly, this felt very weird at first but we are getting the hang of it. My biggest mistake when trying the moderated meetings was declaring victory too soon, assuming that we could do away with the formalities because the new culture had taken root, when it hadn't. I had to backtrack the next meeting. I apologized for the mistake and we paired back some of the formality without doing away with it altogether. By and large the team seems to dig the format and we are getting greater participation from everyone in the team. We have started discussing whether or not we should try to inject the format into broader divisional meetings, but that's still TBD. The moderated meeting can last between and hour and ninety minutes and is broken down into three parts: management updates, formal agenda items, and a priority round table. We start with management updates because its mostly just me sharing information and answering follow up questions. I transition into a moderator role when we move to formal agenda items. Agenda items are determined and communicated in advance of the meeting. Team members may put themselves on the agenda and lead the item or they may ask their colleagues to prepare something and lead. Everyone is given amble lead time to prepare their item. After formal agenda items are complete, we move to a priority round table. Team members can use the time to flag issues, ask for help, or signal their availability to help. No one is allowed to put another person 'on the spot' with a demand during this time and team members are free to 'pass' if there is nothing that they need to raise. I remind everyone regularly that the round table is not a 'justify your work week to me' meeting or check in. We try not to juggle these meetings and prioritize them as they represent a cornerstone our time together. That said, we proceed regardless of numbers of people and with our without me.

Stand-up Meetings

We run 15 minute stand-up meetings twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) at 1pm. Given that these are flex days for some, we are using Google Hangouts as a platform for a video call. This is largely to cover off anything that is 'exploding' and/or needs attention. I also try to flag any absences or (corporate) reminders that need flagging. These proceed regardless of turn out. We've only been doing this for a few weeks but I think they can be effective, especially as a quick check in on a flex day (I flex Tuesdays), although the video call element does mean we need to look presentable!

Bilats (aka Office Hours)

I reserve thirty minutes each week for each team member to be used (or not used) at their discretion. We treat them like a university teaching assistant's office hours. Team members know I will be available if they need me, but they don't always need me or are dealing with work that takes priority. We often speak about work, career development, and even personal matters. We often do it in my office, while going for a walk, grabbing a coffee, or even over lunch. Its a two way dialogue and forms much of the basis upon which I get to know my team members. Again, this isn't a 'tell me why you are getting paid this week' meeting. My only rule of thumb here is that I check in with the team member if they haven't been to office hours for a couple of weeks.

Information Sharing & Tools 

I'm an over sharer generally speaking, so its no surprise that I share a lot of information with my team. Not all of it is actionable or required reading but I think its important for them to see what information flows in the department look like and know that I'm not intentionally holding things back from them. Often I will share something with a qualifier, i.e. this is important to this context, or see page 5 for the crux of the argument. The qualifier allows people to cut to the heart of the issue, it also gives them a sense of how engaged I was or wasn't with the content I am forwarding.

We are also experimenting with tools like Slack and Trello but we don't have those things locked in culturally yet. Slack will likely cut down on general email chatter, esp. with offsite employees and I'm mainly tracking to do lists on Trello.

Friday Appreciation Emails

Every Friday I have half an hour blocked in my schedule to send the team an email outlining what I appreciated about them that week. At the start of the week I open an email and write each of their names down. I save the email to my draft folder and anytime throughout the week I see something impressive, I jot it down in the email. I write it up in greater detail on Friday afternoon and send it before leaving for the day. I make a concerted effort to also use the opportunity to practice my second language, drafting parts of the email in french.

Parler ma deuxième langue

Je fais un effort concerté pour parler le français le plus que possible avec mon équipe. Cela comprend à la fois les francophones qui apprécient l'effort et les anglophones qui (au moins dans mon équipe) essaient d'apprendre le français. It's not perfect, but it creates more space for french in the workplace.

Succession Planning

Rather than hire from outside the team, we are moving through a succession plan that will give each team member an opportunity to act in the position prior to opening it to a competitive process. As a hiring manager this is significantly more difficult than simply pursuing an external hire. It takes more time, it takes more paperwork, and creates the risk of hard feelings and/or flight after the results are in. Investing in your people is also (in my view) probably the right thing to do.

Performance Management System 

Last Performance Management Agreement (PMA) cycle I drafted standard language for objectives and criteria for everyone on the team, we vetted the list together, I incorporated feedback and distributed the list to the team. Individual team members were free to select objectives from the list for use in their PMAs. We are also documenting any/all training and acting assignments for posterity. It's not the most useful tool in the tool kit but I did find being regimented on the language helped bring the team together around a set of shared objectives and understanding.

Other things I'm thinking about

  • How to better balance and value work, work styles, and preferences against dichotomous variables such as longer tasks vs short turn arounds, big picture thinking vs detailed and discrete tasks, etc.
  • How to hold team members to account on things you are encouraging them to do (i.e. meeting new people)
  • How to better acknowledge the traditional lands we are meeting on (i.e. prior to interdepartmental meetings, etc.) 
  • How to best honour the spirit of ideas brought forward by team members


Things we tried but didn't work


  • We tried to discuss the team's training and development in the context of participatory budgeting -- which was brought forward as an idea by a team member -- but ultimately failed in part because our resource base eroded but also because training and development can sometimes be something that people don't feel comfortable speaking to in a larger group setting. 
  • We created a shared outlook calendar for flexible work but it got unwieldy, creating a table in word was much easier.