Two pieces of unsolicited advice

by Nick Charney

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I give these two pieces of advice often and have come up repeatedly in recent conversations and they apply both personally and professionally: (1) don't make other people's decisions for them and (2) have the conversation with the other person rather than about the other person.

Don't make other people's decisions for them

The only way people get better at making decisions is by having to make them. Decision-making is a key learning activity, and you do your team members a disservice if as a manager you take that decision making away from them. Similarly, if you don't ask your management team to make tough decisions (say by preemptively deciding that they are likely to say 'no' so why bother asking) you deny them the opportunity to experience making them.

Have the conversation with the other person rather than about the other person

Often we spend time trying to understand where someone is coming from by speaking to people we trust about them, validating our thoughts, and reflecting on how to address the situation (conflict? issue?) at hand. While I would never advocate against confiding in and seeking the counsel of those you trust, I would argue that more often then not we fail to close the loop with the actual person about the issue at hand. This is inherently problematic as far more can be achieved by speaking directly with the person than by speaking about them. This requires a certain amount of courage but establishing more courageous and direct interpersonal relationships will always solve more issues than meandering through or around the issues.

Putting the advice together

Weighing trade offs, making compromises, and being able to both give and take 'no' for an answer are important skill sets that will serve anyone well in their person or professional lives. This of course means that we also need to get better and giving and receiving direct feedback, understanding our biases, and being comfortable disagreeing openly with others when its appropriate to do so.

In short, engaging in difficult and direct conversations and their resulting decisions -- while at some times can be painful -- makes everyone better.

Our Search for Meaning

by Nick Charney

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Understanding how you derive meaning from your work is incredibly important. But that understanding only comes with experience, or more rightly experiences — breadth, depth, variability, trial, error.

It takes both successes and failures.

Exposure. Reflection. Self awareness. Vulnerability. Honesty, with yourself but also with others.

Understanding what brings you meaning in a visceral way — which is to say when you feel it in your bones — can be an incredibly empowering experience. It can help you dial in your career, cut the noise, and focus on what is driving you in the service of a larger mission.

It can also be frustrating. 

If you aren't deriving enough meaning from your work, you start to wander, get distracted, and lose sight of of how your work connects with those around you.

The easy part -- what I find meaningful.

Personally, I derive my meaning from — and forgive me if you've heard me pronounce on this before (i.e. See: Innovation is Tricky, Literally and/or Finding Innovation, and/or Book Review: Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes the World.) — from being a 'trickster', from being the conduit between different groups of people, introducing new ideas, translating knowledge between them, and bringing new ideas to life.

It's why I'm fullest when I'm meeting directly with stakeholders, briefing senior management, helping public servants scheme virtuously, or mixing it up with my team during times of personal and professional growth.

In short, I thrive in environments that are high volume and high velocity, in the collision prone spaces where new ideas and relationships flourish.

The hard part -- shaping meaningful experiences for others.

I've been thinking about the role of meaning not only in my own personal context but also in the context of managing a team. I feel as though — and views may vary — that as a manager I am responsible not only for not only finding meaning in my own work but also helping my team find meaning in theirs.

This latter part is complicated. What if what drives your team isn't what drives you? What if team members differ significantly when it comes to what they determine is meaningful? How do you steer work in a way that maximizes meaning and employee engagement on a daily basis?

Some incomplete thoughts.

First, you need to accept that shaping meaningful experiences for your team is a part of your role. Some managers would argue its not their job to worry about such things but I disagree, understanding that this is no small feat, that it takes work, and can often be resource intensive.

Second, you need to recognize that your ability to actually deliver on this part of your role is often severely limited. At best managers can help shape what people find to be meaningful experiences.

Third, you have to engage in explicit conversations about meaning and motivation with individual team members and reconcile the needs of each individual team member with the overall needs of the team. Again, no easy task, and honestly something I could be much better at.

I want to talk with more managers struggling with this issue because I'm not sure its something organizations are taking very seriously at the institutional level, that is to say helping employees understand and find meaning in their work might not be a widespread management practice.

As always, if you are interested in discussing these issues, please let me know.

5 things about people management

by Nick Charney

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Let me start by saying that I love managing people. I find it one of the most professionally rewarding things I've done in my career to date. That said, there's a number of things I'm still figuring out:

• How much information to share. Ideally you want to give people enough context to understand the environment within which they are working without overburdening them with superfluous details or distractions. In practice I tend to share much more than was ever shared with me when I occupied their positions, my team seems to value it, though it has definitely led to a handful of more difficult conversations. 
• How to balance individual needs with the needs of the team. Not everyone has the same work style or preferences, optimizing the work environment to get the best out of of everyone isn't easy, especially when some team members may feel as though they are either benefiting from or being held back by a more laissez-faire approach. 
• How to best manage interpersonal relationships with people outside work. I'm a social being and bring my whole self to the job, but being a manager naturally creates a degree of professional distance that can be difficult to navigate in healthy and productive ways. I recall a conversation I had with a Deputy Minister who told me that the worst thing about their ascension was how the tone always shifted whenever they entered a room. I'm not there by any stretch, but that story still weighs heavy. 
• How to measure success. It's not too difficult to evaluate whether or not you are delivering on expectations with respect to the work. You can ask simple questions, are we meeting deadlines, or are we meeting expectations? However its nearly impossible to evaluate whether or not I'm managing effectively with respect to the people. I have little to go on other than overall satisfaction / engagement of my team and the quality of their work. Moreover, we don't help people learn how to give constructive feedback. We are all kind of meandering through. 
• How to turn good habits into practice. I keep telling my team that we need to build our practice up so that it can endure any shifting winds -- new hires, departures, re-organizations, change in mandates, etc -- and I'm mostly doing this by trial and error right now. I'm not even sure where to look for support on this and its always the first thing to fall off whenever duty calls.

Where is the conversation about thoughtful people management happening right now? 

It's got to be happening somewhere, I've been doing some reading but surely there's a place where there's a more active discussion about people's practical experiences.

Someone connect me to the conversation?