Three Critical Ingredients of the Successful Manager's Foundation

If you’re growing frustrated and fatigued with your life as a manager, you might want to take a step-back and review and strengthen the foundation for your role. Three items provide structural integrity for your managerial foundation:

Role clarity
Values
Connectedness

All three components inter-operate to support your effectiveness and to eliminate many challenges in this difficult role. Alternatively, the absence of the three is potentially disastrous.

When the Foundation is Weak:

I regularly encounter managers grown frustrated with what they perceive is a thankless, unrewarding role. They describe people as uncooperative or disrespectful. They are frustrated with middling results and not clear on how to change the current equation for the better. For some, the idea of quitting or at least shifting to an individual contributor role is appealing.

After talking and exploring some fundamental questions, it is most common for us to discover the manager is working on an unstable or non-existent foundation. Often, these individuals were spot promotions who received little training up-front and no coaching over time.

Instead, they’re left to fend for themselves in one of the more difficult roles a human can hold—responsible for the work of others—and they are struggling.

While there are no do-overs for your first day on the job, if you find yourself resembling some or all of the description of the frustrated manager above, you can take action to build or rebuild your foundation and effectively re-start in your role as manager.

How You Answer these Questions Speaks Volumes:

Imagine that we’re talking on a coaching call, and I ask you a couple of questions:

“How do you describe your role to others?”
“What do you stand for?”
“What are you accountable for to your group members for?”
“What are you accountable to your boss for?”

Your answers to these diagnostic questions offer clues to the health and strength of your manager’s foundation. Misfiring managers most often provide tactical, incomplete answers. Some even pause on the “your role?” question and indicate they genuinely don’t know.

Three Critical Ingredients of the Successful Manager’s Foundation:

1. Get Your Role Right and Share Widely

Nothing good happens unless we tune-in clearly to our role and our accountability for living up to this role definition.

I believe the role of today’s manager is much less about control and oversight and much more about three critical activities:

Coaching for performance—ensuring clarity of vision, collaborating to create clear goals and standards and providing feedback and feed-forward, and relevant education to help reach performance targets. Too many managers put this on auto-pilot. Coaching for performance requires daily, deliberate activity on the manager’s part.

Coaching for development—creating opportunities to stimulate learning, develop critical thinking skills and navigate change. This portion of the manager’s role is the one that most often gets left behind in the day-to-day firefighting. It’s also the most important part of sustaining and growing organizational success.

Sponsorship—this term from the world of project management (executive sponsorship), describes your responsibility and ultimate accountability for the success of your group and members. You own ensuring the right activities are being pursued by the right people, and you own knocking down walls, over-running barriers, and protecting the group from outside distractions.

As you rethink your role, particularly in this framework of coaching and sponsoring, also think about how you will teach others what your role is—and in turn, challenge them to think through their roles.

Many of my clients create a Manager’s Charter to both share with team members and to remind themselves daily of their True North as managers.

Last and not least, the most effective managers challenge their team members to hold them accountable to this role definition.

2. What Do You Stand For?

Everyone around you is looking for reasons to trust or not trust you. Too many of us give heaping helpings of reasons not to trust us. One way to solve this challenge is to clarify what you stand for.

Effectively, you are defining the values sacred to you as a manager and an individual.

One manager’s values:

Personal accountability for results is inviolable. Your commitment is your commitment. My commitment is commitment.
Collaboration is non-negotiable. Collaborate as a model team member, or you will leave the team.
The Do Must Match the Tell for all of us. Every single day.
Fight like crazy over tasks, but it can never be personal. Respect is non-negotiable. It must be present in every interchange.
When we screw up, we must own it. We also must forgive as long as the mistake is one we learn from and strive never to repeat.

I love those values for their lack of ambiguity and their mutual accountability.

If you’re operating as a manager with anything less than these clear, pointed values, you are operating on a shaky foundation. Take action to shore it up today.

3. Connectedness:

I’ve long believed to my core that management is an immersive, involved activity. It’s never micromanaging, but it is showing respect to your team members by paying attention and fulfilling on the coaching and sponsoring activities outlined above.

Push away from your desk and keyboard and get out there and observe, support, and do everything you can to teach and model the values.

For those individuals who value space and autonomy, give it to them, but don’t abandon them to their work. Ask if they need help. Offer encouragement and find out what’s in their way and help knock it down. And then get out of the way.

Paying attention is a high form of respect. I believe the values above indicated respect is non-negotiable.

Just Because Your Manager Does None of the Above…

Yeah, I know that you don’t see anything I’ve described from your manager. Get over it. His incompetence doesn’t give you the license to perpetuate poor practices.

I can count on one hand the number of effective managers I’ve worked for. (They read this blog.) The ineffective ones may have been the most powerful teachers for the motivation they offered me to not follow their behaviors.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Before you give up or write off the role, strive to attack it properly. Reset your foundation around role clarity, personal and group values, and turn these words into actions by connecting and getting involved. It’s an incredibly rewarding role able to positively impact others at scale and to help push your organization in the right direction. Instead of playing down to the culture or your manager, raise your game by strengthening the foundation.