There are two kinds of managers.
“And only two,” said a project manager once, responding to my quip.
A client meeting had just ended. I was finishing up some notes. The client’s PM had stayed behind. Someone else on the client team had told a funny story a few minutes earlier about an old boss, and the PM and I were still chuckling over it. He knew what I meant when I said there were only two kinds of managers. He filled in the rest for me.
“The kind who want to control everything, and the kind who hire smart people and get out of the way.”
I’d first heard this from an old boss of my own. It stuck with me for a long time, and I sometimes found myself dropping every boss I’d ever had into one box or the other. It wasn’t hard to do. I don’t think I’d ever thought about it until my old boss had said it. Once I’d heard it, there was no escaping it. Every manager fell to one side or the other.
Not because it was true, but because someone had said it was true.
In truth, there are more than just two buckets.
There does seem to be a bucket that can be easily filled with people who want to micromanage everything. You know the type. They dish out strict instructions. They disappear for long periods of time while you work out all the details (there’s not enough time to micromanage you and everything else). Then they do drive-by management to tell you how wrong all your decisions were and how they would’ve done it all differently. Let’s face it; those people suck.
But the ones who manage well? They come in a million varieties and have a million different techniques and traits. And none of them simply “get out of the way.” Leaders tend to do a whole bunch of things that make us all want to follow their lead in the first place.
Some of their skills are complicated and take a long time to develop, and they help push the entire organization forward with intelligence and quiet persistence. Some are basic, everyday practices that keep teams united and moving and bonded to each other. Practices that nurture an environment of respect and dignity and possibility on a daily basis.
I want you to want to be the second kind of leader. Your team will want that, too. If you want to be a micromanager, you might as well toss out this report right now. It’s not going to do you any good. If you want to be the right kind of leader, stick around.
This report is full of observations about that kind of leader as well as approaches I’ve picked up myself over the years that have helped me be successful in these roles. For good measure, I also include the insights of a couple of very knowledgeable friends.
I occasionally make a reference to design work and design teams, particularly in a web context. This is because I spent most of my professional life working in various design roles, especially that of a User Experience (UX) Strategist. (This means I helped web companies figure out what their products should do, why, and how to achieve those objectives.) This report, in fact, spills many of the same points and stories as a book I wrote for UX professionals called Experience Required: How to Become a UX Leader Regardless of Your Role (New Riders 2015). (If you want advice specific to leadership in the design profession, you can find it in that book.)
The takeaways, though, can be applied to any professional environment. I’ve seen them hold true and work in all variety of professions. They aren’t industry skills, they’re human skills. They’re principles. They’re a mindset.
This is not about how to do managerial tasks. It’s not about which meetings to hold and how often and how to run them. It’s not about how to hire, fire, or promote. This is about the human skills that can help you become trusted, respected, and reputable as a leader.
Before we get into the more involved concepts—the ones that require long-term focus and that develop over time—I want to hand you a set of daily must-haves you can use for years to come regardless of what else is happening. So that on your worst day, you can rely on these few practices and still trust that you’ve kept yourself from getting carried away in the tide of internal politics and obstacles and objections and managed to somehow still do better as a manager than 90 percent of the rest of the world on their best day.
These take commitment, as well—I don’t mean to imply they don’t. But they are simple in concept, and, if you can stick to them, they will make up a base that will serve you and your team well every single day of your tenure.
Whereas much of what we talk about later are things that will help you manage out and up—things that will help you initiate and push your company forward—this chapter is for the things that will help you manage your team.
These are the things people who work under you will thank you for when you leave.
I highly recommend printing them as a list and then stapling it to your forehead. It’s a small amount of pain for a whole lot of benefit.
One of the first things a lot of new managers want to do is manage. They want to begin inserting themselves as decision-makers, experts, masters of their domains.
Don ’t do that. It’s a mistake. Collaboration has a lot of benefits. You likely experienced most of them prior to becoming a manager.
First, everyone in a group can benefit from everyone else’s knowledge and talent. Teams have backup skills, overlapping know-how, people with specialties that you don’t have yourself.
Second, working in groups, with their close working relationships and their innate knowledge of who knows what and who’s good at what, invariably makes individuals better than they could be on their own.
Third, rock-star employees are rare. Though a legitimate master within a profession can do some great things while working alone, teams are far more often the better way to go. Members can help each other out in all sorts of ways.
Rock stars can also be destructive. Pretty much no one wants to be excluded from a project because the rock star on the team can do it all alone. If you want your entire team to look good, no single person can stand out as the lone master without damaging morale and quite likely the product you’re all working to create.
Besides all that, collaborating is often fun. If you have the chance to bounce ideas off other people, take it. Even if the ideas to come out of it rarely surprise you, they will sometimes surprise you. That alone makes collaboration worth trying.
There is, however, a trick to making it work well: keep the team on the small side.
A study showed that larger teams perform better than small teams despite the fact that individuals on small teams performed better than individuals on large teams.
On large teams, people don’t know each other as well. When a person on a large team needs help or additional information, she is less likely to know who to talk to. But because a larger team has more people on it, it will perform better than the small team overall. An individual on a small team, on the other hand, is more likely to know who to go to for extra information. Team members are also more likely to have better relationships with each other, because they’ve worked together more closely than they would on a larger team.
I found the first great manager I ever knew in an unlikely place: a video store I worked at in my twenties. Her name was Kim. I learned something from her I still believe in today, and have seen in countless other good managers since.
When Kim asked people to do things around the store, she’d stand slightly turned, one foot ahead of the other, with her forward shoulder tilted down and her head down. Then she’d look directly at you and say something like, “When you get a chance, can you please clear that shelf and put out the new releases?” She did the same thing when asking you to complete a task, when she asked how your life was going, when she mentioned something her family had done last week, when she asked how the event was that you went to last night. She was never condescending or cold, never angry or harsh. When making a request, she was only mildly commanding. It felt like she was telling you a secret.
To Kim, nothing was worth anxiety. Nothing was worth worry, or urgency, or panic. Kim was as even-keeled as a person can be. Deliveries would arrive, customers would ask questions, lines would get long. Her voice never rose. Kim simply did not believe in freaking out.
And everyone loved her for it. Everyone happily did what she asked. For the most part, the staff remained as calm as she did. We looked at and treated her with all the respect we had, because she earned it, every day.
What I learned from Kim is this:
We teach other people how to treat us.
Overreactions teach people to be nervous about approaching us. Anxiety teaches people to avoid us. Pushing things off teaches people they can’t trust us. Expressing frustration at a CEO’s request to put something fun on hold so you can catch up on lagging projects teaches the CEO to treat you like a nuisance rather than a leader.
When you are calm and consistent, with few exceptions, you teach people you can be relied upon. That you are capable of handling any challenge. That you can be trusted as a leader.
The way you act and react affects the way everyone else will see you the next time they need you to act or react. Stay calm in all situations, and you will have all the respect you’ll ever need to get things done when the chance comes.
Yes, this will be hard to do sometimes. Remind yourself. The long-term payoff of staff loyalty and trust and endearment is worth far more than any satisfaction you could derive from spouting off, even just once.
Learning to achieve work Zen can take a while.
Years ago, a few months into my first director-level role, I began to notice a disturbing trend: meeting overload. No matter the day, no matter the workload, I was dragged away from my desk more frequently than I was able to plant myself at it and get things done. It ate at me for a month or so, then another month, and then another, until I found myself angry at every meeting invitation to hit my inbox. I was even resentful of every invite I created myself. I started scheduling them for shorter time slots. I walked in with agendas and skipped the small talk. I made it a requirement to walk out of every meeting with a decision—a takeaway of some kind.
It didn’t help. I was still frustrated. The work at my desk was still sitting there undone.
A few months of that and I was decidedly over it.
Then I realized something.
Perhaps because there was no real alternative, or perhaps because I convinced myself to believe it, I had the thought that changed my experience for the duration of my spell at this particular company:
Meetings are my work.
I don’t mean that my job was to have meetings (though, that was certainly part of the revelation). I mean that my job was bigger than a job—it was a mission, a purpose, a goal. I didn’t go there to complete tasks, I went there to form and shape and execute on a larger vision. The work I did at my desk was part of it. The meetings I was pulled into were part of it. The daily interruptions by coworkers and questions and emergencies were part of it. Everything I did was part of that mission. It all contributed. It all could be tied back in some way to what I was there to achieve.
Many days came and went after that. Other jobs at other companies did, too. I’ve been just as frustrated by meetings and other distractions at other times as I was back then. But since the revelation, I’ve been able to remind myself of something:
There are distractions and meetings and demands and questions and emergencies in literally every kind of work, every week, no matter what you do.
They are not distractions. They are part of how you will one day achieve whatever it is you’re so focused on. And not one of them matters.
Keep your eyes on the road. Every white stripe that flies by on your left side is another mark in the asphalt, another block of time, another stretch of mileage that will get you there.
Internalizing this—owning this—will all but eliminate your frustration. It’ll make you easier to approach, less anxious, and more productive.
It’ll make you the Buddha of your office.
When you were called in for the interview, you were nervous, but you knew you were qualified—you knew you could do this manager thing. When you met with the people who would hire you, you were humble and gracious and not at all tough, but you knew you had opinions and beliefs about how to be a good manager and what made your last bad manager so bad. When you were offered the job, you knew you’d be on a big learning curve for a while. (Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought the fact that you were hired meant you had it all figured out already and that’s why they hired you for the spot.)
Then you started, and something changed. Not immediately—not on day one—but soon, and one day at a time. You began to see more of the puzzle pieces that make up your company’s decisions. You became one of the voices in the room whose job it was to recognize the constraints and the challenges and to navigate them, to measure priorities against time, resources against abilities. Over a few months, you grew knowledgable.
Great. But you also became something else (or you’re about to):
Yes, you learned to focus on the big picture, how to map out projects and divvy up the talent pool to the right places, and to get things done and to know that things must sometimes move slowly. Yes, you did all that. But in the process, you unlearned the things that made you want to be a manager in the first place. Like how important it is to watch over the quality of the product, the business, the work you’re all doing. You unlearned how to be critical of the thing you came there to do. In its place, you learned to sacrifice this for that, and that for another thing.
Your staff cares about quality. They all want to go home and feel good about themselves and their work. They want to believe in what the company that employed them is doing and how well it’s doing it.
They’d really love it if you did, too. If you weren’t just another lowly manager trying to appease the higher-up managers—another cog in the machine.
Just like questioning a government is one of the most patriotic things a citizen can do, at some point, the only way to truly care about the product your company puts out is to focus on the end result. To them, the product is all that matters. They don’t care that Gianni calls in sick a lot or that Sheila isn’t that great of a designer or that your boss wanted you to spend your time elsewhere for a while. They definitely don’t care about your budget constraints. All your customers care about is whether or not the work you’ve done was worth doing—whether it or not made their lives better.
Believe in your product, whatever your “product” is. Speak up about it. They hired you because you were good at something. Remember to be good at that. Remember to care about that.
There’s this Neil Gaiman quote I like to use a lot:
When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Right now, let’s focus on the first part of that thought.
When people tell us something is wrong or that something is bothering them, most people react as if it were a criticism.
Don ’t be one of them. React as if it were a test.
Think of everything you say as a first draft of some brilliant future speech. Think of everything you write as the shoot-from-the-hip version of some yet-to-be-polished manuscript full of typos and unclear assertions. Then, when you send them out into the world—these statements and words, designs and lines of code, products and mantras—think of them as a test. Then think of what you get back as data that tells you whether or not the thing you put out into the world did its job.
Your job as a manager is to manage as well as possible, which is likely far better than you can manage now. Especially in the early days, there’s little likelihood you are anywhere near as good as you could be. Criticism is the only way to get better. You have to listen to it. You have to think about it. You have to consider what it is that’s bothering other people about how you’re doing it.
Did someone react badly to something you said? It could be that you said it poorly. Did a department react badly to a new policy you’ve implemented? It could be that you didn’t communicate its value, or include them in the decision-making process, or even collect their input in the first place. Is a customer complaining about a flaw in your product you don’t believe exists? It could be that the customer doesn’t understand what was intended.
Criticism is how you learn. Learn to hear it as the result of a test of your work, not as an assault on your work.
Besides all that, if you ever want to be able to offer criticism, you must first learn how to accept it. You have to teach other people that you can accept it.
It’s supposed to be a good thing when you get credit for good work.
I knew a man once who was fired for doing so. Mostly because the credit he took was for work he had done as part of a team, and the people around him who had done the rest of it were justifiably unhappy with his credit-grabby hands. One week, he was on the cover of a magazine. The next, he was looking for work.
Around that same time, a manager I knew was telling a story about a work success and how she’d been nominated for an award quite ironically after having pinned all the good work on a project to her staff. She claimed, basically, that stepping out of the credit race was the key to her success.
“It’s amazing what you can get done when you don’t care who gets credit,” she said.
I believed her. I began doing it myself. Here’s what I’ve learned:
First, giving credit away is gigantic for morale. It helps newer staff members feel good about their progress, and it helps existing team members keep a healthy and positive outlook about their roles within the team and their contributions to the company.
Second, because it makes the entire team look good and not just you alone. Your team becomes a powerhouse. An individual can have a great reputation, sure, but the result is often that the individual becomes overloaded with work because everyone wants to work with that person. When an entire team has a good reputation, the rest of the company wants to work with it, the team as a whole builds a ton of clout that can be used to sway future projects, and when it comes time to hire more people, you can often have you pick of internal candidates.
And third, just like the manager who’d first suggested the power of giving credit away, I soon found that when the team was thanked for its work by the higher-ups in the company, its members tended to point to the team as their foundation. No one person tried to hoard credit. Quite the opposite; they wanted to give it to each other.
Rather than claim credit for my team’s greatness, my team’s work made us all look great.
The word “manage” has a lot of implications, a lot of social baggage. It’s an ugly word many people associate either with a bad boss, the act of maintaining the status quo, or pushing papers around a desk while the minions do all the real work. And there’s some truth to that perception. When managers manage, they do tend to manage people.
It’s a mistake, of course. Few people want to be managed. To be handled.
To the contrary, most people want to be able to go home at night feeling halfway decent about themselves—to hold up some level of pride over their work, to feel a sense of purpose, to satisfy their own internal instinct and drive to be worthy contributors.
We don’t need to manage that. It’s human nature.
What we do need to manage is their ability to do it. And that means something else entirely.
It’s not about allocating resources and handing out assignments and filling in the spreadsheets. Sure, that’s part of the job, but it’s neither why you signed up nor what anyone really needs you to do for them.
What your team wants is for you to keep stupid crap off their desks. Needless email, hijacked priorities, demands from people with no skin in the game, shifts in strategy that come out of the blue and can undo weeks of work.
Keep it off their desks.
As much as possible, be the person who fends off the relentless frustrations of professional life.
Stop managing people. Start managing distraction.
Once in a while, someone wants to break out of the usual and do something exciting.
You know what that’s like. So, let them.
Helping others on your team become as well-rounded and skilled as they want to be is a great way to strengthen your team and keep people motivated.
Here’s a story about this from my book, Experience Required:
I once had a junior designer on my team who desperately wanted to do more strategy work. He’d told me so at least three times while the team was in the midst of a Herculean effort to rid itself of technical debt. He was at his least challenged, design-wise. He wanted to push himself.
I understood. This isn’t what any of us had signed up for. I was just as eager to get back to doing rather than redoing.
A couple of weeks later, a project I’d been pushing for came to fruition. It was something I had been planning for a few weeks and had spent a good amount of time convincing the relevant stakeholders to take on. It was a project I really wanted to work on myself.
Strategy came first. My wheelhouse. My favorite part. But something was gnawing at me.
This designer was really talented. He showed up every day. He slogged through the projects that had kept us all from any kind of forward motion. He did stellar work no matter how tedious the project. From the moment I’d joined the company, I’d wanted to see how far he could go, and here he was, stuck in the mud, not getting anywhere. He wanted very much to do more strategic work, and I very much wanted to give him the chance.
I had to do it. I gave the project to him. I told him I’d be there for guidance and to answer questions if he needed, but that the project was all his.
Secretly, I also committed to asking him loads of questions along the way that would allude to the kinds of things he should be thinking about. But I swore to myself I would give him some distance. Remember: Good ideas come from all kinds of places. We all needed to see what he could do, most of all him. He needed room to step out. To step up.
And so he did.
He did great work on that project. He proved himself to a bunch of people in a bunch of ways. And he learned some things in the process that enabled me to go to him later as a strategic thinker.
Again, people in the web industry already want to do great work. They want to learn more, take on more, build more, design more, ship more. They’ re hungry.
So feed them.
When someone wants the chance to improve at something, find ways to let them. The next time a project comes up that appeals to that person, hand it off, even if you really want to do it yourself. Nine times out of ten, that person will step up. And both of you will be better off for it.
Even if you’re not in the position to decide which people belong to which projects, you can always find little ways to involve others. If they’re interested in the thing you’re working on, invite them over to see what you can do together.
A little advice, though, if you’re on the other side of this scenario—if you are the person who wants more opportunities: Do something to earn them.
I once invited onto a project of mine a designer who’d been pretty well known for his talents. He had worked at a local agency for a long time and had recently gone out on his own to become a consultant. He’d said to me a few weeks earlier that he, too, wanted to get more into strategic work. So when a project popped up that would involve a lot of it, I asked him to join the client and me for a two-day kickoff session. He accepted. We holed up for a couple of days in a conference room and cranked out a bunch of ideas, and then planned to refine them over the next week or so. During those two days, he was great. He was full of ideas, we worked well together, the client liked him, and we got a lot done. His next job was to go create a more complete version of the strategy, make sure our initial design ideas supported it, and put together some more refined screens. We’d have a meeting about it the next Monday.
He never showed up to the meeting on Monday. And days later, when we pressed to see what he’d done, he sent us a digital version of a single sketch we’d done on a whiteboard the week earlier.
I haven’t invited him into a project since. I’m sure you can see why.
If you want people to include you, be there when the invitation comes. Be present. Be reliable. Be engaged. The only way to get better is to drown a little bit. Be ready to jump in the pool.