They’re the reason you have the word ‘manager’ and your success can only exist if theirs does. Without them you are just an enthusiastic person talking to powerpoint slides.
- Inclusion and Diversity - diverse teams drive performance. We all of us want to work in an environment where there is diversity of thought, action, and experience. Your awareness, experience and role within this is crucial to creating high performing teams. Are you championing I&D? Are you an active ally? Maximising inclusion safety for your teams is fundamental.
- Coaching and Mentoring - throughout your career as an individual contributor, you are likely to have engaged in mentoring of colleagues with less experience. Coaching and mentoring as a manager become some of your crucial tools to support your team and those around you.
- One-to-Ones - these become your primary connection point with your team, and can be a brilliant means of connecting, building up a relationship, and coaching your team members.
- Growth and Progression - your role has changed as a manager, and you are now responsible for the growth and progression of others. There are many approaches to this, and being effective in this space will be a significant benefit to your team.
- Performance and Discipline - it’s great when our team is performing well, but managing performance and discipline across the team can lead to complex conversations, navigating process and policy, and having to manage the interpersonal in a way that most are not comfortable with. Doing this effectively can turn something potentially complex and negative and turn it around completely into an opportunity for growth in our team.
- Accountability - we are often good at holding ourselves to account, though holding our teams, and ensuring that we create an environment where they hold each other to account is crucial to high performance.
- Admin (Vacation, Expenses, etc.) - it’s dull, but it’s not just ticking a box - this brings about its own set of challenges where the answer isn’t always ‘yes’, and we have to take into account the wider implications of actions.
- Unblocking - our position as managers is one where we do not directly deliver the solutions of the team, but we can often be involved in helping the team to unlock and unblock the bigger more thorny issues. Often these are more wide reaching, cross team/cross silo issues that require a level of diplomacy and leverage that isn’t always viable from those doing the work.
- Recruitment - growing our teams as the work grows is difficult. Finding the right skills add, and the right culture add, and creating an experience for candidates that is the best it can be is hard. Someone skilled at this is likely to have influenced how recruitment happens, and certainly have honed the process so that it’s as smooth as possible for their particular team/department.
- Onboarding - we all want engaged employees - those who feel more committed to our mission, and our values. A good onboarding experience is pivotal to this, and a strong manager will have likely taken existing org onboarding, and honed and maximised the experience for their local teams.