From the Ask Tom mailbag.
Question:
I’m going to be promoted in July as a manager and I will have to manage 5 people who are older and more experienced than me. I have been working with 2 of them for a year and 2 of them are new to the company, the last person has no experience. My boss knows that is going to be a real challenge for me, he is promoting me because I have the technical ability to do the job. I need to work on my soft skills. I have developed strong analytical skills which are not always an asset to manage a team effectively. Do you have any advice?
Response:
Age and maturity is always a problem for a younger manager working with older team members. You will have to earn their respect and you will not be given much room for error.
Here is the principle I follow.
Every member of an organization, in their pursuit of doing a good job, will always seek out the person who brings value to their thinking and their work.
Wouldn’t it be great if that person was the manager? Often, it’s not, and that is where the trouble begins. My advice to any manager who wants to be successful is very simple.
Bring value to the thinking and the work of your team members.
That’s it. I will let you think about that for a day, while I open this up for comments from the rest of you. What is that you can do, as a manager, to bring value to the thinking and work of your team members? -TF
My “trick” to earn respect of your own team is to be the hardest working member of the team. If you don’t do everything you can to complete your work, the rest of the team won’t do it either. One of our new managers in my company stayed with his team during night testing (it took at least few days since they managed to have no bugs). The manager was new, he didn’t know all the low-level details, he could hardly help the testing team. But he invested his time to help as much as possible, but what is more important to gain their respect. And on the other hand – he learnt a lot then.
Of course working hard doesn’t mean that you work instead of your team. That’s not the way the manager should act.
Whenever I’m taking over a new team or new members to the team I have the same conversation with every individual.
I sit down and explain exactly what my job, as their manager is. Simply put – “As your manager my job is to ensure that you have everything that you need to be successful in the work that you are responsible for – not to do your work – but to create the environment where you have the highest opportunity for your personal efforts to be successful.”
Many times I have managed people with technical and job specific skills that were greatly superior to mine – but realize that doing a specific job and managing the team that performs a set of roles are two different things….
Great comments. This is such an important issue that I will be spending more time over the next few days exploring what it means to bring value.
I believe adding value to the work that your team is doing begins with listening. At all times, a team member would know more about data/project rather than the manager. Hearing it out before giving your advice/feedback would not only make the team feel that their work is appreciated but also result in more appropriate feedback from managers side.