#85: Manager In The Middle
How Managers Can Create Better Dialogue With Their Employees
Welcome To This Week’s Edition of Work in Progress!
Manager In The Middle
What We’re Watching
Career and Workplace Advice
Bonus Section
👩💼Manager in The Middle 👩💼
A few years ago, I got put into a role earlier than expected where I got additional responsibilities and exposure to senior leadership and I was determined to hit the ground running. I started off guns blazing, taking ownership driving results and making it clear to my leaders that they had made a good decision. But after about 6-8 months I began to hit a wall, but the only person who didn’t realize it was me.
Working in corporate is often a full-body contact sport, and being in rooms with leaders where debate goes on and decisions are made is not always easy, especially when you have a role to be there but not the responsibility or pay of the others in the room.
Over time, my energy and drive began to wade, my proactive nature started to dwindle and while I was showing up, I was not performing at my best. One day, my skip level manager pulled me aside, and said to me, “I’m worried about you because I’ve observed a bunch of behaviors that are not consistent with what we’ve seen from you in the past. How are you actually doing?”
We had an open conversation about the challenges of the role given the hectic nature, constant fire drills and pace of change, and how as a sensitive person I often took feedback really personally and would often ruminate on it far outside of the workplace. I shared with her the 2-3 things that I was working on with my therapist, and how much of it was due to the adjustment and stress of the new role, and how it was making me reflect on my own ambitions and aspirations in my career development in the short term.
I felt comfortable talking to my manager because I knew at the core, she cared about me as a person, and regardless of what I was or wasn’t doing, wanted what was best for me. Since the day we met, she had shown me time and time again she cared about me first as a human being.
After the conversation, we made some changes - she would try to take a more active role in shielding things for me, I would get a few responsibilities shifted off my plate, and she also encouraged me to talk to a few other individuals who had similar roles who had dealt with similar situations. My performance and well-being got significantly better after that conversation.
I have been thinking about this experience especially within the context of the latest discourse around burnout, exhaustion, resignations, workplace policies, quiet quitting, and toxic workplaces, especially in relation to managers. Managers play a significant influence in employee engagement, but at the same time, are also burning out and feeling exhausted themselves.
I see this first-hand, in the work that I do in training and coaching managers at organizations. It feels like they are caught in the middle - on one hand, they have to take demands and policies (ex: return to office) and put them into place, and on the other, they have to manage employees and their own concerns, wants and desires.
One of the things that always frustrates me when I read articles about what to do about trend x,y, or z is that most of the answers always come back to some form of “start by talking to your employees.” It frustrates me because, on one hand, if leaders and managers actually did this right, we wouldn’t have the problems we are facing.
On the other hand, the advice seems so mundane and borderline infantilizing that it feels wrong to justify words in an article on something that anyone could figure out.
But assuming that you believe that talking to your employees and actually listening to them is the right medicine you need, here are a few suggestions to keep in mind:
Tell People What They Are Doing Great - If you see someone doing something great, please tell them what they did, why it was great, and encourage them to do more of it. People cannot see their own genius, and the things we often take as normal and pedestrian are incredibly valuable. I’ve written before about how talent spotting is a critical skill that we all need to embrace, especially managers, but if you want people to model behaviors you’d like to see more of a great place to start is to let them know that they are doing them.
Go Out of Your Way to Intentionally Build Trust - If you’re a manager, your job is to foster trust. Most people approach trust as “I’ll trust you once you show me that you’re trustworthy,” but according to Carole Robin, Founder of Touchy Feely Course at Stanford GSB and workplace relationships expert it actually works the other way. Robin recommends you go first, and use the “15%” rule as a way to test the waters. Furthermore, as the individual in a position of power, it is on you to go first and be proactive about it.
Care Personally - In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott tells a story about how her manager at Google, Sheryl Sandberg gave her the feedback that when she spoke, she was using a ton of filler words, and it made her sound stupid. On the surface, that is a pretty hash (perhaps rude?) statement, How could Sheryl get away with something like this? Because Kim knew that Sheryl cared about her personally. Prior to that feedback, Sandberg on numerous occasions made gestures and behaviors that demonstrated to Kim that she genuinely cared about her as a person, so when she delivered that feedback candidly (this was also after 2 times of trying to do it less candidly..) Kim knew Sheryl had her best interests at heart. Your employees need honest feedback, but it becomes a lot easier to deliver (and them to process and act on) when they know that you truly and fundamentally care about them as people.
When it comes to human-related workplace challenges I am often reminded of the quote, “simple, but not easy.” These solutions seem simple and pedestrian on paper, but that doesn’t make them easy. The good news is that if you are a manager or leader who genuinely wants to see your employees win and believes they have talent and potential,
I am confident that building trust, talent spotting and caring personally are all habits that you can start practicing to foster a healthier workplace culture which can enable more fruitful and consistent conversations with you and your employees, so whatever workplace trend comes your way is an afterthought.
PS - I am speaking at a Business Insider Event on September 14th about strategies for finding more opportunity within your current job or role. I hope you’ll join (Register Here)
👀 What We’re Watching 👀
YouTube launches an ad-free video player for education (The Verge): YouTube, a longtime favorite tool for many educators, instructors and individual trainers is launching an ad-free video player along with additional tooling and resources for creators. Right now, the ad and recommendation-free version is available to a handful of select Education partners with hopes of expanding over the next year. It’s also giving creators tools to monetize their content. Many of the big tech companies have been in the education space for awhile, but it’s been interesting to see some of the recent investments and moves they’ve made to put this market front and center on their priority list. Ex: Amazon.
Reejig receives investment to accelerate workforce intelligence (PR Newswire) - Reejig, a talent intelligence and internal mobility platform announced a new investment from Salesforce Venture. Reejig helps global organizations, particularly large ones, find and retain talent serving as both a platform that identifies and allocates talent internally and externally of your organization.
The Busiest Days in The Office (Nicholas Bloom) - According to WFH Researcher Nick Bloom’s research, the busiest days in the office tend to be Tuesday and Wednesday.
Attitudes Towards Work By Generation (Statista) - I’ll be honest, I’m hesitant to wade too much into generational differences because it's hard to make categorical claims across such large groups of people but this is an interesting graph that shows how individuals of different generations agree/disagree with statements about work that relate to the themes of quiet quitting. It’s clear there is a big divide.
Workplace Culture Insights (Culture Amp) - The Insights and Research team at CultureAmp put together an incredibly thorough and thoughtful interactive tool around trends in workplace culture, and common patterns from their dataset of thousands of companies who use their software. There is also an interactive quiz tool, that allows you to identify what type of company you are, and what you can do to overcome culture and workplace challenges.
📙 Career and Leadership Advice 📙
The Role That Work Has Played Has Fundamentally Shifted (Future Forum) - My take for all of the work trends that the media has come up with has been around this idea that people, whether they want to or not, have been given the choice and opportunity to examine and define the role they want work to play in their life. This is also why I get worried by takes that tell people they should think or view work in a certain way - its uniquely personal, which comes to life in some of the examples in this article
Your Career is Just 1/8th of Your Life (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic) - In statistics, there is a quote from longtime statistician George Box: “all models are wrong, some are useful.” I tend to view career advice in the same way. It is really hard to find career advice that is both 1) universally true and 2) specific enough that it’s not fluff. Which is why that quote resonates with me. You’re probably going to get lots of career advice, and while a lot of it may not apply to you, some of it might. Derek does a good job of making this point, and then doing his best to offer some pieces of advice (some through data) that seem to be both A) universally true and B) specific enough to follow.
Generation X: The Original Quiet Quitters (Fast Company) - The media has come full cycle on quiet quitting - what started as a trend, then became a bad thing, is now not actually a trend. Favorite quote (quoting from an article from 1991: “One article, published in the Chicago Tribune in 1995, quoted a 31-year-old local nonprofit executive named Michelle Obama, who astutely recognized how the younger generation was showing up to work with an evolving sense of what they wanted from their employers. “They’re disillusioned because their parents, who were so loyal (to their employers), didn’t get loyalty in return,”
What Quiet Quitting is Actually About (Business Insider) - Aki Ito has published a number of thoughtful pieces about work and careers over the past few years and this one fits that mold. She accidentally may have lit the match that sparked the quiet quitting phrase, and does a good job reflecting and dissecting the underlying elements of what it is and why it resonated (Note: This is a Premium article, if you want to read it, shoot me a note)
🔊 Bonus Section 🔊
I have a hard time publicizing some of my work because I don’t want to come off as braggy or showy, but I am using this as a forum to highlight a number of things I have been a guest on or involved in lately that might be of interest to all of you:
6 Trends For Learning in The New World of Work (The Learning Culture Podcast) - I had the chance to chat with Andrew Barry, about some of the research from my piece on professional development trends. Andrew shares the same interest and enthusiasm for learning in the workplace that I do and also sees the opportunity in some of the newer learning and professional development startups and companies, so we got a chance to nerd out on these topics.
Finding and Nurturing Untapped Talent (The Untapped Podcast) - I had an awesome time chatting with Tarik Meyers, Co-CEO at Untapped about how companies and organizations need to think differently about hiring, guiding, and mentoring untapped talent pools. Tarik is a fellow Jesuit educated professional just like me, and while we came through different experiences, we both share similar views on the value of giving talent the opportunity to thrive and what comes from it
Your Guide to Cross-Functional Collaboration (The Muse) - I partnered with The Muse to write a guide to cross-functional collaboration. These are based on almost 15+ years working in cross-functional roles, and has a list of some of the tactics I’ve used over the years to effectively work on cross-functional teams.
That’s all for now. Have a great week!
Al