The four responsibilities of a people manager: DEEP
More often than not, a person ascends into people management because they were really good at the technical craft of the domain they’re in. Perhaps it’s a very explicit switch where you become responsible for a sizeable team, or it’s more gradual where you manage an area within your department and eventually build up a team.
Part of the challenge in stepping into this is knowing what you should actually be doing. The trap that early people managers fall into is never getting out of reaction mode. As a people manager, it’s quite likely that you’re simply reacting to each new task that you have to sort out, whether that’s something project oriented or something team oriented. While that’s not a bad thing early on, it can become a huge issue later if you ignore some of the more macro pieces of people management.
From my perspective, a people manager needs to focus on these four things, and to regularly check-in on how they are holding up within the team:
- Development
- Environment
- Enablement
- Performance
Development (individual and team)
Every individual on your team should be growing, and it’s your responsibility as a manager to facilitate that. Reactive managers forget about this and only worry about delivering. This isn’t sustainable and ultimately results in unecessary team turnover.
Beyond just individuals growing, if you want to lead a high performing team you also need to ensure that the team itself is developing. That means becoming aware of whether the team is, over time, improving its capabilities to deliver, and finding opportunities to step up how the team works together as a whole. As you can imagine, there’s a lot that can go into this - more on this in the future.
Environment (team rhythm, safety, and norms)
All teams develop some sort of environment, by nature of how things are communicated, decided upon, and collaborated on. As the manager and team leader, you need to regularly assess and influence the environment such that your team can thrive. Does each member of your team have high psychological safety to share feedback? How does your team make decisions? What’s the operating cadence of your team? These are all factors that will shape how each individual and your team as a whole perform. Ultimately, it’s being aware of how being on this team actually feels and setting the conditions to ensure that it’s positive and productive.
Enablement (clarity, resources, sponsorship)
Teams can be set up for success, or not. Even if you have a great team and a fantastic environment, the team can still get stuck if not enabled effectively. So what typically gets in the way of teams doing really well if you already have all the right ingredients? The first is clarity - if the team isn’t clear on what their mission is, what they should be rowing towards, and how to tackle that, I can guarantee the team will just spin it’s wheels in meetings. Now I want to emphasize that your role as a team leader isn’t necessarily to tell your team what to do — this isn’t about command and control — rather, it’s ensuring the team and individuals on the team are clear on what they are going to do. You can facilitate rather than direct, and more often than not that looks like providing the right context and guiding the team by asking the right questions.
The second is resources - a team isn’t set up for success if there are clear tools, funding, or capacity that they need to realistically achieve their goals and they aren’t provided that. A great team may be resourceful and can make due with what they have, but there’s a balance to that and you need to recognize when the team is too under resourced to sustainably deliver what’s expected of them.
Lastly, and this doesn’t necessarily apply to the same weight for all teams, is sponsorship. Depending on the culture of an organization and the mission criticality of the team’s work, sponsorship by senior leadership may be essential for your team to be successful.
Performance (individual and team)
The last area here is performance. Every person in a company is hired for a reason, and part of yours as a manager is to deliver some form of results through your team. While it’s important not to overindex on this, you also need to ensure this is part of your overall focus as a manager.
From a team perspective, it’s paying attention to two things. Firstly, is your team hitting the goals and expectations set out either collectively, set out by you, or set out by the company. Secondly, it’s determining if your team is performing better than the sum of its parts. That is to say, as a team are you doing better than if you just had number of separate individuals working on things. A great team can produce better results together than independently. A poor team actually produces worse results, because every time a team gets larger there’s actually more coordination and dependency costs layered on top.
Individual performance is also important. Hand-in-hand with development, you need to spend time supporting and coaching each individual. Peak performance looks different for each person at each stage of their career, and your role is to set the right expectations while also supporting them to do their best.
As a manager, you also need to pay attention for underperformance. There’s also a lot that goes into this, but the tl;dr if it is being able to recognize it, addressing it, and if unresolved taking action to ensure it doesn’t negatively affect the team.