5 essential practices of first-line managers

How to lead teams that consistently deliver impact and innovation

There are a lot of great books out there about management and leadership. Andy Grove’s High Output Management is an absolute classic. But as a new manager, sometimes the list of practices and behaviors can feel overwhelming. All of a sudden you go from being just a strong individual contributor to someone responsible for creating and reinforcing culture, something that is incredibly hard and requires great intention.

I promise you will not get it right, especially at first. I have been in management for six years, recently moving into second-line management, and I’m still learning every day about what it means to be a good leader. And I learn more from the things that don’t have the intended impact than I do from the things that work.

But as I reflect on my years in first-line management, five things stick out above and beyond the others. They are things that have made a big impact on the teams I’ve led and the successes and failures we’ve shared.

#1 - It’s your job to determine the problems that need solving

As an individual contributor, more often than not, problems get assigned to you. You’ve likely been promoted into management because you’ve been successful delivering work others have given to you.

The more senior you get in your career, the more nebulous the assignment gets. The direction you get changes from “execute this project” to “grow this piece of the business.” With that vague direction, it’s increasingly your job to determine what the most impactful work will be to deliver on the goals of the business.

This translation exercise requires real command of your company’s broader strategy, position and goals along with expertise within your specific domain. It’s only when you can marry those two things together that you become genuinely effective at calling plays.

My ability to call plays has improved dramatically as a result of two behaviors.

First, over the course of a few years I read over 200 books covering business, technology, marketing, design, etc. And I probably spent another hour or two every day reading things online. I follow and attempt to participate in the external discussions that people in my field have every day on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. If you believe that most innovation is theft, the number one way to improve your ability to generate good ideas is to improve how widely read you are.

I promise you that you will only ever be mediocre at calling plays if you don’t make a major, every day investment in developing your breadth of expertise.

Second, I became a much more sophisticated user of analytics and data. It not only helped me to better support my arguments with data, but also helped me discover things about what I perceived as the disconnect between our words, our actions and our performance.

A manager that deeply understands their business context, their discipline and can use data to develop and support their position is a manager that will be a Director soon enough.

#2 - Use the 70/30 rule as your approach for driving consistent impact and innovation

Often times I hear managers complain that their leadership is simply too short-sighted. No one cares about building for the long-term. No one cares about the big idea that could change things but will take time.

That’s fundamentally not true. I have never met a senior leader in my career that doesn’t believe in creating long-term sustainable success and growth for their team and for their company. But they, like everyone inside a corporation, also must deliver today.

And when you aren’t being successful today, that’s when everything feels focused on the right now.

The way I have always approached this with my teams is the 70/30 rule. With 70% of the time and activity of the teams, we will focus on projects that will have clear, predictable impact this year. When someone asks what we are doing to contribute to success, we will show them the 70%. We will deliver without fail on the 70.

The 70 is what buys you space and freedom. It buys you the 30%. With the 30%, we invest in new ideas, technologies and programs. New ways of doing things. Not everything in the 30 always pans out, but that’s OK because we have the 70. And some of the things in the 30 do pan out and become big things.

And as a manager, how you distribute that 30% is up to you. You might tell everyone on the team to spend 30% of their time and work on new ideas. If you have a ten person team, you might have seven people executing a core project and three people working on something new. The balance is up to you. You have to strike the right balance between giving everyone the opportunity to explore new work and having some people on your team trying dedicated to building things that are completely new.

The 70/30 rule is about building an organization that year after year consistently has the space to build new things. And as projects in the 30 mature into successful programs, and you develop a reputation for consistently delivering both performance and innovation, the more space you will get. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle if you can get it going.

#3 - Design your team your team for ownership and engagement

I have two practices around org design that inform nearly every decision I make.

First, I want extremely clear and differentiated categories of work. Any team that has wild dependencies across the group without clear ways that decisions get made is a recipe for a dysfunctional organization. The primary reason people end up with organizations that don’t make sense is because they try to make everyone happy. If you have two people that are good but logical org design calls for one team lead, people often struggle to make that call. They don’t want the other person to get upset and leave. They will find a reason to have two teams.

In the moment everyone will be somewhat happy, but you sign yourself up for a lifetime of pain after that. When the teams disagree, they will come to you to break the tie. They will have slightly different perspectives on priorities, ways of organizing themselves and approaches to the work. Now it’s your job as a manager to provide unambiguous clarity that can’t be misinterpreted.

The implication of you now needing to develop this level of clarity is that you haven’t actually delegated anything at all. In the ideal world, you will have set somewhat higher level objectives and you can empower other folks on your team to then build out detailed plans and operating models.

Delegation starts with design.

Second, the thing I always tell the team is that there is a universe of things we can do or build that would help improve the business. And there is a universe of things that the human beings on this team are good at and are passionate about. When we think about the work we do, we want to operate as much as possible at the intersection of those two worlds.

I have always found that if you give smart people work that they find interesting and important, they will basically manage themselves. You will never need to ask where something is because they basically self-manage. It’s when people are in jobs they hate, where they aren’t learning or being challenged, where they aren’t making an impact, when they start to disengage and need prompting.

Don’t worry so much about managing every little task your team members have in their backlog. Worry about the big picture. Especially for your top performers. The thing you should be losing sleep about is how do I get my people in jobs they love that will always make a big impact for our team and business. That’s the real problem.

For me the actual work the team ends up taking on is as much a reflection of what absolutely needs to happen as it a reflection of the unique talents and passions of the people I happen to be leading. I think of this as being a player’s coach (eg building the system around the team) vs being a system coach (finding players to fit a pre-defined system).

#4 - Frame critical feedback in the context of your team member’s personal goals

The thing I struggled with the most as a new first-line manager was giving critical feedback to team members. This was especially true for me because my first management job I was younger than most of my team and it was in a functional area (analytics) where I had little experience. I barely knew how to use excel.

You might wonder how I even got such a job but the nice thing about working at big companies is that if you develop a track record of doing things successfully in different areas, people trust that you will figure out new areas and find ways to improve them.

But I digress.

I struggled with giving critical feedback for many reasons. Because I wasn’t an expert in the domain. Because I couldn’t do the work myself so was terrified about attrition. Because I was young. Because I was a new manager.

And the team suffered as a result. My excessively positive approach meant the team didn’t get enough critical feedback to help them improve. It feels more comfortable in the moment but in hindsight you realize you were doing nobody any favors. Did I help anyone get any better? Did I actually reinforce behaviors I should have been helping to change?

Radical Candor is a book that has helped a lot of folks give better feedback and I encourage any new manager to read it. But that approach wasn’t what made it easier for me. The thing that ultimately made it easier for me to give more critical feedback was removing myself from the equation.

I didn’t want it to be me saying you aren’t doing something to my standard. Instead, I started spending more time deeply understanding the goals and career aspirations of people on my teams. Many of them wanted to get into leadership and management one day.

What I started doing instead was approaching feedback by saying, “you told me that your goal was to move into management, well if that’s what you want you need to do a better job aligning with stakeholders on objectives and timelines.” I would always frame that feedback in the context of their goals instead of it being about my personal expectations of them. It’s more like a personal trainer approach where you tell someone where you want to get and they are here to help you achieve that, and are tough with you along the way when they need to be.

It’s a pretty subtle difference but it turns the feedback from being about you to being about them, and I found that helpful.

Six years into leadership and management this is much easier for me now. Both because I’ve done it more and because I have more experience and confidence related to the domains I’m leading.

But it was this simple observation of framing feedback in the context of the employee’s goals that helped me get over the initial hump.

#5 - Be a player/coach

I like to tell first-line managers that they aren’t a head coach, they are Lebron James. They run the show, but they do so while being the best player on the court. First-line management is usually not senior enough to completely remove yourself from all individual contributor activities.

I think of it more as an opportunity to focus on only the biggest, most difficult challenges that only you can solve and then delegating and empowering the team to do the rest. But you are still there to handle some chunk of the really hard stuff.

That can vary a lot based on the size of the team and the nature of the work, but you shouldn’t rush to completely remove yourself from the game.

Often times people get promoted to management because they are exceptional individual contributors and if you completely remove your personal contribution on day 1, it’s not inconceivable that the team actually gets worse because you aren’t in the trenches anymore.

I tend to think it’s better to keep your hands on the keyboard a little bit, still feel connected to the work, still be in the game with your team.

The only thing you have to be careful about is not going too far with this. If you use this as a crutch to avoid learning how to lead, if you take the cool projects that someone else could do, if you find yourself not doing the work of management because you are still doing your old job, you will fail.

But there is a way to be an on the court leader and that’s how I have always seen the job of first-line management. They lead through action.

Consistent impact and innovation

What I’ve found is that it’s the combination of these activities, and how they build on and reinforce one another that ultimately delivers consistent impact and innovation.

If you are deeply rooted in domain and market context, consistently allocate time and money for new things, align people to work they are passionate about and give them good feedback along the way, you have a real recipe for repeatable success.

And you are the x factor. You were promoted into leadership and management for a reason. I like to believe that I have always been a positive force within my teams around driving impact and innovation. I always took great pride in being on the court with the team. I felt I could see things and call plays I never would have had I not been in the thick of it.

If you want a team that embodies impact and innovation, it starts with you. And you have the job you do because someone believes in you to deliver on that. It is up to you what you make of it.