#160 - Managing a Team During Rapid Growth, Part 2: Adapting To Change
Plus: Finding, coaching, and managing new leads; Making (and unmaking) hard decisions; Updating senior executives; and Networking at conferences.
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In the last issue (#159), we talked about managing a team through rapid growth, and discussed areas pretty specific to bringing on new people. This week I want to touch on two remaining topics that are more general than just hiring rapidly:
Supporting the team collectively through the change, and
Handling the change and the new management work yourself.
Supporting The Team Through Change
I wrote way back in #58 about Tuckman’s stages of team formation in terms of heist films:
A lot of heist movies have really clear depictions of Tuckman’s four stages of group development. Forming is the initial “the team is brought together” sequence, where a group of individuals comes together for a common (nefarious) purpose. After the initial honeymoon phase, when the hard work begins, comes the Storming phase - the individually brilliant but mismatched group initially has conflicts as they try to figure out how to work together. In the Norming phase, default solutions and workarounds to those conflicts start to emerge as “the way we get things done in this team”. And then there’s the performing phase, where those norms enable the groups collection of individuals’ skills to build on each other and really start to shine, and they start to deliver in a serious way on some high-performance larceny.
The key here is that the team has to go through the storming phase for the norms established in the next phase to be effective.
Now, we don’t necessarily think anymore that Tuckman’s stages are as discrete or linear as was first described.
In particular, teams go through mini re-”forming” stages whenever there’s a big change like new team members brought on (or old ones leaving), or when there’s a change in the work of the team. And then people have to storm/norm/perform again, whether it’s the whole group or sub-groups.
Crucially: there will be conflict.
This doesn’t have to be bad, as long as it is expressed in healthy and respectful ways!
The more engaged team members are, the more they care about their work, the more likely conflict is to arise when there are changes.
These conflicts are sparks produced by the friction of people trying to fit themselves together in new ways to achieve updated goals. Little arcs of static electricity zap and crack from all the jostling and shuffling about. Our job is to make sure these flashes harmlessly discharge the friction’s heat, rather than causing damage and hurt.
Disagreement, corrections, and feedback are normal and productive forms of conflict on high performing teams of peers who respect each other. They are part of how peers negotiate new ways of working together, along with support and listening and encouragement. We want to support and encourage all of these kinds of communication during periods of change.
We want to stave off other expressions of conflict. Arguments and taking sides are not healthy, and disrespectful behaviour towards peers can’t be tolerated.
Some of the work we need to do to ensure productive and healthy disagreements can be done working with individuals, during one-on-ones or coaching them through challenges. But most of the work is to spend time working with the team at a whole, before and during times of change:
Communicate early and clearly about the team challenges: Much of our attention during this time is going to be focussed on the logistical issues of handling the change. But we need to spend some time discussing the teamwork challenges of handling the new change with the team. Bring this up early in team meetings, and keep revisiting it.
Everyone vs. the problem: It’s really important to frame this as a single problem, “us versus the challenge of this change”, because otherwise it becomes a half dozen problems of “they’re doing stuff wrong/different/incompletely and it’s making my job harder”.
Agree on the end goal: Getting collective agreement — or even better, collectively creating — the end goal, what success looks like after this change, is essential. Everyone having a common vision of what they’re aiming for makes it much more likely they’ll reach it.
Create a plan to get to the end goal: Once the end goal, the vision of post-change, is in place, you and the team can work out how to get there. This is definitely an agile, rather than waterfall, process — focus on next steps.
Continuous improvement: Neither the end goal nor the plan to get there will be correct at the beginning. Frequent retrospectives and revisiting are necessary to keep things on track, to keep the discussion about “the team vsthe challenge”, and to make better choices as more data is uncovered working through the change.
Working with individuals as needed: This is principally a team, rather than an individual, change. But it will affect individuals differently, and individuals will need personalized help. Make sure one-on-ones cover the changes, and how they’re doing; provide feedback and coaching as needed.
Handling this well is a lot of work. Depending on the nature of the change the team is going through, it can be exhausting.
But a team facing a big change, tackling it together, talking openly about the issues, and finding solutions to them collectively, will come out the other side strengthened by the change and its challenges, rather than weakened. They will almost certainly have come up with a better way of handling the change than we could have decreed ourselves at the onset. They’ll have more confidence in their ability to work together to solve new challenges.
Handling The New Management Work
This change is hard on us, too, especially since we’re trying to shepherd the team through it in addition to dealing with it ourselves.
There’s going to be a tonne of one-off up-front work for us preparing for and dealing with the change, and then very likely some steady-state increased amount management work post-change. (It is of course mathematically possible that the change we’re asked to implement will reduce the amount of work we have to do, but in your experience, how often does that happen?)
There’s no trick to handling this, unfortunately. There’s the same tools available to us as always, only amped up in urgency:
Communicate constantly: Just as we had to manage expectations of the team’s stakeholders, we’ll have to manage our “stakeholders” - peers, our manager, and any others. We need these lines of communications open as we work our way through this.
Prioritize ruthlessly: Some things just aren’t going to get done, at all, period. The classic manager 101 and 201 work, doing one-on-ones and goal setting, and team rituals like retrospectives, are more vital now than others. Those will have to be prioritized, even if it means focusing inwards for now. Are there other things you can at least temporarily not do? Are there coordination meetings or projects you can bow out of? Is there reporting or other work that can be halted? The people you’re communicating with can offer guidance.
Delegate, on our team and to others: Just because work has to be done doesn’t mean we have to do it. Some activities (hiring/firing, promotions..) by their nature need to be done by the person sitting in our chair. Almost anything else is delegateable. Delegation can be done in small steps (#154) or all at once, and can be done within our team or to peers. Within our team it should be a valuable and welcomed growth opportunity; to peers it’s more likely to be a favour you have to ask for. Either way, it’s useful to ask ourselves hard questions like, “do I really need to be the one to do this?” The answer is “no” surprisingly often.
Consider deputizing one or more team members: A powerful way to delegate is to give large chunks of responsibility to others. This especially helps when the team grows beyond your capacity to manage well (usually around ten people; it can be more or less depending on the team and the work, but more than ten is usually hard even for experienced managers on mature teams). You can assign some team members to lead or supervise certain tasks or subteams, even without formal titles or structures. This requires coaching and clear boundaries, and careful oversight at first. But it can develop their leadership skills and reduce your workload. Even if the team isn’t growing rapidly, handing off some kind of “team lead” or “supervisor” or “deputy manager” responsibilities for particular team members or kinds of work can be a valuable for you and them.
None of this is easy; change is hard, not least on the person who steps up to manage the change. But it is doable, particularly if one focusses on the team level first before the individual level.
What else have you seen work or not work? How have you helped teams wrestle with ambiguity and change? Let me know - email me at jonathan@managerphd.com, or as aways set up a time to chat about this topic or anything else on a Manager, Ph.D. reader input call.
And now, on to the roundup!
Managing Individuals
Management Prospects - erik johannessen
Three skills to develop before becoming an engineering leader - Nav Kumar, LeadDev
Three Ways to Gain Visibility into Indirectly Managed Teams -
,If you are going to brevet some team members into semi-formal roles of broader responsibility, you’ll need to:
Identify some likely prospects,
Manage the process of getting them started, and
Stay on top of how the sub-teams are doing, because you’re still ultimately accountable for their success and well-being.
One-on-ones and quarterly goal setting are great ways to find out what people are interested in. Johannessen’s article describes what he looks for in people who he’s considering for more leadership or management responsibility:
Successfully demonstrating some leadership or glue-work already: facilitating collaboration, introducing a new practice or process, advocating for improvements to how the team works,
Someone who is reliable,
Someone who is honest (when things start to go awry with a new responsibility, it is so tempting to lie and say things are going well to the person who entrusted you with that responsibility), and
Someone who is unselfish - as we know, leadership and management means it’s no longer about you.
Kumar’s article is about preparing to become a leader ourselves, but it’s good to think about in the context of helping someone grow into eventually becoming a leader:
Technical skills: Broaden their skillset, have them mentor others, and look at th bigger picture
Interpersonal skills: See a project through end-to-end, get involved with stakeholders, build internal and external relationships
Business skills: Understand the problem being solved, how the organization works, and how (and why!) the team is funded.
Finally, handing over some management or leadership responsibility not only helps grow the skills of the team member; it gives us the opportunity to practice next level skills. Here, it means we need to learn to be a director of sort - a lead-of-leads. That means maintaining visibility into the new indirectly managed teams, which is what Samuel’s great article describes.
Samuel starts with the goals of effectiveness of managing indirectly:
First, you need to understand what’s happening on indirectly managed teams below you.
Second, add things necessary for execution.
Third, remove things getting in the way of execution.
and then some guides about what that means - for our purposes that means
Understanding how the teams are doing their work - are decisions being made sensibly, do they have the necessary tools…
Understanding if the team’s results are good and sustainable
Understanding if the team is engaged and happy
Tactically Samuel suggests one-on-ones, which are useful, and other possible data collection approaches (surveys) and metric tracking to see if things are on track.
Samuel’s really nice article is focussed on tech roles and companies, but it’s very much worth spending more time with than this quick summary.
Managing Teams
Kicking the Can Down the Road (On Hard Decisions) - Ed Batista
Reframing The Problem - erik johannessen
Leaders Can Always Make a Bad Decision Worse -
In #158 we talked about making management decisions, and how to make them as a manger and not as a researcher (sometimes it feels like we can always read another book or collect more data or ponder a bit more making a firm call).
Batista writes six common reasons he often sees leaders hesitate to make a big decision, and how to combat them:
They overestimate the costs (to themselves of making the call, of closing off an option) and underestimate the benefits (to others of having clarity)
They’re too optimistic (if there are only “least bad” options, or of their ability to keep muddling along)
They feel guilty about past decisions (something turned out badly before and once burned..)
They’re overwhelmed by data
They don’t trust their intuition
Johannsen (appearing again!) writes about getting unstuck on a decision, whether a team decision or one you have to make, by reframing the problem. And if that doesn’t work - just choosing. (Bautista has an article I quite like on, seriously, flipping a coin).
Finally, the Admired Leadership Field Notes newsletter points out that if the decision does end up bad - which happens! - doubling down or taking risks to redeem ourselves on the next decision almost always ends up poorly. Accept that the decision went poorly, do what can be done to fix things or walk the decision back, learn from it (but not too much! Don’t over-index on how one decision turned out), then move on.
Managing Within Organizations
Lesson #13: Providing updates to senior executives - Kelly Vaughn,
One area that we routinely have challenges with is presenting material to more senior people in our organizations. We spent a lot of time being trained to give one-hour presentations to fellow experts who weren’t familiar with our day-to-day work, presenting our case with unassailable levels of detail and evidence. That… is not how the rest of the world likes to be communicated to. (To be honest, even most of us didn’t enjoy it at the time, but that’s Just How Things Are Done.)
Vaughn has great and succinct advice for us as we provide updates to decision makers.
Be ready to state the business case for your decisions and proposals
Be honest about your effort’s feasibility
Get right to the point
Know your audience
Share your presentation ahead of time (“especially the negatives”, which is a brilliant point)
You don’t have to have answers to every question. (Our training actually helps us with this one; you don’t get very far in research pretending you can provide a full answer to absolutely everything).
It’s a great short article and well worth reading in it’s entirety.
Managing Your Own Career
How to network at academic conferences -
,As in the managing up article we covered last issue (#159), “networking” gets a bad reputation. Let’s face it, a number of us kind of want to keep our peopling time to a minimum, and so it’s easy to disparage voluntary peopling.
But like managing up, it’s a professional duty to develop and maintain a network of professional relationships. A strong professional network helps make sure that we get information we need about the state of the profession, and means we can share information with those that need it. It exposes us to new ideas that are relevant to our work. It’s a mechanism by which we can offer juniors connections and mentoring resources.
Prof Berdahl’s very helpful article is about academic conferences, but it applies to really any kind of meetups. It extends an earlier article on building a strategic network, with an image I really like of consistently maintaining relationships or moving them one notch deeper:
From no relationship ties to weak ties
From weak ties to close ties
Berdahl has a number of really helpful suggestions (read the article for details), including:
Focus on the opportunity to strengthen relationships with external people, rather than the other attendees from the same org
Define some networking priorities, such as
Increasing the number of weak ties
Strengthen weak ties
Solidify close ties
Decide on networking approaches (Berdahl has a number of useful tips here)
Plan on some things in advance (especially alcohol, which is a great point)
Be generous with networking, introducing people (especially juniors) to others.
For what it’s worth, I personally find it easier to do these things when I’m focussed on others rather than myself. I feel less self-conscious when I cast myself as the role of host and introduce myself to someone sitting alone, or introduce people together, make a point of telling people about the new things I’ve learned from others at the meeting.
That’s It…
And that’s it for the week! I hope it was useful; Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share with me about how a newsletter or community about management for people like us might be even more valuable. Just email me, leave a comment, reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox, or schedule a quick Manager, Ph.D. reader input call.
Have a great weekend, and best of luck in the coming week week with your team,
Jonathan
Thanks for sharing my post! I appreciate it!