#173 - Are you accomplishing things, or are you just busy?
Plus: Giving feedback; Coaching skills at work; The infinite hows; First, understand; and Stop people pleasing.
Manager, Ph.D. is a newsletter and community which helps people from the world of research reach their full potential managing teams and enacting changes. We’ve already developed the advanced skills to be exceptional managers; we just need help with the basics.
If you’re new to the community, drop me a note! Some past issues from the archive which you might be interested in include:
#157, “It's Ok To Be Uncomfortable With Management Jargon. Now Get Over It”
#164, “Make Communication Easier By Trying On The Other's Communication Style”
#165, “Thinking in Experiments: Your Management Lab Notebook”
Plus of course the one-on-one and feedback guides.
And whether you’re new to the community or not, feel free to email me, or even have a quick chat with me about problems you have, or things you’d like to see!
One of the issues I see managers like us wrestle with is that it’s easy to become very very busy without actually accomplishing much.
Part of this is because we tend to throw ourselves into doing tasks that we could easily let our team members take on.
Another part is that, facing a little bit of impostor syndrome (#170), it’s easy to start doing elaborate pre-work (research, analysis, planning), which feels like doing something, rather than getting started.
It’s also really easy to avoid hard conversations or giving challenging feedback, and so end up having to re-do work, or do elaborate workarounds for inadequate processes or people who are doing the wrong thing rather than dealing with the issue.
And it can also be easy to avoid hard decisions, distinguishing between high priorities and low priorities and choosing not to advance work on the low priorities right now.
The problem is that this state of being furiously busy while accomplishments or deadlines start to fall by the wayside can lead to a vicious cycle, as added work to catch up just piles additional busyness on top of the already frantic pace.
This is fixable! Not by some “One Weird Trick” or super-advanced technique, but also not by working still harder or a final enormous effort of will.
The fundamental premise of this newsletter is that management isn’t rocket science. We have more than enough skills to do this job and do this job well.
Doing these jobs just takes regular, sustained attention to performing routine, workaday tasks of management. One-on-ones, feedback (giving and receiving), retrospectives, prioritization, and talking with your manager and stakeholders.
It starts with carving some time out of your calendar to start working on the situation, not just in the situation. Find or create two one hour blocks on your calendar as soon as possible. Do it by cancelling or postponing the least useful thing on there right now. You don’t even need to know what you’re going to do yet.
In the first blocks, start by looking critically at the situation. How did things get here? What are the things you’re working around or against?
“The team has too much to do” - that’s a prioritization issue, and one will benefit from conversations with your manager, stakeholders, or others across the organization (#171). Some items are going to need to be dropped, and it’s easier if they participate in the discussion earlier. Then there’s a change management process of stopping doing something (#50).
“XXX won’t stop/start doing YYY” - that’s a feedback conversation waiting to happen, and it doesn’t get easier the longer you wait.
“I’ve been doing all these things and everyone else is busy, they don’t have time to take them on” - this is something you can work on incrementally, by slowly making each “next time” a little easier (#153) and then growing the team’s ability to get things done (#154).
“I've been looking into it but I’m still not sure how to start this new project” - sometimes you just have to start. Thinking about things, after a while, hits diminishing returns. I’ll talk about this more next issue - action brings clarity.
It’s not that hard, and it doesn’t take super advanced leadership techniques. It’s fixable, using small and simple (but not necessarily easy) steps. Usually these situations take a long time to develop, and they will also take a long time to unwind. But you can get there.
If you find yourself stuck in one of these vicious busy cycles, or you have in the past and had something else that worked, reach out and email me (jonathan@managerphd.com), or share a comment.
And now, on to the roundup!
Managing Individuals
Management Skills: How to Give Constructive Feedback in the Workplace - Tara Nouveau, LifeLabs
I really like LifeLabs very concrete and small scale exercises for building management skills, especially around communications. Their writing style is very different than mine, and different than I normally enjoy reading, but the material is excellent.
Here, Nouveau gives detailed instructions on giving good and useful feedback in the work place; the content overlaps with for instance my recommendations but there’s a lot more attention paid to the emotional side of things. I’m not great at writing those topics, so I don’t, but it’s manifestly a very important aspect of giving and receiving feedback! So do read the article.
If you like Nouveau’s article and style, LifeLabs’ book is really quite good. (Note: nothing here is ever sponsored or an affiliate link, I just point out stuff I think might be helpful).
Coaching Skills for Managers I: The Coaching Steering Wheel - Philipp Hauer
Advanced Coaching Questions - Paloma Medina
One of the hard things for people like us who take roles like ours is that we are extremely driven just to solve the problem and fix the thing. We were extremely capable at that, we got a lot of satisfaction and recognition from doing that. Being an expert who people bring interesting problems to is a great role, very personally rewarding, and so we’re tempted to just keep doing that.
But that’s not the job any more.
Before, our job was to do the work. Now our job is to create and maintain the environment where the work gets done. Our two responsibilities are to ensure the team as a whole is doing great work and our team members are doing well and growing their skills as individuals.
Both of those responsibilities are being sabotaged if we do the problem solving. If everything sufficiently hard has to go through us, we become bottlenecks for anything new or interesting. And it doesn’t give our team members an opportunity to grow.
Instead, we have to learn to let go of doing the work, of providing the answers to the questions, of fixing the things, and focus on helping our team members do those things instead, not just this time but for the future.
These are two comprehensive articles on coaching our team members who have problems, guiding them through the process of finding a solution. Both of them have a tonne of example questions, which are really valuable - it’s great to have bits of a script available to us.
Haur’s article walks us through a process:
Identifying the problem (and then, the real problem)
Figuring out some desired end states
Generating some options
Figuring out some next steps.
There’s a lot of material there, going deeper into each section with lots of questions to ask.
Medina’s article covers a specific case of coaching someone through some challenging feedback (coming from you or someone else), and what I like about this one is that there is advice and questions for each of five stages of readiness to deal with the problem:
Stage 1: Totally disagree with you that they should change _______, .
Stage 2: Maybe I agree with you? I’m not sure.
Stage 3: I agree I should change_________, but how would I/we make this work?
Stage 4: Successful agreement and collaboration on how this change will happen.
Stage 5: Maintenance stage — I’ve been making the behavioral changes for awhile, and now must work on maintaining momentum and motivation through this process (which requires continuing a connection with my purpose for this change).
(These overlap with but are somewhat different then Rapoport’s Conditions For Improvement).
Managing Teams
The infinite hows - John Allspaw, O’Reilly Radar
This article is almost a decade old, but found its way into my browser recently, and it’s worth recommending.
I’ve spoken before of the importance of routine team retrospectives; in fact, I argue that just as one-on-ones are the foundational tool of managing individuals, retros are the foundational tool of managing teams (#128).
Sometimes when people are digging into something at a retrospective meeting, they’ll use the “five why’s” approach to search for root causes. Allspaw cogently lays out the case against that approach.
The first reason against is that there’s almost never one root cause. That doesn’t mean that digging deeply into the how of what happened isn’t worth doing - it’s just that the siren song of the Single Root Cause can be all too alluring and lead to simplistic answers.
The other reason against is that they question “why” is actually a pretty poor question to ask in these situations.
Asking people why they did something inherently sounds accusatory. Even once you get past that, the fact is that for most of the things we do day to day, we don’t formulate detailed reasons ahead of time - we just do what seems like the right thing. If you ask me why I did almost anything I did for the past few weeks, I’d just retroactively construct a plausible seeming reason on the spot, inevitably including some knowledge I now have but didn’t then. Basically, people retcon answers to “why” questions - not out of dishonestly, but because we don’t actually have a real answer.
And of course asking “why” a technical component of a system did something is… well, kind of goofy. That server or software or widget doesn’t have any agency or intentions. It has mechanisms.
Talking about hows and whats, and following those through the web of answers you end up getting, is much more likely to surface real if complex and nuanced answers, than a search for one root cause with a fixed number of Whys.
We are people of science. We take measurements and postulate mechanisms. Our remit is “What” and “How”. Leave “Why” to the philosophers.
Seek First to Understand - Dan North
The Blue Tape List - Michael Lopp
Whether we’re in a new job or our team is taking on a new type of work, our first instinct as high-achievers is almost always to personally do too much right away. It’s not good for ourselves, it’s not great for our team, and frankly some of our knee-jerk reactions to these new things probably just aren’t right.
North’s advice lines up very nicely with how we’ve talked before about taking on a new responsibility (#130), but I really like how he made two points in particular:
Fix the Next One - watch how the team operates with these tasks, and especially if it’s succeeded in similar kinds of things before, observe failure modes and the teams reaction to them, and tell yourself you’ll fix the next occurrence of this issue if in fact it warrants it.
The Rule of 63 - Of the 63 (or whatever) things you see and note as an issue after the first little while, pick just the top three and work on them. Then go back to the next three if they’re still issues. This reminds me a lot of Lopp’s Blue Tape List (have I really never included that article in the roundup before? Well, now I have - go read it!)
Managing Your Own Career
How to set boundaries and stop people pleasing at work - Nikita Rathi
A lot of people in our community who I talk to — people with STEM PhDs who are now or considering becoming managers — tend to be high achievers who enjoy basking in external validation and conflict avoidant. That’s a rough combination. It’s different from being a people pleaser, but there’s enough overlap in behaviours that I’m always on the lookout for articles for articles on these topics that can be helpful to people in our community. Because I want you to succeed and achieve your ambitions, but I want you to be happy, too, and for it to be sustainable for you.
Rathi has a lengthy article identifying four common personas she sees, and goes into depth about each and some steps to start taking to make things easer for yourself:
Validation seeker - build inner confidence, pay attention to your desires and opinions, aim to find strong and genuine connections
Invisible martyr - develop a bit of assertiveness, seek visibility and recognition, find other areas of fulfilment
Peacemaker - Build other tools for conflict resolution, set boundaries around conflict (not every disagreement is an emergency), prioritize own needs
The Load Bearer - Lower your standers to mere excellence, not perfection, learn to trust and delegate to others, recognize and celebrate achievements
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 weeks with your team,
Jonathan