Managers are your Teenagers waiting for Adult Conversations
Let’s imagine a Developer… starts her career applying her skills in coding from her education to real problems in the industry. If she has good communication skills, has shown good team work behaviours and shown good ownership behaviours and taken on challenges that came along her way in the first few years, it would be reasonable to expect her to grow to become a team lead.
As a team lead, she is now mentoring junior engineers, putting herself in front of the occasional customer interactions and/or escalations and also interviewing people as the organization grows. Lo and behold, its 8 years and she has now become a people manager and is defining growth for herself up this path.
Now let’s imagine the organizational context for a minute.. The company she works in is a mid-size company tech company of 400 employees and creates value for its customers from its engineering talent.
If I were to now pose a question — What will be the top 3 priorities for the HR organization, a team of (possibly) 5 people in such a company be?
- Recruitment, Compensation and Benefits
- Employee On-boarding and Off-boarding and HR compliance
- Employee Engagement events
- Performance review process
- Talent Management system for skill development
- Growth and succession planning for mid-level leaders
I am willing to bet by the time the team gets to first 3 items, they are already out of steam and have to stretch to manage the performance management process. Where does that leave priorities 5 and 6?
For item 5, most organizations will partner with a skill platform (there are tonnes of them calling themselves “ed-tech”) to impart a variety of skills that engineers need. This will provide a check-box that they are satisfying the talent management needs for the employees.
Who worries about the growth planning of the mid-level managers? People who until they got to this level were prized possessions?
Unfortunately, most mid-size companies handle young managers like families handle teenagers. Teenagers are as tall as adults and speak of being independent and can argue well, so parents assume they must know what they want and will ask what they want when needed. The teens on their part are all wondering where all the loving care went that they got until they got to 12 and how they can handle all the change that they are “expected” to handle with few people other than their friends to deal and share their problems with, who know no better themselves.
What happens to such teenagers if they are left unattended by the adults? They get rebellious, the parents and the teenagers lose the common ground of communication and eventually drift apart, disengaged with the family, wondering what happened in the intervening 4 years?
This is where organizations (much like parents) — especially mid-size businesses must invest in developing their young managers. This implies, helping their managers deal with the following:
- What to delegate, when to delegate and why to delegate
- How to develop trust, gain trust even while being vulnerable
- How to deal with incompetence and indiscipline in the team while being compassionate
- How to differentiate between skill and potential — what to reward and what to promote
- How to handle conflict within the team
- How to handle conflict on behalf of the team
- Being accountable and driving alignment for the team
- Being able to disagree and commit — putting team goals ahead of personal convictions
- Sufficient self-awareness to develop their own style of managing people
- Team building, people budgeting and succession planning
The list above is the essence of what Development is all about. These cannot be “taught” but has to be nourished through constant mature engagement. Senior management and particularly HR must facilitate such communication to ensure the “teenagers” can grow and becomes adults and become adult personalities in their own right.
Development is all about coaching (as opposed to mentoring). Its about having engaging and open conversations in safe environments that will allow the potential of the managers to manifest in ways that cannot be predicted (and hence not “programmed”).
So, here we are… we started with a developer and ended with development. Are you thinking about the development needs of your early stage managers?
If yes, congratulations….
If not, fret not; Start today and start the coaching journey for your managers who are waiting to be heard and become the adults you want them to be on your organizations path to success.
