Letter to a New People Manager

As of this August, I’ve been a people manager at Pivotal for four years. I reflected on my time in this role, and wrote down some thoughts on the things I’ve learned. I’ve made mistakes as a manager, which has helped shape how I operate today. None of this is particularly novel; you can probably read something similar in a book about management. Nonetheless, here are a few things I’ve learned and things I know to be true about managing others!

Get to know your report. Seriously.

One of the most important things you can do when you start managing a new report is to get to know them. You don’t need to become their best friend or hang out with them on the weekend, but you do need to learn more about what motivates them and what keeps them engaged. Some questions you could ask to learn more:

• Why did they take this job?
• What did they hope to learn from this role?
• What do they enjoy about coming in to work everyday?
• What are the activities in a day that they just can’t get enough of? Why?
• What are the activities that they absolutely hate doing? Why?
• What did their journey look like in coming to work in your company or in this role?

The better you know the answer to these questions, the better it will help explain the actions they take at work. It will help you drive better conversations about career growth. And overall, it will help you build trust. I prioritize this as the most important goal in the first few months with a report.

Set expectations early.

Many of the hardest conversations I have had as a manager could have been made easier if I had set expectations early. Being clear about the expectations of the role, your relationship, how certain company processes work, among other things, is good for your report and good for you. It helps your report understand what success looks like. It helps them understand what feedback cycles exist to ensure they are on the right track. They will understand how or when you will tell them if things are going off track. It can seem trivial to share things like when you expect to see the report at work in the morning, but if ever you have to bring up tardiness later, you’ll be glad you were explicit.

Every report comes with different baggage about past managers and leadership.

Think about the best manager you’ve had in your career. Now think about the worst one. These managers likely behaved differently, had different values, and probably interacted with you in different ways. Every report that walks in the door has different ideas about what good and bad managers look like. In some cases, they may have even left a job because of a bad manager. It is important that you seek to understand their manager history. Find out:

• What did relationships with past managers look like?
• What did those managers do well?
• What did those manage do poorly?
• Did they feel that they were treated fairly by that manager?
• How was their manager involved in career growth and feedback?
• How did that manager communicate with them?

In many companies, a manager is there to oversee your work. Your report might think that is what you are going to do at your company. In others, the manager is absent most of the year, and then swoops in during performance review time, learns a little about what the report has been up to for a year, and bases a compensation change on that short-term peer feedback. Understanding your reports hopes or fears about management will make your relationship stronger.

I’ll be with you now and later.

In my early days being a manager, I got caught off guard when one of my reports told me they were giving their notice. They had never mentioned being particularly unhappy, and we hadn’t had a chance to explore their career options within the company. This taught me that I needed to be explicit that this was a topic they could always talk to me about.

Now, when I get a new report, I tell them on their first day: I will be with you now and later (if you want that!). I explain that I am going to be motivated to keep them at the company, but I am also someone they can lean on as a career advocate. I tell them early that if a time comes when the job or role is no longer right for them: that is something we can talk about without fear of consequences.

Be available and engaged.

Every report has a different way they like to communicate — some in person, others in Slack. Some reports appreciate being able to send a text when they are running late to work. Find out what works for your report and meet them on the medium that works for them. If you only use the tools that work for you, it will be harder for them to communicate with you. This may mean you have to make compromises in how you work, but it will ensure that your report has fewer barriers to communicating with you.

It can be tempting to explain away problems. Don’t.

I can’t tell you the number of times a report has brought me an issue that was bothering them and I jumped in to try and help them solve it. I cut them off to give them context, reasons, answers. I left the room, assuming that I had solved their problem. But I had only made the situation worse! The report had wanted to explore the issue, and in some cases just be heard. Don’t explain away their problems. Learn how to find the right balance of listening and collaborating on working through problems.

You can only do so much! You’re a manager, but you also have a day job.

When I’m in the midst of helping a report, I want to dive right in and spend all of my time helping them. But that isn’t a sustainable model. On product teams at Pivotal, we try to reduce the bus count — that is, we try to avoid situations where one person is responsible for everything, as we don’t want to create silos or bottlenecks. It is risky when we rely on a single person to solve problem.

Do the same thing with your report. Find ways to build a network of people who can help your report. Help your report identify different people they can go to for different types of help. Don’t be that bottleneck when they need help or for growth.

Early on, I felt guilty when I couldn’t find the time to collect as much feedback as I wanted for my reports. I just couldn’t keep up. While I still collect regular feedback for reports, I’ve tried to teach reports to collect their own feedback as well. Help them build a sustainable model for these feedback loops. Encourage your report to help you tell the story of their success; I always tell my reports: “please brag to me!” The more feedback and success stories that you can get others to push to you, the better.

Be direct with feedback (especially the hard stuff).

When I first had to give constructive feedback, I wanted to give a feedback sandwich: a little bit of the positive, a little bit of the constructive, but end on a happy note. This can make it easier for you, as the feedback giver, but you aren’t doing your report any favors. If you are dealing with a real issue, don’t bury the lede. You need to avoid any ambiguity if you really want to see a change. The kind thing to do is to be direct.

Giving useful feedback means being creative, adjusting your tactics as your report grows.

Regular feedback is important, but one size does not fit all. Sometimes peer feedback is what a report needs; other times, they need feedback from leadership. A few things I’ve learned as a result of trying different tactics:

• Feedback from others as direct quotes (over only presenting synthesized feedback) can be helpful to ensure you’re reducing bias
• Reviewing feedback should be a discussion between you and your report, not just a presentation; feedback is nuanced and there is often bias packed into it
• I often use the word “consider” when sharing certain types of feedback; I try to avoid telling the report what to do (I still use more pointed language when there is an area that they must improve)
• Peer feedback can be tricky! As much as we’d like to think individuals will be unbiased in their feedback, it is a very tall task. Seek to understand who the feedback giver is, where their head is at the day they gave the feedback, how they are doing on their team. Get more context.

Create different types of feedback loops. Prove that action comes from these activities.

You will likely have 1:1s with your reports — this is a great place to get and share information and feedback. But in the spirit of continuous improvement and feedback, you should consider finding other methods for feedback loops over time. This could mean encouraging your manager to set up a skip level with your report, different types of retrospectives, encouraging your report to participate in the company or team health surveys, among other things. A report may be more willing to share certain kinds of feedback in different formats.

But having those feedback loops set up is not enough: show your report what comes from them giving feedback, proving that action actually gets taken. If someone consistently participates in giving feedback but believes it goes into a black hole, they will be less likely to participate in the future. Additionally, avoid feedback loop fatigue — ensure you’re creating the right cycles but not overdoing it.

Don’t blame others when you have a hard conversation.

It can be hard when you as a manager have to deliver challenging news to a report, and it gets even harder when you’re operating under constraints yourself. Take for example a report where you’ve advocated that they should get a big raise, but the budget doesn’t allow for it. In this moment, it could be easy to blame the company or others for this fact. Be honest with your report about the reality of the situation, but don’t blame others.

Don’t make compromises on hiring.

When people say hiring, you probably think about recruiting, interviewing, and making an offer. But those are the activities to achieve the outcome: great team members who will help the company achieve their goals. When you have aggressive hiring goals, it can feel easier to focus on getting bodies in the door. My advice to you: do not compromise on hiring. When you make compromises now, it a short term fix, and will result in a ripple effect of problems later.

A few things I know to be true about building a great team:

• It is crucial to ensure candidates demonstrate an ability and willingness to learn
• Hire for values over skills; if you are hiring someone with the ability to learn, you can work to teach them the skills they need; values are much harder to course correct later
• When your team is a “maybe” on a candidate, it is likely a no; work to tease out of your team where the hesitations are (and make sure to check that bias!)
• Hiring for diversity is critical: a diverse team makes for a better workplace and is able to bring different angles and perspectives to the table when building great products

Lean on other managers. Learn from them!

One of the biggest ways I’ve honed my craft as a manager is by actually experiencing challenging situations. You can’t will these situations to happen (and probably don’t want to!), and so they only come up so often. But you probably want to be continuously learning as a manager. So what should you do? Learn from other managers! Encourage activities as a manager team that allow you to share stories and learn from each other.

You can also lean on other managers for gathering feedback. Managers give great feedback: they understand the level of detail you’re looking for and aren’t afraid to give the constructive feedback. Make sure you’re leveraging them for feedback regularly.

There are no winners or losers. Sometimes there is no right answer in a challenging situation.

When I’ve helped mediate interpersonal issues between individuals, I have found myself trying to figure out who was “right” in the situation. I tried to gather evidence to understand what really happened. Many situations have more gray area than that. Learn to navigate next steps for each side, while not deeming one person the winner. Set a good example for others that everyone has something to learn from a challenging situation.

What’s in is your letter to new managers?

So now that I’ve summed up my list, I’d love to know: managers, what’s on your list? What are your lessons learned? If you could write a letter to a new manager, what would you tell them? I hope you’ve found this list helpful and it sparks great discussion for you and your management team.