Setting expectations then training, training and training.

I have written several posts on the importance for setting clear expectations, making sure your team understands your goals and directions. But for your team to succeed they also need to have the knowledge and skills required. And this cannot be done without training.

Every manager’s priority should be to train their teams, for a simple reason, if their team has the right skills they will succeed and therefore the manager will succeed. If they are not properly trained, they will not deliver and then…

Of course training takes time, but as Ben Horowitz said. “being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat.”

This is even more crucial for new hires. I have seen it (and done it) too often, we make a huge effort in recruiting a great candidate, it has been tough, long, painful to find this great candidate… and then once she starts we are too busy to train her, to give her the tools to succeed. And then the new candidate fails and we have to do it again… and bottom line, recruiting again will take 10 times more time than what a good training program would have required, and on top of that we have not been fair with the candidate who failed because of lack of training.

Don’t hire more people than you know you can train well. If you lack time, redirect your effort from recruiting more people to better training your team.

Every manager should ask themselves if they spend enough time :

  • sharing their knowledge with their teams
  • training them

And then face the reality and take actions.

By the way, training is the goal of my blog!

Efficient and productive meetings

Meetings cost a fortune to companies. Direct costs (salaries of everyone attending the meetings) but the highest, most painful, cost is the cost of opportunity! When people attend meetings, they are not working on their top priorities.

So meetings should be taken very seriously.

There are very basic rules for a meeting to be productive:

  • Meetings should have a clear agenda and this agenda should be shared several days BEFORE the meeting. The subject of the meeting should clearly mention its goal.
  • The supporting documents should be shared several days BEFORE the meeting to give enough time to everyone to read it.
  • Everyone should have read the document BEFORE the meeting.
  • We should not read / present the document during the meeting, the goal of the meeting is to DISCUSS it. We do not need to be all in a room to read the document, this is not a book club.
  • In case not everyone was able to read the document, then the meeting needs to be rescheduled. We cannot have 1 person waste the time of everyone else.

AND FINALLY THE GOLDEN RULE: a meeting needs to have meeting minutes with clear actions / decisions. Those minutes need to be reviewed and used long after the meeting took place. The minutes are the most valuable output of the meeting. If there were no minutes, it means the meeting should not have taken place and we have wasted our time (and money).

The few tips above are not best practice, they should be mandatory.

How to destroy a team

Most of us expect to learn and grow and our managers and peers are part of this positive process that we all cherish.

Most of us expect to be treated fairly. This includes getting the same reward for the same investment, effort and value we create. (Yes value creation is important!).

Most of us want to work in a company that grows, can invest and innovate. A company (and a team) we can be proud of.

So what happens when you have colleagues that are laid back, very slow to get the job done, propagate negative energy, make mistakes and do not care about it… and still they end up being treated the same way as you?

And what happens when you know that everyone, including your manager, is aware of their shortcomings, when colleagues, teams are complaining about this person…. and nothing gets done and this person stays in her job and in the organization?

Let me tell you what happens: if you are talented, hard working and want to grow and learn then it’s simple, you just quit! You say good bye to your boss and your organization! Because you expect to be part of a team that has the same values, same goals, same DNA and that of course recognizes the value you can bring…

But of course the ones who enjoy mediocrity will stay around. If you look for a place where not performing, being slow and making mistakes is ok… then the last thing you want to do is to change job if all this is accepted, tolerated.

So as a manager, when you decide to keep low performers because you are afraid to make tough decisions, you simply destroy your team, you make all the top performers leave, and you destroy your own career because you will go nowhere without your team, or we could say that you can go as far as your team can take you. I specifically wrote “you decide” because it’s too easy to say that you have no choice because of whatever excuse you might find not to make a tough decision.

Being a manager is not easy, it means taking tough decisions. It requires courage.

And to finish this post, here is how this same idea was explained by Sebastian Gebski in his blog post: Bozo Effect – from greatness to mediocrity

The problem with bozo effect is not only that it may be hard to spot (from within), but also that it’s very hard to reverse: once you lower these standards, they tend to continue dropping dramatically, because:

  • A players want to play with other A players, …
  • … but B players tend to favor (consciously or not) C players (so they feel more secure, more in control, etc.)

Hierarchy of needs

We all have the same basic needs in our job:

1 – proper equipment!
Starting with a decent computer! Why to spend so much time trying to find a great candidate and then to welcome her with a poor equipment. This is a motivation killer.

2 – to know very clearly what is expected from us by the organization and our boss!
Even if that seems obvious, this is actually a major problem. I have already written a post on this topic (lack of strategic alignment) that I invite you to read again. This is so important to make sure that the people we manage know very clearly, without any doubt, what we, and the organization, expect from them. What we expect from them today, this week, this month, this year.

3 – to receive feedback!
We all want to know when we do well, but also when we are not meeting expectations. If no one tells us, then we will not know that we are missing something until it’s too late. We also need feedback to improve, to grow. No feedback means no growth, no satisfaction and it usually does not end well.

Are you sure everyone in your team is 1000% clear on what you expect from them? Have you given them some feedback today? yesterday? last week? Are you sure? Have you had a 1to1 with them in the past few weeks? Did you take time to plan 2021 with them, to give them a direction? Are you sure they fully understood? And is it written in your 1to1 meeting minutes?

Be ridiculously selective in hiring people

The title of this post comes from the book Essentialism from Greg McKeown. I have never found a better way to express how important, how critical it is to only hire great candidates.

The biggest mistake is to hire a second choice candidate, someone we have doubts on, someone we know is not going to be a great hire with the usual excuse that we are in a rush, that we need someone to take this role, that we need someone very quickly to do the job…. what a costly mistake!

We should NEVER hire an acceptable candidate instead of being patient and working harder until we find a great candidate.

Once you hire the right person your life can really change, you can move forward, you can grow, work on more interesting projects, a new world opens to you…. when you hire someone who is not going to perform well, you will go through months of challenges, frustrations, time wasting…. and still at the end of this long and painful journey you will need to restart the recruitment process again, and pretty often have a big mess to clean up.

Yes recruitment is extremely difficult… we lack CVs, it takes too long to screen and interview candidates, we get rejected, while our days are so busy and there is so much pressure to hire… so we sometimes get weak and take shortcuts… we go for the easy way, we hire someone who might be ok but who is not a great hire… STOP… this is going to take you nowhere…. this is a HUGE mistake.

Hiring the right candidate is life changer, an amazing accelerator, with the right person in your team the sky is the limit… with the wrong candidate… good luck to achieve anything… you will go nowhere.

Be ridiculously selective in hiring people.

And yes, I know it is super difficult, super frustrating, but it is life changing… this is the best and only way to keep growing as a manager. The leverage is so big that I believe it is worth the pain. Don’t give up, stay focused on finding great hires only.