7 Principles that Guided me to be an Effective Manager
As a young professional a few years back, I aspired to be a manager for one simple reason: It was the progression in the career ladder.
Looking back now, I guess I’ve spent far more time working hard to reach that title, rather than actually thinking about what the role meant.
After spending a significant amount of time as one, I’m documenting the lessons I’ve found useful along the way in this post for a couple of reasons:
- To remind myself the key lessons I’ve learned
- To share and exchange thoughts with anyone who is in the same role
- To hopefully share what worked for me to people who aspire to be future leaders
Principle #1: Energy, motivation, and expectation management are just as crucial as time management
I’ve spent a significant part of my career as an individual contributor and I can safely say that it’s impossible for me to operate at 100% brain capacity for an entire eight or so hours. To work at our maximum, there has to be time allocated to cultivating ideas, building up momentum, and active resting.
As a manager, it is desirable to see our team operating at its maximum potential, but I suppose there is the unhealthy tendency to associate ‘hard work’ with the image of people being heads down 24/7.
It’s important as a manager to be conscious of people’s mental energies and I found it helpful to encourage these hours of ‘cultivation’ just as much as we looked up to hard work.
Of course, there’s always going to be the fine line of knowing when to push the team. At the end of the day, however, the ultimate barometer of success is the simple question of “are outcomes incrementally being realized or not?” and that gauge is the fail-safe signal for managers.
Avoid at all costs:
- Thinking the team is ‘lazy’ just because they’re relaxing — leads to micromanaging
- Failing to give feedback when outcomes are not realized.
- Not accounting for rest and personal mental schedules (plan meetings more than three working days in advance!)
Principle #2: Vulnerability is an underrated leadership skill
I’ve heard of what people call ‘boss’ culture where the relationship between managers and their team is built around the idea that the manager is always right. I recognize there are environments where this is the most efficient way to realize value.
However, working with smart and talented people, I believe the only blocker to progress is building a psychologically safe environment, and managers have the greatest influence on this.
This is not a passive exercise. Building an environment where only the best ideas win is not a one-off ‘do you have any questions’ in a meeting, or an annual google form asking for feedback. It has to be a habit where we constantly and openly admit that we do not have all the answers, and we equally need feedback to improve as well.
This not only allows yourself to be aware of your faults, but it also encourages everyone to explore without the unnecessary fear of judgement.
Avoid at all costs:
- Only giving one-way feedback
- Hiring people who will take advantage and misinterpret your vulnerability as weakness
- Letting only the ‘loudest person in the room’ (which is usually the manager) to speak
Principle #3: You don’t have to be the expert, but you have to be the enabler
As an individual contributor who transitioned to become a manager, I thought that the best way to support my team was to learn everything that they were doing. However, what I’ve realized is that it wasn’t my job to learn everything, but rather, to support and empower them in everything they’re doing.
This meant that my full-time job was to enable people to be capable of reaching their highest potential.
This is certainly more ambiguous than an individual contributor path where ‘performing well’ means making high quality concrete output. As a manager, this can carry different meanings, which may include mapping out goals, clearing the path for opportunities, imparting a vision, and even also getting our hands dirty (actually learning a specialized skill) from time to time.
Avoid at all costs:
- Discouraging exploratory projects as part of business priorities
- Not being deliberate in management initiatives (meetings for team alignment, 1–1 sessions for career and personal development, stakeholder discussions and visibility, etc.)
Principle #4: Good managers are Reactive, but Great managers are Preventive
If company shoutouts happen, it’s usually because of someone solving a glaring problem that everyone had their eyes on. This gave me the impression before that what would make me a good manager is pre-emptively allocating ‘80% of my time to put out fires.’
I’m lucky enough to have had a manager that taught me otherwise — he emphasized that my job was not just to solve business problems — that’s my job as an employee. As a ‘manager,’ it’s my job to develop the systems that prevent them.
For example, if employee attrition is a problem, it’s one thing to convince people to stay (reactive), but it’s an entire undertaking to develop the means such that employees are constantly happy (preventive). If an important change needs to happen, it’s easy to simply give an order to shift gears (reactive), but it’s an entire undertaking to create a roadmap for people to follow while recognizing their capability to transition (preventive).
It’s ironic and completely opposite to what success means to an individual contributor, but the less noisy things are, then that means we are potentially doing more of the right things as a manager.
Avoid at all costs:
- Allocating >50% of the time to put out fires (it should be allocating >50% of the time to prevent fires). The remaining time is spent for innovation, strategy, etc.
- Failing to enact proper Change Management
Principle #5: Managers manage outcomes by managing people, not the other way around
This one is a bit more practical (and relevant for upward management).
For many people (including myself), one of the main motivators to becoming a manager is the desire to mentor people. I did a whiteboard exercise before with fellow managers where we made a word map for words associated with the word ‘Manager.’
It was late in my management stint that I realized that leading, mentoring, coaching, etc., are all simply means to an end. As a manager, our main role is to manage the path towards realizing organizational goals.
As direct as it may sound, a manager is considered performing depending on how well he or she is able to follow through on the team’s goals, rather than how well he or she coaches or leads the team.
It may sound bleak, but this isn’t a bad thing. It also means managers are expected to deliver a result beyond what a single person can do. That’s where mentoring, teaching, visioning, and leadership becomes necessary for the role.
Delivering results with your own capability makes you a good manager, but delivering results thru others is what will make you a great manager.
Avoid at all costs:
- Thinking that the only requirement for management is being a good coach — we also have to be able to rally people to a cause, collaborate with senior stakeholders to open opportunities, and much more.
Principle #6: Radical Candor
Speaking of results and outcome, I personally resonate with the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott. This book has been recommended to me by multiple leaders I respect, and it has guided a large portion of how I approach my team (and even personal relationships).
The message from the book is simple: In order to achieve the best results, we have to both care personally and challenge directly whenever we give people feedback.
The picture of the framework is what I embedded in my memory, and this guide gives me the necessary cues whenever I give feedback to my team, peers, and also my bosses (̶i̶̶̶n̶̶̶c̶̶̶l̶̶̶u̶̶̶d̶̶̶i̶̶̶n̶̶̶g̶̶̶ ̶̶̶m̶̶̶y̶̶̶ ̶̶̶g̶̶̶i̶̶̶r̶̶̶l̶̶̶f̶̶̶r̶̶̶i̶̶̶e̶̶̶n̶̶̶d̶̶̶)̶:
Caring Personally:
- Am I confident the person is in the appropriate emotional state to receive feedback?
- Am I giving feedback because I’m frustrated? Or is it because I want to help the person?
- Have I built the necessary relationship with this person to be able to give candid feedback?
Challenging Directly:
- Am I giving feedback truthfully? No pullbacks?
- Am I giving constructive feedback? Can I offer an alternative to help the person?
I’m certain I’m oversimplifying the message of the book, so I ultimately recommend people to read the entirety of it!
Principle #7: Managing is situational, there is no ‘one-style-fit-all’ approach
I personally love teaching. Naturally, this translated into my role as a manager, where I spent most of the time coaching during my first months in my training to become one.
While this may have worked for some members of the team, I have received the feedback that I tend to dictate how an output should be done, to the point that I deprive a learning opportunity for someone else.
As I shifted to a more delegating and directing style, I ironically have also then received feedback that people need the guidance to avoid rabbit-holing.
The framework that helped me move forward is the Situational Leadership Model, where the idea is to apply various approaches on managing depending on the person we are aiming to develop.
What I found that worked best for me was to keep track and actually write down at what stage each member in the team is, and this serves as a guide as to how I adjust my leadership style.
We keep a monthly cadence where my team and I align what are the key wins and shortcomings. This is not an exercise to scrutinize performance, but rather, we establish it to be an actionable exercise where we determine our next steps, as all feedback should be.
Avoid at all costs:
- Imparting feedback only at the end of a performance cycle (as my manager always used to say: “A good performance cycle is one with no surprises”)
- Assessing a person’s performance without alignment with the individual involved — this may lead to being blindsided on both wins and shortcomings.
Management is more than just a title in the career ladder
Sharing candidly, I do hold the opinion that management should be a non-obligatory path to move forward with our careers. It is an entirely different skillset to being a deep specialist, and it is also a full-time job to be a manager, but both require competency and desire.
Multiple companies have caught on to this trend and have provided the option to progress in either path, and the hope is this idea becomes more common in the professional scene.
For those that do choose the management path, it is imperative that we continue to develop these principles, and bring out the best from the people we are ultimately responsible for.
This post is dedicated to (1) my past managers who’ve helped me grow as much as I can and (2) my teammates who continuously inspire me to keep improving as a manager.
Please feel free to shoot an email to nfrimando@gmail.com or connect with me via LinkedIn. Glad to share notes and discuss should you have thoughts and comments to share! Shoutout also to our HR team at First Circle — namely Alezander Zupancic and Ching Villaneuva, who taught me multiple management frameworks I use in my practice!
