Bringing Up the Boss: Practical Lessons for New Managers by Rachel Pacheco was published in 2021 by Matt Holt Books, an imprint of BenBella Books, Inc. The book provides helpful advice for new managers and covers topics such as leadership, communication, and team-building in the workplace.
It includes real-world examples and practical tips to help new managers navigate the challenges of their roles and build successful teams. Overall, the book aims to teach new managers how to be effective leaders and bring out the best in their employees.
Great Expectations
Often, we don’t articulate what we expect from our team members; this leads to disappointment, frustration, and the feeling that our team members are incompetent.
We don’t set expectations because we’re afraid of people thinking we’re micromanagers, and we overestimate the abilities and competence of junior people.
The solution is simple: Each time we assign a task or action, we should articulate why the task is necessary and its overall objective, define what good looks like, and state when we want the work done. If possible, we should provide examples of similar work.
The Complications of Compensation
Compensation motivates your team, but often not in ways that are rational, and there are times when paying people more money might demotivate them.
Be careful about taking money away from individuals or expecting a small amount of money to be a huge motivator. This is because of loss aversion, the concept that people are much more upset about losing money than they are excited about an equivalent gain.
Making Work Meaningful
As a manager, you can help your team members find meaning in their day-to-day work. You can do this in how you design and structure roles and how your team frames and perceives their work.
There are five design choices that make a job meaningful: task significance, task identity, skill variety, autonomy, and feedback.
Often, little things you do as a manager can impact those five factors.
Job crafting is a tool used to help team members reframe how they think about their daily activities and how they align with their broader motives and purposes.
There’s No Crying in Baseball
Emotions are a tricky topic in the workplace—we are often encouraged to hide our feelings, often to the detriment of bringing our authentic selves to our jobs.
Emotional labor occurs when the inner emotions someone feels don’t match the outer emotions someone is expected to express. Lots of emotional labor can cause stress and burnout at work.
Emotional contagion is the immediate and subconscious spread of emotions between people. Emotional contagion is particularly impactful on a team, where one little negative emotion can quickly create a collective negative emotion for the whole team.
The Trifecta of Motivation: Achievement, Power, and Affiliation
Each of us is motivated by a mixture of three basic needs. Most of us have a dominant need that primarily drives how we are motivated.
Understanding one’s dominant need helps to understand what is motivating to the individual and specifically how to structure work, provide praise, and reward performance.
The three needs are achievement, power, and affiliation.
- Someone with a deep need for achievement is motivated by setting and accomplishing goals and showing progress.
- Someone with a deep need for power cares about their ability to influence and compete.
- And someone with a deep need for affiliation cares about their community and being liked by those around them.
Feedback is a gift you need, maybe not one you want
Your job as a manager is to provide constructive, timely feedback. You will hurt your employee’s long-term career prospects if you do not provide feedback.
We are terrible at giving feedback because we want to be liked, and we know that individuals have a hard time receiving feedback.
We are terrible at receiving feedback because we are biologically hardwired to run from threats to our ego; we also believe our performance is better than it typically is.
Goal Interrupted: The Good and the Bad of Setting Goals
Goal setting is a powerful tool that can help motivate teams and drive productive behavior.
Goals can also create unintended consequences, including unethical behavior, a myopic view of the organization, and a failure to innovate.
Furthermore, in start-ups, annual goals are often wildly mismatched with how the business operates: static goals don’t align to a dynamic and quick-changing environment.
The Heavyweight Title Fight
Promotions and titles are a great motivator, especially for team members who are driven by achievement and power.
Yet a sloppy approach to promotions and titles can ultimately hurt the person being promoted, hurt your ability to recruit other team members, and hurt your ability to motivate the rest of your team.
The case for a promotion is made when an individual shows competence and success in their role, performs better than their peers, and when there is a new set of responsibilities and requirements (i.e., a new role) that the organization needs.
Feedback Contd.
Effective feedback starts from a place of data and objectivity and provides actionable modifications to behavior at the end of the feedback.
Great managers also actively solicit feedback from their team members; they praise and reward those team members who show courage in giving hard feedback.
Just do it. If there is one thing you take away from this chapter, it’s that you should just start giving feedback. It will be awkward at first, but the important thing is that you start doing it.
Managing Performance Anxiety
It’s important for you, as a manager, to be comfortable putting your team members on performance improvement plans when they are not meeting expectations of performance.
When assessing someone’s performance, there are subconscious biases that may inhibit us from being completely objective with how someone is performing; these include the ladder of inference, attribution theory, and confirmation bias.
A good PIP has a defined timeline and is concise: it should focus on three to four areas of improvement and a short set of clear action items for the person to work toward.
