As a manager, I have had my fair share of changes imposed on me (and my team) because of an incoming exec, and I have done my bit in bringing in change to the organizations I have gone to. If you have been in any of these situations, you will realize that change of any kind is hard: whether it is you who is trying to change an organization, or whether you are the recepient of the change.

However, one of the things that I am realizing as I reflect on these experiences is surprising: people who have brought in changes are sometimes not as good at being recepient of changes as you might think they would be. Even though they may pump their fist and push you hard to change, when it is time for them to change, they come across as change resistors! In one of the change management training I took, they gave us a test which evaluated us on whether we embrace change, we are neutral to change, or we resist change. Now I am much more inclined to think that (assuming such tests are valuable at all) there should be two versions of the test: one to test whether you are good or bad at bringing in change to an organization, and then there should be another one to test whether you are good or bad at receiving change when it is imposed on your organization.

I will not be surprised if these two tests show different results for same individuals. Will you be surprised?

Recently I attended a training which highlighted some of the differences between team and workgroups. The discussion started with the team definition. The definition used was the one from ‘Wisdom of Teams‘ book:

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable

This immediately (and rightly so in my opinion) shows that discipline-based teams (like dev team, test team or PM team) is not really a team but a workgroup since it doesn’t have complementary skills and mostly they are individually-accountable. A real team in such discipline-based organizations (which is most of the organizations in this world) will be feature/product teams which are formed to create solution for a specific problem.

However, this got me thinking again on the topic of leadership: how important is the role of a leader in a team? In a workgroup, a leader is obviously needed because someone is needed to hold people individuals accountable to their assignments.

Most of the examples in Wisdom of Teams have designated leaders in the team (and the special role a designated leader plays in the team) but the definition itself doesn’t include the need for a leader. This may be because in a high-performance team, individuals step up to lead as needed and hence designated leader may not be needed on day-to-day basis.

However, in most real-life teams I have seen, the designated/natural leader is the one who takes the additional responsibility (call it individual accountability) to keep the spirit of team alive by continuing to strive for common purpose and mutual accountability when things go wrong or get stuck.

When we discuss the forming-storming-norming-performing model for team, storming is the phase where most teams get stuck for a long time, and again it is the designated leader who has to get the team moving on to the norming and performing phases by being creative in storming phase (without short-circuiting the process of storming of course).

In my opinion, self-managed team is a rarity and while it is an ideal goal to have, we cannot plan for such an ideal outcome and try to work without a leader. As a manager, if you get a chance to form a team, it is your responsibility to designate a leader for the team (with clear roles and responsibilities, which are different than when you are a manager for example), and you would have tremendously increased the chances of success for the team.

What do you think about this? Is a leader essential to a team, or do you think he/she will hinder the performance of the team in most of the cases?

Often times, setting goals for next year’s performance review takes into account only organizational goals set by the manager for the employee. This misses an opportunity to set the goals in a way that could benefit the employee’s career growth plan in the most direct way.

As an employee, you should look at goals set by your manager as what organization wants to achieve. You then need to identify your personal goals and figure out a way (working with your manager) to write the goals and execution plans in a manner that can incorporate personal goals without compromising organization goals. This creates a win-win situation for you and your manager.

However, before that can be done, you need to identify your personal goals. Most of the time, the clues lie in some of the feedback on improvement areas you might have received from your manager or from peer feedback. It will also lie in your long term career plan if you have one.

Organization’s and managers are (or should be) interested only on the final results of the goals,and not necesssarily on what intermediate steps are. This gives a chance to the employee to weave in his/her personal goals into the goal setting.

Here are a few examples:

1. If you want to improve your influencing skills over next 12 months, include some cross-functional group working in your execution plan for some of the goals.
2. If you want to hone your people management skills, sign up for goals that require working with vendors or interns.
3. If you want to be well-known in the group/company, sign-up for the goals which your CEO/big-boss is passionate about.
4. If you want to learn more about creating organizational processes, add a sub-goal of process improvement for an appropriate organization goal.

Of course, all these goals must be agreed to by your manager, so that you get his/her support throughout the year for on-the-job learning. For ex, for #1 above, if your manager doesn’t sign-up to coach you while you work on the cross-functional group, it is very easy for you to fail.

This is performance review time, and naturally I am thinking about what I have done over the past year as a leader/manager to warrant any reward. It is always hard to figure this out, because all the work is done by an Individual Contributor, and so it is hard to be objective when evaluating the performance of a lead/manager.

Here are some values I believe a lead/manager provides to the organization and should be used for performance measurements:

1. Judgment – Take difficult decisions even with incomplete information
2. Mentoring and Coaching – develop better Individual Contributors, new leaders and managers
3. Vision –Provide roadmap (new or interpretation of existing one) to employees, both for personal growth as well as for organizational growth (employees need both), do long term thinking
4. Change Agent – Change is very hard, leaders/managers need to be the change agent by figuring out when a change is needed, as well as ways of successfully implementing change while continuing to show results
5. Role model – Leaders are what employees want to be, and hence their behavior is closely watched and often emulated by others. As such they need to reflect right organization culture and values at all times.

As you can see, I am using Leader and Manager words interchangeably. However, they are not the same.

Here is a good Harvard Business Review article on leadership (What Leaders Really Do):

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having charisma or other special personality traits. It’s not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action, argues John Kotter in this article, first published in 1990. Both are necessary for success in today’s business environment. Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are, for the most part, responses to the emergence of large, complex organizations in the 20th century. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change. Most U.S. corporations today are overmanaged and underled.

Here is another HBR article (Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?) with another perspective:

Managers and leaders are two very different types of people. Managers’ goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at defusing conflicts between individuals or departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organization’s day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes toward goals. They look for the opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense, and their working environment is often chaotic

What are the ways you have seen leads/managers evaluated in your company?

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Expectations).

This is the final post in the series, and this tackles perhaps the most important question of all: Ravi needs to help people in his team build and grow their career as they work under his guidance. However, this takes time, patience, and some skills. How does Ravi manage this along with all the other responsibilities he has, given the fact he doesn’t have enough time on his hands given so many reports?

Career Management is the theme for this blog and I have written extensively on this topic, both from the perspective of a person managing his/own career, as well as a manager doing it for his/her reports (see Career Development and Perf Management categories for example). If you survey other resources on the net, you will find everything from survival tips to research papers, see How Not to get Laid Off, 25 Hot Tips For Managing Your Career, Managing Careers in Large Organizations, etc. However, this doesn’t make the job of a manager with 9 reports any easier, given the fact that there is no silver bullet to be used when managing your reports’ careers is concerned. Career Management takes time, and time is something a busy manager like Ravi doesn’t have.

This post builds on previous posts, and offers some quick tips (based on my previous writings on the subject) which busy and burdened managers may find useful. Based on my experience and those of others around me, I can vouch for their effectiveness, but then every organization is different and there are lots of things which can make life complex and hence no guarantees!

Assuming that Ravi finds the previous posts useful, he should have planned to do the following:

1. Set up clear goals and measures of success for his reports.
2. Figure out effective ways of doing 1-1s.
3. Set up clear delegation and/or empowerment strategies to be more efficient in daily working
4. Set up right communication channels with stakeholders and managers to keep his team focused

For his reports, this means they know what their goals are (and how it fits within organization’s goals), how their performance will be measured, they know they have a forum to give and take feedback about their work and career (1-1s), they understand the boundary of decision-making with their boss and hence can work freely, and they know their boss takes care of them by helping them focus on their work and deliver on those performance goals rather than getting them randomized with stakeholder requirements.

This is a huge achievement on its own, and Ravi should celebrate it J! Employees should celebrate too, having such clarity and focus gives all the ingredients to build a great and satisfying career in the company.

So what else is needed before Ravi can claim he is managing careers of his reports too?

The piece which is missing from this otherwise perfect picture is alignment of these (organizational) goals with personal career goals that individual employees may/should have. Otherwise, successful completion of projects and great performance appraisals will translate into growth for the company, but may not necessarily mean growth for the individual. Therefore, Ravi needs to spend time on this alignment. So how does he do that?

Here are the steps I recommend to managers (and which I follow):

1. Identify the career goals that the individual has. Most people haven’t spent enough time to understand/identify their own career goals, and hence this will prove to be a difficult exercise, but very important to do. Starting with “Assume this is 2014, and describe where you are from a career perspective, what you have accomplished, what you are doing right now, etc” and/or “Assume you are on the cover of The Time, what do you want the cover story to talk about you?” works well with most people in my experience. Important thing is to force people to think about the big picture and deep into future. Once big picture thinking is done, try to get to 1 yr, 2 yr, 3 yr type goals which are likely to be actionable.
2. Identify strengths, weaknesses, skills and interests of the individual. This takes time and working closely with individuals obviously help.
3. Identify projects that are likely to play to strengths or interests of the individual AND which align with the career goals identified in #1 above.
4. As much as possible, project/work assignments should be done with organization-career goal alignment in mind rather than ‘first one available’, manager should never hesitate in switching projects and people if it makes more sense for careers.

For more details on each of these steps, you can review my previous posts (drop me a note if you want specific recommendations).

I define Career Portfolio as a rich profile of strengths, weaknesses, interests, skills, and career goals for an employee. It is manager’s responsibility to keep this portfolio in mind all the time, and it is employees responsibility to help the manager keep this portfolio updated.

#4 is worth reiterating: most organizations/managers do not pay enough attention to this way of assigning projects, and one of the most common reasons is that they are not aware of the ‘career portfolio’ of their reports to begin with. This is the most fundamental problem to be solved when managers need to manage careers. Managers with large number of reports actually have an advantage here because they will have a large variety of career portfolio that can satisfy most organization goals the manager needs to sign up for, without asking their reports to work on projects that do not align with their career portfolio (it sounds almost like the matching game in Kindergarten). This keeps his reports happy, motivated and hence highly productive.

However, as this Harvard Business Review blog (How Great Managers Manage People) suggests, great managers “define the outcomes they seek and let each person use her individual talent to achieve them”, “emphasize the development of their subordinates’ unique strengths so as to help further their talent, while finding strategies to support their weaknesses” and “rate the performance and develop the person—they realize that every person is different and should be treated as such”; career management needs to be tailored for individuals in the team and hence it is likely to take significant time investment”

This marks the end of the series on managing large teams. While we discussed about various things Ravi and other managers in that role can/should do, I am sure you see that managing in general is hard, and managing large team is very hard. However, it is also the challenge which motivated managers like to take up and do well against. If this challenge doesn’t excite you, maybe you are not cut out to be a manager, and you need to re-think your career strategy.

I am very interested in reading about your experiences in similar situations, so do post your comments or drop me a note.

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Work).

In this post, we are going to try answering the question: How does a manager as important as him (and holding as many resources) manage expectations from other senior managers and executives without over-committing his team or himself?

If you try to look for writings on the topic of managing stakeholders, you will find very tactical things (“Managing Stakeholders“, “Project Management Success“), some useful tips (“6 steps to success“) and some philosophy (“Managing Key Stakeholders“). In any organization, there are a lot of internal stakeholders (“a person or group that has an investment, share, or interest in something” – matrix organization‘), there will be much more communication-related expectations, organizational cultures that are very results focused may want you to keep improving your efficiency and keep delivering more, managers (or organizations or culture) who focus on long-term growth and vision may pose stringent requirements for people growth, and so on. Dictionary.com) for any given work. For example, in a typical software product development company, a manager in R&D group typically has these stakeholders: his/her manager, managers in peer disciplines (dev, test, operations, etc), product manager(s), heads of engineering, marketing and support organizations. Typically, stakeholders exert enough influence directly or indirectly on your work to make a significant difference to the outcome (positively as well as negatively) and hence it is important to manage their expectations.

There are three aspects of expectations from these stakeholders that Ravi needs to keep in mind:

• Project-related expectations
  
  • Deliver on time, with quality
  • Deliver more every time than before
  • Be the savior when tricky problems (customer issues for ex) arise
• People-related expectations
  
  • Mentor ICs to be better at their work
  • Grow leads, managers, and otherwise smart people
  • Have low attrition
• Communication-related expectations
  
  • Do not surprise them with late-breaking information
  • Incorporate their ‘feedback’ into your work

Some of these are obvious, some not so; for ex, delivering more every time may not be possible at all for some teams, controlling attrition may not be in the hands of the manager alone, etc. Not knowing the expectations is the worst thing that can happen to a manager, so it is important to spend some time in identifying various stakeholders and their expectations.

Once the stakeholders and their expectations are known, we need to understand why these expectations exist, otherwise figuring out the most efficient solutions may be difficult. One of the frameworks I have found to be useful is to think about them in the context of People (working styles of individual shareholders), Culture (culture of the organization), and Structure (organizational structure). For example, in an organization where dotted line relationships are prevalent (‘

To understand the reasons behind the expectations (and hence figuring out the solutions), asking some of the following questions can be useful:

Once we know the reasons for expectations being there in the first place, we need to prioritize these and address them. Most of the time, your manager and your department head are two most important stakeholders and keeping them aligned can secure their help in aligning with others.

A quick note on communication is in order. My experience has been that some of the (surprising) expectations exist because many stakeholders feel they do not know as much about the project as they want to, and hence pose (sometimes unreasonable) goals for the project in order to achieve what they need. For example, if a stakeholder insists on weekly/monthly demo of the progress, it is possible that he/she thinks the requirements are not captured properly. Understanding their requirements, and making sure they understand “we understand their concerns and will act accordingly” goes a long way in avoiding this unnecessary overhead and also keep this stakeholder aligned. While communication (which includes listening and comprehension) is not a solution for every stakeholder expectation problem, it helps in surprisingly more number of cases than we realize. The golden rule of communication that I have found useful: “Communicate early, Communicate often, and in right language“. As mentioned above, personality and culture differences makes one-size-fits-all communication impossible in case of stakeholders, so think in terms of ‘peeling onions’ approach: executive summary for those who trust you with details, charts and graphs for those who are visual in style, excel sheet for those who want to verify for themselves, but everything on demand (rather than packed in an email/zip) so that people can choose what they prefer.

To summarize, here are the step-wise process Ravi should follow:

1. Identify all stakeholders

1. Identify all the expectations
2. Understand why these expectations exist and how they can be satisfied (root cause)
3. Prioritize stakeholders as well as their expectations.
4. Identify solutions that address the prioritized list.
5. Communicate early; communicate often, and in right language.

Most managers are smart enough to figure out various solutions to various expectations that are posed to them, but the trick is to find solutions that fit with each other, and with what you and your team really wants to do; doing something only for the sake of a stakeholder expectation (which happens in many organizations) causes extra work, frustration, and inefficiencies in the team and hence should be avoided at all cost.

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing 1-1s).

In this post, we are going to try answering the question: While Ravi is the smartest guy and the leader in the team, he is also the bottleneck. How can he manage his work (delegation or empowerment for example?) so that he still has time for himself and his family?

For a manager, managing work is one of the most important activities that determine the results that the team achieves. It is also one of the easiest, and best, ways of measuring the performance of the manager and that of the team, as is clear from the way most performance reviews are conducted. Due to these reasons, work management tends to be topmost on the mind of a manager, and consumes most of his/her time. Our goal in this post is to explore some of the ways to make this an efficient activity and save time without sacrificing value that the manager provides by getting involved.

Some of the reasons why a manager has to get involved in day-to-day activities so extensively are as follows:

1. Uneven capabilities of team members: In most large teams, individual skills and abilities of team members vary a lot. This makes it hard for the manager to distribute work and/or delegate it without keeping an eye on how the individual is performing. Depending on the relative expertise of team members and how well the team is formed, the manager may end up spending significant time in managing the actual execution of the work allocated to individuals.
2. Technical leadership: Often, the manager is also the technical lead of the team and hence he/she needs to offer the leadership and expertise to the team members who need it. Most of the time, the way this is done is via problem-solving and troubleshooting, which tend to take lots of time for resolution.
3. Work prioritization: Most technical team members struggle with too many tasks and too little time in the day (only 24 hours!). On top of it, new tasks keep coming up and old tasks have the habit of becoming less or more important as situations change. It is hard for each team member to do a consistent and accurate prioritization of tasks and hence they need to manager’s input to do this correctly. The more dynamic the environment, the more is the demand on manager’s time.
4. Decision-making: In most organizations, managers retain the decision-making powers. This is obvious, because it is hard to be accountable for a decision if you do not make those decisions, and a manager is accountable for every decision being made in the team. Depending on the style of decision making (which is a separate topic on its own), it will require the manager to spend a lot of time in making decisions, or less time in making them but more time in getting the team to accept it. Either way, significant time is spent in decision-making for a manager.

Of these reasons, first 2 are about lack of sufficient expertise and skills in the team and the most viable solution (though it takes time) is to develop that expertise (or hire for it). Most managers are (or should be) adept at this, even though the day-to-day rush of getting things done does not allow them to spend time on developing expertise.

Next 2, however, are more interesting. Even with an experienced team, these 2 can suck up lots of time from managers. One of the ways I have found some managers to handle this in the past is to delegate and/or empower some of the individuals so that some of these decisions can be offloaded. However, I have noticed that delegation and empowerment as concepts (and as words) are used interchangeably, and hence sometimes cause confusion in the mind of these individuals who are supposed to work on manager’s behalf. Read this and this for a good discussion on the topic. Here are the definitions I like to use for these two words, and hence distinguish them:

• Delegation: The act of handing over a task ownership to someone else. Delegate is responsible for execution of the task and manages any decision-making that needs to be done in the context of this task. Anything significant or beyond the scope of the task is usually escalated to the manager for proper decision-making. Since tasks are rarely independent, this means that manager still gets involved most of the time.
• Empowerment: The act of handing over a complete project or work item ownership to someone else. Empowered person is responsible for planning, design and execution of tasks needed to get the work done. Since a project can be independent from other projects (especially when it is chosen carefully), empowered person usually exercise significant decision-making and needs to involve the manger much less than in the delegation scenario.

In a way, delegation is empowerment of a reduced-scope work and both of these can be considered to be different measures on the scale of ‘giving control’.

I find it more useful to think of delegation as a very different management technique than empowerment so that we can recognize and address different demands they make (to the manager and to the report). Delegation can usually be successfully done to a smart techie, this requires the person to be self-managed and independent worker. For the manager, it is easy to do because he/she is losing very little control. In empowerment case, the report needs to be someone who can take good decisions and work with ambiguities and incomplete data, in addition to being smart, self-managed and independent. This is also hard for manager because it requires giving up good amount of control and having trust in the report. Choosing when to delegate, when to empower (and when to do neither) is an important skill to learn because wrong pairing of people-control mix can be worse than not giving any control at all. Following is a representation of what I have observed to be the case about this mix:

Decision-making and work prioritization are good skills for a budding manager, and hence if a manager uses delegation and empowerment appropriately, he/she will develop next level of leads and managers, which will further help reduce the time he/she needs to spend.

In the next post, I will talk about managing expectations from various stakeholders in the organization. Stay tuned!

Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Performance). In this post, we are going to try answering the question: What is the most efficient way for someone to manage their 1-1s when one has many direct reports (in my friend’s case, 9).

Effective 1-1s is an important tool a good manager has (my earlier post), here are some other resources I found useful: How to have great 1-1s and couple of podcasts from Mark and Mike (part-1 and part-2).

Based on my experience with numerous 1-1s for over 10 years in India, US and China, and after working with many great managers (and not so great ones), I have come to believe in the power of effective 1-1s in building a good team and a good manager. However, effective 1-1s take significant investment of time, most comfortable 1-1s need at least 1 hour of face-to-face time and ½ hour of preparation and wrap-up time. This is the bare minimum; to be effective in providing feedback to your reports (which is one of the most important reasons of doing 1-1s), you need to spend time in collecting feedback, fitting it in the large scheme of career development for the individual and then provide the feedback. To do all this for 9-10 people every week is an extremely hard thing to do.

Here are several efficiencies that I have found useful to apply towards 1-1s:

1. Amortizing Preparation Time: I try to have a theme for my weekly 1-1s, and have all of them on the same day (I have only 4 reports right now). This helps me prepare about what I want to say, how I want to say it, and what feedback/comments I expect back from them. One preparation helps for all the 1-1s and I save time. Also, since previous discussions are fresh on my mind, I can actually pre-empt some of the questions and thus save some confusion/questions, which goes to reduce overall time needed. I have noticed that when I approach my 1-1s this way, I can wrap up my central theme of 1-1 in ½ hour per person instead of regular 1 hour schedule that I usually follow for each person every week.
2. Using written material: I have also found it useful (especially with reports who have reports too) to send write-up to them before or after (I have done both) about important topics of that week’s 1-1. I do not do it every week, only for some weeks when I have something critical to share. This helps them to review it when they need to, as well as use it with their own reports without losing much of the context. This also helps me be consistent with everyone since individual discussions are bound to leave something out (and bring something new), write-up provides single view of my thought/action/decision. Memos have been overused (and sometimes derogatory) term used for this in the past, but I have found this to be a big time-saver for me.
3. Using team meetings: I know team meetings and 1-1s are different topics, but I wanted to cover something I have found useful: whenever I have had topics for 1-1s that I knew would generate debate/push-backs, I have used team meeting to broach the topic and get some initial questions/comments without committing to a specific decision/action. This goes to the rule of 80-20 where 80% of issues can probably be captured in that 1 hour of team meeting, rather than spending precious time in 1-1s with each individual. Of course, this has to be used carefully, because there are some topics where people will open up only in 1-1s and hence team meeting could be a waste of time. I have also used team meeting as a follow-up to my written material to good effect, to reiterate my commitment as well as to get theirs.
4. Having focused 1-1s: If you have ample time, it makes sense to have open-ended 1-1s where you talk about lots of things, both in projects as well as in career development, and this fosters trust and comfort. However, when you have scarcity of time (as is the case with my friend), it is a good idea to identify the primary focus of the 1-1s and then just spend time on that topic. It is much better than trying to squeeze in everything in that ½ hour, twice a month meeting. Typically, there are 2 distinct areas to focus on (which give rise to other focus areas): project delivery, and career development. In crunch times, it is a good idea to identify (with mutual agreement of course) which ones you two want to focus on. Focusing on project delivery means talking about issues, risks, gaps in projects, and coaching/mentoring to improve the person’s ability to cope with them. Detailed status enquiry and technical inputs should not be done in 1-1s (and is usually not needed because that anyway happens on demand). Focusing on career development means identifying the goals and objectives the individual has, identifying skill and competency development plans, and coacing/mentoring them to achieve those in long term and tracking the progress via 1-1s. These focus areas can change over time (sometimes as often as monthly), but sticking to the area is critical to saving time on 1-1 and still provide value.

I am interested in hearing from other readers about what has worked for them in such a setting.

In the next post, I will talk about Managing Work in such a setting. Stay tuned.

See my previous post for background on this series of posts. The question we are attempting to answer is: How does someone (in this case, my friend Ravi who has 9 direct reports) set performance objectives for teams and individuals so that he does not have to spend too much time directing day-to-day activities?

There are many aspects of managing performance. you can find some of my previous posts here. Of course, Employee Performance Management is a vast area, so is performance measurement, for example see this great introduction (a US govt. office document but useful for everyone) or this article in HR World (“16 ways to measure employee performance”).

Time spent in directing and monitoring day-to-day activities of one’s reports serves many purposes (providing technical guidance, mentoring new hires, tracking performance issues/potential, etc). For this discussion, we just consider the time that needs to be spent because this provides the basis for yearly/six-monthly/quarterly performance reviews. Even though organizations have different ways of doing performance reviews, one of the most common input in this process is manager’s feedback about the employee’s work. To give effective comments during the review, the manager needs to be aware of the details of the work and should be able to provide concrete examples, so the logic goes. This means that managers do need to spend a lot of time with their reports in order to collect this data.

However, if you dig deeper, you will find that in many organizations (and in case of many managers), this detailed data is mostly used to justify a certain rating given for employee’s goals for the appraisal period. This justification is needed because the goals are not specific and measurable enough to afford objective (and mutually agreed) evaluation based on work done in the period. So for example, if the goal is ‘deliver the feature in release X on time and with quality’, it is hard to get agreement on whether the individual met this goal, exceeded this goal or needs improvement. Detailed examples and reasons from the manager (collected during those daily interactions on project work) help gain that agreement. Such data can be used to gain agreement only if it has been collected first-hand, and hence they need lots of time commitment. This time commitment can be avoided with careful goal setting and mutually agreed ways of measuring attainment of a goal.

One of the best ways of avoiding the need for this time commitment is to spend significant time with each individual in setting details goals, objectives, and measurement criteria. In some cases, this could be easy (esp. with organizations which play with lots of numbers, like customer support, test, etc). However, in some organizations, setting objective goals can be very hard. In those cases, what I have found to work is mutually agreed upon measures of subjective goals. For ex, it is hard to phrase ‘deliver the feature in release X on time and with quality’ into very objective measures, for a developer, ‘deliver the feature by meeting all planned release milestones and with 0 known P1 bugs’ come close, but is not perfect. However, If the employee and manager agree on some other measure that makes sense for their world (for ex, in case of Software as a Service companies, number of customer reported issues can be a good measure of perceived quality of a feature, and data is available very soon after the release), it makes measurement more objective, if not the goal. However, an important criterion is that there should be mutual agreement on goals and the measurements.

Once such goals and measures are set, a manager need not spend time just to make sure they know enough about the project to use later. They can be sure that when the time comes to evaluate performance, these measures will help both of them and there will be few surprises and hence cause for disagreement. Time saved this way can be applied in more important activities like mentoring, career discussions, etc.

One important factor in this exercise is the amount of trust that employee has on the manager and on the performance review process. If this doesn’t exist, no amount of goal and measurement setting will help, and even after collecting lots of data with significant time commitment, performance appraisal time will be a bitter experience for both parties.

In the next article in the series, we will talk about Managing 1-1s and how time can be efficiently utilized there, without sacrificing value. Stay tuned.

While talking to one of my friends (I will call him Ravi) who has 9 direct reports and 4 indirects (and who doesn’t have enough time to spend on each of his reports on non-technical topics), I realized that having more reports than you can handle is a serious but common problem, especially in places like India where there is scarcity of good leads and managers. I am scheduled to talk to Ravi to discuss some ideas about how to manage his reports in a way that they do not curse him 2 years later (when they realize it!) for not spending enough time with them now. And this has set me thinking about how I have managed this problems and others around me (who I admire as effective managers) have done so. I am also trying to read and learn from fellow bloggers on this topic.

Here are some of the aspects of this challenge that I hope I can find answers to:

1. Managing performance: How does Ravi set performance objectives for teams and individuals so that he does not have to spend too much time directing day-to-day activities?
2. Managing 1-1s: What is the most effective way for him to manage his 1-1s when he has so many reports?
3. Managing work: While he is the smartest guy in the team, he is also the bottleneck. I also want to explore how he can manage his work (delegation or empowerment for example?) so that he still has time for himself and his family.
4. Managing expectations: A manager as important as him (and holding as many resources) needs to manage expectations from other senior managers and executives. How does Ravi manage this without over-committing his team?
5. Managing careers: The most important of all (at least in the mind of his reports), he needs to help people in his team build and grow their career as they work under his guidance. However, this takes time, patience, and some skills. How does Ravi manage this along with all the other responsibilities he has?

Hope you will find this series interesting.