How do I set up my team for success?  This was one of the big topics that was raised when I asked forty experienced people managers what they wished they had known when they first started managing.  (This article contains anonymized quotes from those interviews.)

Many new managers think that the way they set up their team for success is by telling them to do the right things, and making sure they do those things right – i.e., “being the boss”.  But as it turns out, there are many things a manager needs to do to set up a team for long-term success, and “being the boss” in that way is not one of them.  So what do teams need from you to achieve long-term success?  Here's a list:

One: Independence and Autonomy

Your team doesn’t need you to tell them what to do or how to do it (with the exception of junior staff still learning the work).  If you take that approach, you will become the dreaded micromanager, with terrible consequences for everyone.  Your team will do their best work – and experience higher job satisfaction and learning – when given autonomy and independence.  

“My job was to put people in a position where they didn't need me.  It's very easy to spend a lot of time with people and help move them along. But if you don't wean them off that then you're not building up organizational capacity – you're just helping them execute. It's nice to be in the weeds, helping people and feeling like you're part of the team, but if you step back and create space, people will step up.”

“You have to allow your employees have a fair amount of autonomy in order to get them to do their best work.  Don’t feel like you have to have control everything.  I think that's what creates trust. It also allows the team to create their own relationships without me having to be there.”

Two: Clarity, Context, and Meaning

For a team to work autonomously, they must have a very clear understanding of the desired outcomes of the work, the “why” behind what they are doing, and the “why this matters”.  

“As someone that informs other people's decision making, success isn't just based on how well I deliver this report, but rather: do I help my partners accomplish a change in their understanding? Do I help them digest it and take action on it? Do I help them make decisions? So, so I think about my role differently – it's not about me, it's about my teammates.”

Without that information, they are bound to make bad decisions – ones that perhaps help them locally, but that may work against the bigger picture.  Clear, repeated communication of big picture and how your team fits into it is one of the most important things a manager can provide.  (And your staff should be hearing the same story from all the senior people.  If the management team isn’t aligned on what the company is doing and why, that’s a much bigger problem.)

One of the three components of employee engagement is meaningfulness – people are more engaged when the see how their work is meaningful and impactful.  Think of the difference between a hospital janitor who sees his job as wiping equipment tables, versus one who understands that his job is to protect vulnerable patients from potentially deadly infections.  Good managers help their staff understand how their work contributes to the larger mission.

Three: Resources & Path-Clearing

A central responsibility of a manager is to ensure their team has the resources they need to accomplish their goals, and to clear their path of any obstacles to success.  It’s not glamourous work, but it’s critical.

“As the manager, you're the Zamboni on the ice rink. You clear obstacles out of the way. You make the path straight and you let people fly and do their thing.”

“You have to make sure there's budget. [You might feel] oh my God, I wasted my entire day. I did nothing but go to meetings. But what did those meetings do? The meetings meant that I had the budget to pay the people I could hire, the extra expertise I needed.  They needed an upgraded computer. We needed a better server. I have approval for all that stuff. I did a lot, you know, even though no one on my team will actually notice 90% of what I did, but they can all do their jobs.”

Management done right is fundamentally a service role.  You are the pit crew to the racing team, not the lead driver. 

Four: Psychological Safety and Belonging

For your team to work effectively together with everyone contributing their best, you need to establish psychological safety.  This can’t be done with a seminar or by decree – leaders create psychological safety on their teams through the daily, small everyday interactions they have with every individual around them.  If your staff sees that you are humble and willing to admit your mistakes, they will be willing to admit their own.  If they see that you are open to ideas that conflict with your current thinking, they will be more likely to share their insights and criticisms.  You will get to harness the brainpower of the entire team, rather than having them all defer to yours.

“I'm never right. Because I always think I know going into a discussion or a meeting or whatnot what we're gonna do. And we always do something different because we bounce the ideas around everybody in the room and I learn and grow too, and we walk out with something better than what any one of us brought to the table. And that to me is successful.”

Psychological safety has been shown to positively impact productivity, belonging, engagement, innovation, retention, and the ability of a team to learn from their mistakes, so it is well worth the investment.

Five: Work / life balance

“I didn't realize how much of the job of a people manager was literally just telling people to take care of themselves.”

If you want your team to have sustainable, long-term success then you need to make sure they are not overworked or overstressed.  The trick to doing this is to model this behaviour yourself, and to reward it.  If your staff sees you working long hours and weekends all the time, or praising an employee who does the same for their effort, those are the behaviours they will emulate.

“I find managing unlimited PTO strategy interesting. You would think that the problem is people are always taking vacation and never there, but the opposite is true. People don't take vacation. So you've really got to tell them. What I tell them is ‘I'm planning on taking four weeks vacation this year. So you should feel enabled to do the same.’”

If you want your staff to take their vacations, it’s also necessary to make sure your team processes can seamlessly handle the absence of individuals.  If everything breaks down when Mary is away, Mary will be disincentivized from taking her vacation days.  Building this kind of resilience into your process pays off in other ways, as well, on sick days or when employees depart.

“I put work-life balance first, with extremely high standards.  It means my process has to be spot on. It means the standards have to be extremely high. There has to be a clear way to success. Cause otherwise I'm setting my team up for failure.”

And there’s more!

In this article I’ve been talking about the relationship between a manager and their team as a whole.  This is closely related to but not the same as the manager’s relationships with individual members of his team.  One theme that came up repeatedly in my interviews with people managers was about the unique differences between individual in their needs, wants, limitations, and motivations, and the challenges that can present to a manager.  In my next article, I’ll talk about how managers create healthy relationships with individual team members – which is another part of setting up your team for success.

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Micromanagement and Psychological Safety - How a toxic management style impacts team health

The Authentic Team - The problem with bringing your whole self to work

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