The third element of being a boss
What it takes to be a real manager, not just a task-setter and motivator
Before I started my management career, I was self-employed. I had to be very good at execution because my income depended entirely on my results. The main questions for me at that time were, “What should I really do to earn efficiently, and how do I avoid being bored to death?”. If I could solve these problems, execution would not be an issue at all.
So, naturally, when I started my management career, I thought I just needed to find the answers to those same questions—only this time, for my team.
I believed that being a boss required only ensuring that:
my team deeply understood their objectives and how to tackle them, and
my team was motivated.
Obviously, this was a naive way of thinking, so very soon I added the third element: assisting the team in execution.
But only much later I understood that this help can be significantly different for different people. And my success as a manager heavily depends on gauging how much and in which ways I should step in.
The third element is the trickiest because of the long feedback loop. If you fail to set the right target or provide motivation, you’ll know pretty quickly.
However, it’s hard to tell whether you’re effectively helping with execution or not. Maybe you control too much, or perhaps you give too much slack. Maybe your team needs more precise standards, or maybe you’re suppressing initiative. How can you tell? Eventually you will find out, but it might be too late.
You have to treat every interaction with your team as a test of a micro-hypothesis to see if it was helpful. Use two ways to test this hypothesis:
Eagerly seek honest and specific feedback from your team: was your intervention helpful? could they have achieved the same result without it? what lessons did they learn from the situation?
Pay attention to short-term projects. Assess small wins and failures. They might seem unimportant to the bottom line, but they bring invaluable insights.
You need both. Without feedback, you cannot boost individual performance; without routine post-mortems, you cannot organize efficient teamwork.