I first made the transition from team member to General
Manager in October 2010. Prior to taking over the role of General Manager for a
conference production division at an Australian Conference organisation, I’d
work in a team of one, me, at a boutique publishing and events company.
The first thing I realised when I walked into the office
that first morning was I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say to the
team. The second thing I realised was I shouldn’t have worried. The team I’d
been hired to manage had resigned as group before I’d even been hired.
There was a part of me that thought this was probably a good
opportunity for me to put my stamp on the team and the way it functioned. Turns
out, I was wrong. One producer had already been hired, the Marketing Manager
for the team had resigned and was finishing up that Friday and her replacement
had already been decided on.
All in all, it was definitely a time of massive change. From
memory the first thought that crossed my mind as I sat at my new desk was “I feel exposed.”
That could have been because of the massive desk I was
parked at, placed there by the owner of the company on the direction of a Feng
Shui expert years before. But mostly it was because I felt like a fraud.
Who was I to manage a team? I had zero experience in mentoring
and developing other people in the conference industry. I’d done it in my
previous life in call centres, but this was different. Plus, back in the call
centre days I wasn’t “in charge,” I was just a team member who got handed the
new hires to make them “phone ready.”
I can remember a conversation with a friend of mine when
word came down that I’d gotten the job. His advice “Call everyone Joan.” I didn’t
take that bit of advice on board but it struck me as sadly amusing.
Most of the “bosses” I’d worked for over the years treated
staff as a number, or more accurately, a series of numbers. How many days a
week were you at your desk, how many mistakes did you make today, how many
hours do I need to sit staring over your shoulder to make sure you do what I
asked? As I sat in the
middle of the office in the Sydney CBD I wrote a list of what I wanted to
be as a manager.
- How I wanted to lead the team
- What sort of style I would adopt
- How would I create a cohesive team, moving in the same direction
On paper it looked great. It was for the most part the exact
opposite of how I had been managed in the past.
It didn’t take long for the wheels on my grand design to
begin to wobble though. Employees don’t work like robots. They are people. They
have their own drivers, their own motivators, and their own way of doing things, even those fresh out of University with minimal work experience.
So to the point of all of this. Over the years I’ve learned
how to manage staff a little better. Not too much though, I wouldn’t want to
scare anyone but, there were several key mistakes I made the first time around
though.
The four main mistakes
I made transitioning from Team Member to Team Leader:
A Part of, but a
part from the team:
Of all the well-meaning advice I received from family and
friends back in 2010, the first and most important was “now you’re a manager you need to maintain a distance, you can’t be
friends with your staff.” That sounds all well and good – and like something
out of 1950’s management text book – but the reality is you do need to maintain
a certain line with staff members. It’s fine to have a joke around with the
people who report to you, but there needs to be a line and both the staff and
you need to adhere to it.
Maintaining that line was the first error I made. There were
times when I managed it successfully and other times when I blew it completely.
Just let me do it
This was a big one for me to learn. It was “easier” to just
do what needed to be done rather than delegate it to a staff member and leave
them to it. I had a long history in conference production by the time I
inhabited that desk. I knew how to write saleable marketing copy, I knew how to
lay out a brochure, and I knew how to “fix” problems.
Instead of explaining to the team how to do it, it was just
easier for me to get out my red pen and make the changes on the word document.
Even though I had my job to do, letting go was – and at times still is – harder
than expected. I became my worst nightmare, the dreaded micromanager.
Sticking to the
step, not the big picture
I spent many years writing legal events. My one and only
priority was the conference. When you’re producing 2 Contract Law events a year
it’s hard to make it fresh and new, but I strived to do that with every event.
When I became the GM of the Division there was a lot of time where I forgot my
new role was more strategically focused, and less “step-by-step.” Letting go of
the steps others needed to take was difficult. While it’s always been important
to oversee my team’s projects from beginning to end, learning to look outside
the box to the bigger reason the project was being undertaken was a massive
learning curve. When you’re bogged down in the minute details of an individual project
it’s easy for the team to swerve off the road without you noticing.
Passing the buck
Now I know how that sounds, but the traditional meaning of
the phrase is not what I mean here. When I first went into management I was the
first person to pass praise on to the team. If praise came from higher up the
ladder, the first words out of my mouth were “I’ll pass that onto Joan, it was her work,” or “Don’t thank me, thank Joan, it’s her event.”
Yet if the mud hit the wall, the first thing out of my mouth
was “well, as manager that’s totally my responsibility.”
Credit where it is due is fine, but so is acknowledging the
mistakes a team member has made. While it is true – and I still hold to the
belief – that if a manager misses something the mistake is theirs to own, it
doesn’t help your team if you are constantly acknowledge all mistakes as “yours,”
while handing all the successes to the various members of the team. It actually
makes you look incompetent.
One of the reasons for it was the list I wrote on the first
day. I had in the past had managers who, when congratulated by those higher up
the ladder had taken the credit, the thanks and the promotions. When I
transitioned to management, I swore I wouldn’t do that to my team and in the
process I took away from my team the opportunity to learn and grow by their mistakes.
Mike Cullen has recently returned to Akolade after a period as the
conference producer for one of Australia's leading economic think tanks. Mike
began working in the conference industry in 2007 after looking for a career
change from the high pressured world of inbound customer service. Mike has
worked for some of the most well known conference and media companies in the
B2B space and in his spare time is working on his first novel in a planned Epic
Fantasy trilogy.
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