Being part of a management team

Deanna Troi is my favorite person on the Enterprise command, no management team is complete without HR

In a team or even in a bigger group, it is very often the instinct of the manager to only focus on how to make his team amazing. Thinking about the balanced growth of your team, its vision, planning, execution, quality, etc. is a huge part of your job as a manager. But as a manager of a team you are also part of something bigger than that. Your team is part of a bigger group, which also has a manager and other team leaders.

Let’s consider that bigger group and your manager in that bigger group. From my experience I’ve seen two types of group managers that you might have:

• You report to a group manager that manages each of the team leaders that report to him individually. You have a close one-on-one relationship with your manager, but he might be managing 3 other team leaders like you, or 5, or more, but it doesn’t really have any effect on you.
• You report to a group manager that has a management team, where in addition to having that individual one-on-one relationship with your manager, you are also part of a bigger context where you have the opportunity to have a much closer relationship with the other team leaders.

The exact same concept applies for higher levels in the organization. Just like team leaders can be part of a group management team, group managers can be part of a division management team, division managers can be part of an organization unit management team and of course the CEO can have his own management team.

It is obvious from the title of this article which type of manager I prefer. In this article we’ll dive a bit into why it is important to have a management team, what it means to be part of a management team and how things can be great and wrong in a management team.

Why do we need a management team

Before we go into the list of advantages, just as a thought exercise, take a minute to think about the team that you manage. Are all of the people in your team working only on a single project? Most teams have multiple projects that maybe share a similar domain, but probably it is still important for you that they feel like a team, collaborate, hold team meetings, be friends, etc. Try to think: Why is it important for you that people who report to you act like a team? I’m not saying it’s the same as a management team, but there are similarities.

Back to management teams. Why do we need them? You might guess that the main reason for having a management team is decision making. If that was your guess, in my opinion you are wrong. Most decisions that relate to your team are taken by you and sometimes together with your manager or at most with another team leader from your group. Of course some decisions are taken at the management team level, but those are pretty rare (such as planning a re-org) and often not really critical (such as selecting a date for the group fun day), but that’s not the main purpose of the management team.

Here are the main things we benefit from having a management team that meets regularly and openly share their plans, updates and challenges:

• Having a bigger context — being part of a larger team gives you the opportunity to know more about what the group that you are part of is doing. Sometimes it will be things that can actually affect your team and would otherwise surprise you. And sometimes it will be things that don’t have a real effect on you, but help you understand the bigger picture better and learn about types of challenges that you might not be familiar with. No matter if they affect you or not, having a bigger context and understanding is a critical part of your growth as a manager, it broadens your knowledge and experience with things that you don’t deal with in your team.
• Getting and giving advice — in a management team, you have an incredible opportunity to share your challenges with other people that deal with challenges similar to yours and also to give them advice. Whether it is an HR issue, technical challenge, managerial issue, etc. it is incredibly important that you will be able to have a group of peers that you trust that you can consult with and not only with your managers or friends.
• Bigger impact — being part of a larger context gives you the opportunity to express your opinion and have an impact on things that are outside your realm. For example, some manager might inform the management team that she is going to embark on a new project that otherwise you wouldn’t have even heard of. Maybe you’d like to offer your help or advice because it is a subject you have experience with or passionate about. Maybe you just have an opinion about something that can be improved or maybe you’d like to offer a different perspective. Maybe the project sounds so important to you that you might even offer that your team will assist in it. Maybe next time you have some big project someone from the management team will assist you in similar ways.
• Building relationships and trust — in a team that meets regularly and is used to talk openly about their challenges, a unique form of trust, respect and communication is eventually established. This is something that can become a game changer in how you collaborate on cross projects with your peers in the management team, how you can help to push each others agenda and create a common front when needed, how you will feel more comfortable to mobilize people between your teams and how you will help each other in common day to day things such as design reviews, interviews, etc.
• Learning new skills — often management teams are not homogeneous. Some of them are new managers, some are more experienced, some are managing big teams, some smaller, some are responsible for areas (such as HR or operations), they often have different professions and different domains. This is a big advantage since it allows the team to intuitively learn new fields and gain a lot of experience.
• DNA — when a management team works well together, in my experience they learn so much from each other and affect each other so much that they start to manage in a similar way and work in a similar way. Sometimes it will be from conscious decisions they made along the way, but most often it is completely unconscious inspiration just from working together for so long — this is what I call DNA. Once DNA is formed the amazing thing is that it is contagious, meaning that your team will get this DNA as well and new team leaders on the management team will get it as well and just like any form of evolution, I promise you that the DNA that was built from inspiration from other managers and not just you will be better from the DNA you would have built on your own, and for sure it will make all collaborations between teams in the group much much better. Sorry for all the biology analogies, but this is important :)

What it means to be part of a management team

Okay, so being part of a management team is good, we get it. But what does it mean? What do we need to do? There’s no formula of course, but I’ll try to list some things that worked for me.

Weekly meeting

• Meet regularly, at least 1 hour weekly. Use the time to share important updates from your team (both projects and HR) and discuss important challenges.
• Only share updates that are really important things that are currently happening in your group to keep everybody focused and engaged. Important: You are kicking off or launching something big next week. You have a new developer joining. You have someone who is discussing leaving. You have some big presentation tomorrow. You have a major issue holding back your project. Not important: Some project is going as planned and will be delivered next month. We have a one week delay with some tasks.
• Attendance is mandatory, it must not be a “nice to have” meeting or a “15 mins late / need to leave early” meeting.
• Don’t let it be a “everyone updates the boss and no one listens to anyone except himself” meeting. Be engaged. Listen to people. Also, don’t let it become a pissing competition where people talk just in order to talk.
• Don’t let it become a project status meeting where you dive too deep into discussing a specific project that doesn’t interest everybody, there are separate meetings for project statuses and they don’t need to involve the whole management team. On the other hand, don’t be afraid to raise an issue with a specific project if you think it is important enough and people on the management team need to be aware of it.
• Ask questions about things you don’t fully understand. Your peer chose to update on some project because she thinks it’s an important update, so if you don’t know this project, ask what it is.
• Don’t be afraid to raise concerns, even if it’s not your responsibility. Your peer chose to update on some project because she thinks it’s an important update, so if you have a concern, she really wants to hear it. It is of course her responsibility to decide what to do with your concern, but it is your responsibility to raise it!
• Have trust that the management team is discrete. Don’t be afraid to share things internal to your group if they are important enough to share.
• Offer assistance, suggest ideas, ask to join some meeting.

Help each other

• Join design/product reviews and brainstorms if you feel you can contribute.
• Promote each other’s agendas when you have the opportunity to.
• Interview for the other teams, share CVs of your friends, mobilize people.
• If you think your peer is wrong, tell him today. If he hurt you, tell him immediately.
• If your peer is not involved enough in something you think he should, tell him. Don’t let him just miss it.
• If someone in your team has a conflict with your peer, solve it together with him, don’t take sides.

Be social

• Monthly night out
• Weekly team lunch
• Sit at nearby offices
• 1-on-1 Coffee break
• Have a whatsapp group, make sure it is active and not only work/update oriented.

When management teams go wrong

It’s all pink and perfect, right? Sadly it’s not that easy. Management teams can easily go wrong, and fixing a broken management team is usually impossible. Here are some indications that something needs to be fixed immediately before it is too late:

• Team leaders feel that they are competing with each other on resources, responsibility or acknowledgement.
• Team leaders do not trust or respect each other.
• Team leaders siding with their team instead of working together to resolve conflicts.
• Too many escalations to group manager instead of solving things together.

Having a broken management team is much worse than having no management team at all, so even the slightest smell of any such indication must be taken seriously by the group manager and he should put all of his attention to put his management team back on the right track as soon as possible.

The alternative

As was mentioned earlier, having a management team is not a must. Some group managers are perfectly happy to only have one on one meetings with their team leaders and some team leaders are perfectly happy with not knowing or being involved in anything more than what is necessary for them to do their own job on the best side. I don’t think that’s a bad choice — I know excellent group managers that don’t have a management team and I know great team leaders that only focus on their own team’s responsibilities.

Not being part of a management team doesn’t mean you’ll fail, but it does mean you are missing out on a huge opportunity both for your growth and for having extremely better collaboration for your team with other teams in your group. To finish with an analogy: you can grow a perfectly fine family even if you are not in close relationship with your brothers, but it is for sure much nicer to know your brothers got your back and your kids have a bunch of cool uncles and cousins they can hang out with.