Show Notes
In this episode of the TTL podcast, the hosts, Andy and Mon Chiao, discuss the concept of ‘Management Experience’ and its distinction from ‘Employee Experience.’ They explore the importance of management surveys, the challenges of delegation, and ethical implications in a hierarchical setting. They debate the effectiveness of the proposed four pillars for Management Experience and propose their own set of principles. Listeners will learn about the roles of ethical leadership, alignment of work with organizational goals, and the importance of recognizing employees as individuals.
References
- Introducing MX – Management Experience (TM) – https://yanivpreiss.com/2024/06/29/introducing-mx-management-experience/
- Manager Tools – https://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics
Transcript
Andy: Welcome back to another episode of the TTL podcast where Mon Chiao and I gab away about different topics of management and leadership.
Hi everyone. Future Andy editor here. I just wanted to jump in really fast to say yes, my audio quality in this episode is terrible. I think what happened is that I was using the wrong mic. I’ve done what I can to clean it up. The audio is still not that great.
But it should be good enough for you to hear what Mon-Chaio and I were talking about.
With that out of the way. I’ll send you back to the episode. Enjoy.
Andy: And Mon Chiao, what is it that we’re going to be gabbing about today?
Mon-Chaio: We are going to be gabbing about a concept called Management Experience.
Now, they drew from things like Employee Experience, EX, or probably the one that people are most familiar with, User Experience, UX. And so they posited that there’s this concept called management experience that is important to be familiar with. And they proposed, I think, a framework or a model to help us think about what is management experience and how can we measure it in our organizations.
Andy: My initial reaction was, Hmm, I don’t know about this. As I read it, I started thinking, Okay, I kind of, I can get behind this. I like the idea. I like the idea. And there’s a few parts of, of the way of presenting this that I think could be useful. They’re useful ways to think about what are you doing as a manager?
What are you doing as an employee? Because as a manager, you’re also an employee. And how does all of that come together? So I, I thought it was quite useful. I think Mon Chaio, you had a slightly different take, maybe not on the overall broad brushstrokes of the model, But I think it was some of the specifics you, you, you were a little less certain about.
Or maybe hostile towards?
Mon-Chaio: a little bit. I think one of the reasons that I even clicked on the link to read this article was the idea that management experience was an interesting thing I hadn’t thought about before. A lot of companies do these employee surveys where they talk about and rate their managers and their leaders. Does my manager give me feedback? Are my goals clear? Do I see laddering up between my team’s goals and the other goals? How often does my leader tell me about the strategy? And nobody’s really ever given this name. It’s called various things, this survey. I’ve heard it called Tiny Pulse. It’s been called the Pulse survey.
It’s been called the Developer survey or whatever the case may be. When I heard the term management experience, I thought, oh, maybe it’s part of that. And, in fact, it kind of is. It is around, how are my leaders supporting me? The problem, Andy, that I had was, I felt like the foundation was loose.
And, you know, whenever a foundation is kind of rickety, then like, you can like the house that’s being built on top of it, but then you kind of question, well, you know, can it just fall over at any point? And my biggest problem was the author based all of his management experience building, I guess would be the term, on these four principles that he drew from something called manager tools. And the principles are, 1. Thou shall get to know your direct report. 2. Thou shall talk a lot about performance. 3. Thou shall grow your direct report. And 4. Thou shall push work down to your direct report. And for the author, those are the four pillars of management experience. And everything else that you measure around management experience must take those principles into account. And for me, that hostility, if you want to call it that comes from, I think there’s at least two, possibly three of those pillars that I just think are not that great as base principles for leadership.
Andy: And it’s not the grammatical error in the writing, is it?
Mon-Chaio: No, no, no,
it is Not It is shalt, isn’t it?
Andy: It should be shalt with thou, yeah.
Mon-Chaio: right.
Andy: I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give the writer a pass on that since it’s not exactly a term we use anymore. But I think, I think in the less biblical way of phrasing it they, they put it as know your direct report for trust and rapport. Talk a lot about performance to improve future behavior. Grow your direct report for new applicable skills and push down work for bigger responsibilities for the manager and business continuity. And I think in there, there’s a little bit more nuance than this kind of like, stark, black or white thou shalt. I think I think one in particular that I believe you have a problem with from our discussion before we started recording was push down work to your direct report. This idea that you’ll just take work and push it down.
You’ll take work you’ll push it down.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Yes, I, I think I have a very visceral reaction to that simply because I think that’s one of the core skill sets of a leader. that I would say in my experience, not just from my work experience, but from networking, from talking with other leaders around the, around our space,
Andy: Mhm.
Mon-Chaio: I think nine in ten leaders get this wrong. They do not know actually how to push work down. And in fact, I think making push work down as a pillar of leadership is simply incorrect. It implies in my mind, and nuances aside, I don’t even think he gets into a ton of the nuances here, but pushing work down implies taking work that you are responsible for in your sphere and pushing it down into the sphere of your directs. And I generally think that that is a terrible way to think or model delegation and employee growth.
Andy: Right. To get a little more specific, they gave some examples of different ways some of this could show up. And one of them was around delegation. They said “giving employee a new responsibility or task that the manager used to do to free up the manager’s time for bigger things, scaling up the direct report and increasing business continuity.” But looking at that, I don’t think that there’s anything necessarily all that wrong on the skilling up direct report and increasing business continuity. Like having more people who know how to do it.
I think, I think the part where you’re probably catching on to this and like getting that visceral reaction is this idea that it’s all about the manager just offloading their work to someone else.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: This the task that the manager used to do.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: Now, they have, they have some anti patterns in how this works out that go against manager experience or management experience.
And one of them is micromanagement, which if your entire mindset is, well, these are things that I do as a manager, and I’m going to have someone else do, or these are things that I did as an individual contributor, now that I’m a manager. I can do it. It used to be my work, but now I’m going to delegate it.
You can very easily slip into micromanagement,
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: saying you do this, you do that. On the other hand, you can also slip into absentee management, they call it, which is, you’re like, well, I know how to do it, so I’m just going to hand it to you. You’ll figure it out. So, I think they have a little nuance.
I’m gonna, I’m gonna challenge you on some of these things. I think they do have a little nuance there. Is there more to the management experience than Would you want to take delegation out of how people perceive their manager? Or, or what, what would you want to do with this?
Mon-Chaio: I think, first of all, I would say that it be eliminated as a pillar. I think delegation is interesting and it is important in the overall makeup of leadership.
Andy: Mm
Mon-Chaio: But when I think about management experience, I would not think about delegation as a core pillar of how my management experience happens, or sorry, of the measurement of my management experience.
Now, they actually give management experience measurements, or what they would do for what they would call KPIs, perhaps,
for the delegation example. And their KPIs are things like number of new responsibilities for the manager, number of new responsibilities for the direct report, constant increase in the quality level of the delegated task, And
so I think already from that, for me, I think that those, one, those measures are absolutely horrid.
They’re just terrible. Because
Andy: I thought it, my immediate thought was, this sounds like a recipe for empire building.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Andy: Where I am improving my management experience by growing a larger and larger area of what I’m responsible for.
Mon-Chaio: Absolutely, and a big part, Andy, of what we both part Andy
Andy talk about
is consent, right? Nowhere in delegation, and I’m going to go off on a slight tangent here. He, he, author of this blog post, or this article takes those four principles from a set of leadership principles by a group that invented this thing called Manager Tools.
When we link the article, you can click through, you can see what the Manager Tools are. And I listened to their two part series about Delegation 2. They have a podcast about it. It’s about 50 minutes. I listened to that about how they think about delegation as well. And for both the manager tools folks, the folks that created that model, as well as the author of this article, nowhere in there is consent. This concept of my report is asking for these new skills to be developed. My report is eager for this new work. My report believes that this new work benefits them and doesn’t just benefit me. Or benefits them at least equally, if not more than it benefits me, right? Because we’ve given this example on the podcast before, this shit rolling downhill example.
And I’ll give it again because I think it is so important. A lot of the power resides with folks at the top of an organization. They generally have more years of experience.
They have more connections in the industry. They have a higher salary. They have more stock options banked. And so for them, the risk of saying no is much, much lower than somebody perhaps early or mid career, where the risk of saying no and saying, I’m going to get fired for saying no. Can I find another job?
I don’t have enough savings to be able to weather not having work. That disparity is huge. And so the problem with shit rolling downhill is if my VP, if I’m like a director and my VP passes me something and I say, man, this is, we’re not going to do this, buddy. Like I, my organization is not going to do this.
This doesn’t fit in. We have already too much work. We’re just going to say no. The risk to that person, if they get fired, they could probably exist. I don’t know, two, three, five years, maybe. I don’t know. I’m just going to make stuff up, right? Generally speaking. But if instead they basically say, okay, thank you.
I’m going to absorb this work. And because then work overflows my bucket of time, I am then going to push stuff down to basically say that there’s somebody down below that can absorb it. And even if they don’t technically absorb it, even if you say, hey, by the way, drop these three lower priority things you’re doing in order to absorb it, it’s still the power disparity of saying, you are now going to take this on, and you are now responsible for taking on the overflow. And it allows the folks at the top to be much more blatant about Well, sales wanted this and they sold this new feature. So, hey, nobody’s ever telling me no, right? I just, I just push things into the queue and it’s a black box and somehow it happens. Like, great. But like, it’s the bottom of that pyramid, which is taking all of that load and taking all of that inequity.
And I think that’s a huge, huge problem with the way they think about delegation.
Andy: Right. So there may be a disconnect between the way that the author of the article that we’re looking at and the referenced inspiration for these pillars thinks about it. Because the of the article we’re directly looking at says it’s important to emphasize the prerequisites of ethical management.
Mm hmm. Meaning a manager has benefit of the organization in mind and behaves accordingly. So ethical for them is about the organization. Now, I think there is an aspect of that in ethics that you’re doing things for the organization, but there’s also an ethical for the people that you’re working, that you’re, you’re managing.
So they say with “an unethical manager who’s either violating the company values, lying, cheating, or humiliating, Portraying a poor management experience to begin with. Results and retention are likely to be low. There is no point in talking about the principles.” So I think their take on this is that we may disagree with some of the ways they presented it, but I believe that they’re trying to get to that.
How do you delegate, you know, in a way that helps people?
Mon-Chaio: So I want to touch on that real quick. And then I want to touch on the helping folks portion. In the delegation episode of the Manager Tools podcast, they mentioned this idea of as you delegate, people might say no to what you delegate. And one of their tactics that they present is ask them why they say no.
And they talk about salespeople love to hear no. Because people explain why, and then they know how they can get around it. And so they said, if somebody comes in and they say, Well, no, I can’t do this because I have too big of a workload. You can, they call it setting the hook. You can set the hook by saying, Well, what if I could guarantee the same workload?
Then would you say yes? And they mentioned that if the direct, if your director report then says yes, you’ve basically gotten them to agree to the work, given the constraints, and that gives you a space to work with. And they even touch on the ethical part of this. They say, well, some people will come to us and say, well, you know, I don’t like that, like setting the hook.
But in their mind, being unethical requires malice in the heart of the giver of the work. I think that is
Andy: That’s,
Mon-Chaio: Really problematic,
Andy: I wouldn’t with that. because that means that as long as you don’t think about it, you’re, you’re doing all right.
Mon-Chaio: Right. Or if you’re saying, look I mean, one of their big things is like the big thing you, like your job management is the, is serving the organization, which, you know, I’m a big believer in, right? Like you’re not employed if you don’t serve the organization. So yes, management is serving the organization.
So as long as you keep the organization in mind, then you can kind of keep this pureness of like the salespeople sold it. My job is to deliver it. And now I’ve gotten you to be able to deliver it, and so great. So, I think, you know, the ethics part, given that that’s sort of the basis of the foundation that the author of the article draws from, I have a challenge of that.
Andy: Right,
Mon-Chaio: You know, I have, I have a difficult time thinking about the way that he talks about ethics without thinking about the way that he draws from the
source material that he draws from.
But I think the other part of it is something that you like to mention a lot and I agree with you with, which is not everybody wants to grow.
And growth, I very, very much disagree that growth is the central part of a employee’s employment experience, much less the central part of a manager’s central duty or leader’s central duty in running their organization. I really, really do.
And some people will say, Well, you know, how can you get more efficient if people don’t grow?
Or how can you outperform your competition if people don’t grow? I mean, we can we can debate that. But generally speaking, I think there is an over focus on performance. And there was an over focus on growth. And I think under focusing on those actually gets you better results.
Andy: What we’re getting to is that this, this is asking for a complete focus on performance, a complete focus on growth. And a complete focus on delegation.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: Now, those are all things that may or may not be useful things to do, I think is what we’re getting at. Like, you might want to delegate, you might want to focus on performance, but it’s going to vary by person. So what is, if we strip that away, if we strip their pillars away, and kind of look at this idea of management experience.
Because I said, early on, I still think it’s a useful idea. And I do, I have similar concerns as you about some of the things that they’ve said on here, but if we strip that away, is it actually still a useful idea? Cause they, they, they put it against things like user experience, developer experience, customer experience, all these things that are kind of, well, I’m not an expert in any of them.
But they’re kind of nebulous. They’re just kind like, here’s a group and here’s an interaction they have with something. And the idea on them, for the most part, is like, well, what is their experience doing that? There’s many different aspects that you might involve in that. So user experience, they said, it includes perceptions of utility, ease of use, efficiency.
Developer experience, quite often we’ll talk about what are the tools available. What kinds of frictions are there? What kinds of things are allowed or not allowed? Customer experience. I know we always get you walk into a store sometimes and they’ll start asking you about your customer experience.
Mon-Chaio: hmm. months after you purchase a product,
Andy: yeah.
Mon-Chaio: they’ll send you an email about this five times a day.
Andy: Or, or if you’re at in the Like a lot of airports I’ve noticed have this. If you go into the toilets at the airport on your way out, there’s the little three smiley faces, or three faces. Select, select your experience here.
Mon-Chaio: Mm
Andy: And then they had one that I hadn’t heard of before, which was employee experience.
And they linked to an article from an HR organization talking about employee experience. And it, it was just how employees feel about everything they encounter through their employee journey. A very nebulous thing, but a thing to kind of say, you know what, there’s a thing here that might be useful.
The authors of this article try to draw a distinction between management experience and employee experience. And I’m wondering if, if we could debate that a little bit and figure out, I don’t know if we’re going to take different sides on this debate or not, but Debate this a little bit and figure out, is there actually a difference?
They say management experience is a subset of employee experience. Okay. So let’s start out. What is management? If management experiences, well, they tried to give it a much more specific thing about these four managerial principles, but it starts out very general, like all of the other things, which is, is how an employee, employees experience everything they encounter from their manager. I think I could get behind that. The idea that there’s some sort of experience you get from that interaction and
Mon-Chaio: I absolutely agree. I think I don’t know I have never actually read a study on this. So, Andy, I know you come from the same vein, so our listeners can kind of plug their ears and go, la la la, of course this is what Mon Chaio is going to say and maybe Andy. But since I’ve never read a study on it, I’m going to take it with a grain of salt.
I generally believe it, but I’m not going to put my foot down and say, yes, this is something I absolutely believe in and I’m going to make a central part of my management thinking. Which is. Employees leave managers, they don’t leave companies.
I think you’ve heard that, Andy. I see you nodding, right?
But I generally believe it. Like I said, I’m not going to put my foot down and say this is absolutely true, but I generally believe it. And so when I think about management experience and why I think it’s important, why I even clicked on this article, the link in the first place, is because I want to, I think it’s a useful topic, and I do think it contrasts with employee experience.
I think it’s tricky to contrast it, but I do think it contrasts. Because in larger companies, when you see these surveys, you definitely see a manager part of the survey, and then you see what is clearly a company part of the survey. And you can very clearly often see distinctions. And I wouldn’t even say small distinctions.
I’d say often you would see large distinctions in scores between the manager’s side and the company’s side. So I’ll give you an example. Does my manager follow through on what they say they’re going to do? Oftentimes you can see very high scores there. Do my leaders follow through on what they say they’re going to do?
Oftentimes the scores are much lower there. And so as I contrast this, I think that there is quite a big distinction between management experience and employee experience.
Andy: Yeah, I, I think there is. And I’m going to, I’m gonna nitpick this a little bit and I don’t know if this will be useful nitpick or not. So we’re going from One kind of category of things to another category of things with these two different terms. So employee experience is the sum total of the employee’s relationship with the organization.
Now, that’s a, that’s kind of like a category of this amorphous un individualistic group and group behavior.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: The definition that they gave for management experience, however, is down to a single individual. Your experience with a single individual. And,
Mon-Chaio: Mm
Andy: I’m wondering if there, it might be more useful.
Management experience is not about your individual manager. Because if you accept that employee experience is about the sum total, this kind of total system that people are experiencing, Management experience, and I think, and this was part of your kind of tear apart of these pillars, was that the person is not in isolation.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: So the management experience, if we suddenly put it in isolation on that one manager, you’re like, oh, you’ve got terrible management experience because your one manager. Well, it’s really, you’ve, I mean, possibly, there can be bad individuals, but also Really, the thing going on there, to be comparable to employee experience, is not your experience with your one individual manager, but your experience with the management structure of that organization.
How does that whole thing work out? Because your manager is part of that structure, just as you’re part of that structure, and your manager has actions restricted by that structure, and actions promoted by that structure. How does that work?
Mon-Chaio: I love that thinking, Andy. I think that’s a really interesting way of approaching it. And I think that, I think that it makes a lot of sense. So without saying that everything is a systems level problem, because you and I, in our experience, have both seen terrible managers in reasonable systems. I wouldn’t even say great systems.
I don’t know that I personally have worked in a great system. You might say that you have.
Maybe
Andy: Reasonable. Even then, just reasonable.
Mon-Chaio: And so I would say I’ve definitely seen very terrible managers in reasonable systems. And so you could say well we need a way to suss them out, to rate them, to figure out where they are because they have such a big blast radius. That’s true. But more often I see reasonable managers in terrible systems and the manager getting the blame because they’re trying to do reasonable things in a terrible system.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: And what I see there often is I see people being presented as good managers or people that are able to overcome the system. So, you know, it’s like they, Force you to tie a parachute to the back of your employees as they’re running, right? But the manager is somehow able to get them to run fast anyway.
And so you, you say, well, they, they did great. Without thinking about why are we putting parachutes on these people? And so a manager who’s otherwise good, but for some reason can’t get employees to run fast with parachutes on their back, suddenly is seen as a terrible manager. And I see that over and over again.
And managers whose skill sets are basically good, but are in terrible systems. And for one reason or another, they don’t kind of click, right? Like, Their, their very big strengths don’t align with how to overcome this terrible system, and so then they get the blame. And so I don’t know if we want to go into this, but like, it is a really big thing in my mind that a lot of it is actually the system’s fault, quote unquote.
And so if we then think about management experience, maybe we think about it as say, it’s not about your individual manager, but I don’t know how high you go. Maybe we go to the the top of your immediate AAA group or something, I don’t But like, How is that system structured? And like, is, does the system give me the experience that I want?
Is that kind of where you were going? Or
Andy: Yeah. Yes.
No, absolutely. That’s, that’s what I was thinking is that it’s, it’s more about that system level thing. It doesn’t change some of their points about the difference between employee experience and management experience, but I think it changes that focus from these pillars are to me, these pillars end up being interesting ways of viewing what’s going on, but not necessarily the measures of quality. So, for, for example just to kind of pull that along a little bit further, they talk about in this that employee experience quite often is going to be about things that are keeping people engaged, keeping them happy. Management experience ends up being not about making people happy. It’s more along the lines of, are people productive?
Are they doing things useful? so management experience will be in tension with employee experience at times. experience might be, yeah, they tell me not to do certain things, but I feel like I’m doing something useful. And that’s a kind of a theme that comes through this structure that they have.
I think you can completely divorce it from these four managerial principles that they tried to use and still have that aspect, that you have these two things in tension. And in fact, they even talk about it as something called an organizational tax, is “the employee may disagree or dislike some of the experiences.
And that’s what’s known as the organizational tax. To accomplish great things, humans collaborate, and as a result, each individual sacrifices something.” Do people believe that they’re sacrificing the right things to get the results that are wanted?
Mon-Chaio: that’s one of my favorite lines, if not my biggest favorite line out of this I mean, that’s what, that’s, that’s 10 words or whatever. This is probably a thousand word article. I love, I love when they mention that, but yeah, I think, I do think it’s a useful concept. We’re a bit into this episode, Andy, and I thought in the first few minutes, you were going to ask me if I disagree with these pillars so much, what would be my pillars for management experience?
Andy: I wasn’t to put you on the spot like that, but if you want me to, I can.
Mon-Chaio: No, but I think it might be interesting to talk about. I was afraid of it because I was not ready. I didn’t, I didn’t, have any canned answers for that. But I, I, don’t think this is an episode where we’re going to talk about tactics. Is it?
Andy: to recognize that the management experience is not directly tied to happiness, but happiness will drive a lot of people’s management experience. So, this came to my mind as I was reading through this, and we were kind of getting there along the way. That employee experience is quite often about people’s happiness.
And they work from a basic assumption that people are not productive when they’re happy, they’re happy when they’re productive. And a thing that I was taught, that I work from, is not that my goal was happiness of people that reported to me, but that People being unhappy was a leading indicator to turnover, to people leaving. Because people will be doing stuff and become unhappy over time and then decide to leave. And what this does is it gives me a little bit of a, of a thing of figuring out what part of their experience is that their employee experience? Is it, is it bad interactions with co workers or just complete mismatch with what the company is doing.
Is it that they don’t feel like this is a place for them? Or is it the management side of it? Is it that they don’t feel productive? So this, to me, this gives a little bit of a framing of can you look at it in these different ways? It doesn’t give an absolute answer, but it gives a few different ways of looking at it and saying like, okay, I’m sorry you see this unhappiness.
What part of their experience Is it their interactions with the management system? Is it their interactions with the organization system as a whole? That, that might be driving that. And where can we go from there? So to me, that was the tactic is to start thinking that there are these different parts that we can tease apart a little bit and use those as ways of understanding what’s happening for a person.
to help them through their experience as an employee.
Mon-Chaio: That makes sense. I think for Smaller companies, because before I went into big tech, this concept of the difference between your management experience and your employee experience, I could say didn’t really come to the forefront of my thinking at all. Maybe it’s because the employee experience and the manager experience are too close.
Maybe in smaller companies and for
larger organizations, they’re further. I don’t know what it is. But in larger organizations, that definitely happens. As I mentioned, most of the employee happiness surveys has a very clear manager portion and very clear company portion.
And I like the tactic to say, like, if you’re not at one of those big organizations, think about the difference there.
There is a difference. And in fact, at most of big, at most of the big tech companies that I’ve worked with, there is a big emphasis placed on the manager numbers and a lesser focus placed on the organization numbers. In large part because the manager numbers tend to predict retention better than the organization numbers.
So those organization numbers could be in the 40s or the 30s and that doesn’t really help predict retention. But certainly if the manager numbers are falling into like the 60s you’re going to get retention issues, right?
Andy: It is much more closely related to what is a person’s day to day.
Mon-Chaio: do think that I disagree. One of my least favorite sentences in the article, honestly, is the sentence that says “it’s not that happy employees are more productive, but rather that more productive employees are happier.” I think there’s a lot of research that shows that happy employees are more productive.
Mm
Andy: Yeah. Yeah, I went over that thinking that they’re not saying that that’s not true. It’s they’re saying that that’s just not their focus.
Mon-Chaio: Sure.
And I, I, can, yeah, and I think When you’re building a model, I think it’s reasonable to say, look, like that may be true overall. But in the model, we want to focus on the of just pure happiness versus the job of getting productive work done and
happiness within that sphere, right?
Within the confines of that sphere,
which I think is, is an important distinction to make.
Andy: Do you want to give it a go and seeing if we can come up with a few, a few aspects of management experience that we would agree with?
Mon-Chaio: Hmm.
Sure. Let’s, let’s, let’s give it a go. see where we can, let’s see where we can get through sort of off the cuff with this. Okay. So, I think a big one for me to start off with, and maybe we’ll round robin this, I’ll give one and then you can give one, and we can see how we go from there, is, are my days getting better?
Andy: Hmm.
Mon-Chaio: I don’t know, how do you like that one? And maybe that’s too broad, right? Maybe that’s closer to the happiness part. So maybe we kind of narrow it down and say, are, you know, are my working days getting better? Or is it easier to do work every day than the day before? Or is it easier to be more productive than the day before?
Or something along those lines.
Andy: So, kind of along the, so let me try, try my own wording of it, which would be, Do I see things? Do I see improvement?
Do I see improvement in things that matter to me?
Mon-Chaio: Hmm. Yes. I think that’s great. I think the thing that I was thinking about wasn’t that, but I love that one because like I think whatever it is, whether it’s, is the company going in the right business direction? Are they seeking the right customers? Is the code improving at the right rate?
Andy: Yeah, so maybe I should, maybe I should reframe it a little bit more.
Am I seeing improvement in the things that I think matter?
Mon-Chaio: But again, I think, I think that’s important and I like that. I was going for a narrow focus about is my day to day job getting easier or can I do more with less every day than I could the day before?
Andy: Yeah, see I was, I was staying away from that a little bit because
Why was I staying away from that?
Hmm. To think about.
Mon-Chaio: This is what happens when we go off the cuff.
Andy: Yeah, it’s, it’s somewhere in there. I’m not, I’m not fully comfortable with that, that more focus on just the productivity, but maybe I should be, maybe, maybe I
Mon-Chaio: Well, and I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know if it’s simply productivity, because when I think about like, one of my biggest problems with this is the focus on productivity that they talk about with management and how that’s basically all it is. And so I’m not comfortable with productivity necessarily either being the super big focus, but at the core of it you are at a company to do some work.
Andy: Yes.
Which, which was actually getting to another one, which I was thinking of, which is another principle is, do you know what’s expected of you? Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: hmm. I like that. And maybe the focus on that, for me, would be something around, can I see alignment between the work I do and what’s espoused from the top levels of the company?
Andy: hmm.
Mon-Chaio: Right? One thing I always used to ask my directs, or sorry, not my directs, but my skips or skip skips, is the work that you’re currently doing, Which major pillar does that touch of, you know, the last thing that like the
our VP said, or the CEO said about what’s important? Can you point to it? And if they couldn’t, I think that’s a big problem of their leadership, including me, right?
But I think all the way down the chain, too.
So, yeah.
Andy: So I think, I think what we’re getting to is that, Ooh, we’re getting pretty dangerously close to, to these four pillars
Mon-Chaio: Uh oh, oh.
Andy: because we’re talking about are things getting better, you know, in a way that works. So grow your direct report
Mon-Chaio: Eh, okay, I don’t, I don’t think, I don’t think those are similar at all. But we can disagree. Okay,
yes.
Andy: Okay, One that they don’t have which is well, but I think they would probably say talk a lot about performance But to me, this is this is a different way of thinking about it. I think it’s what we were going on which is Know what you’re trying to achieve
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: I think I see the difference between what we had said, which is, are things getting better? Are you improving? Are you, are you able to do more? Which is very different from the idea of grow your direct report.
Mon-Chaio: Right, I think so.
Andy: Yeah, the grow your direct report has very much this idea of they’re growing responsibilities.
They can do more. Whereas are you improving could be, you have the exact same responsibilities, but you can do it better.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm Yeah, and there’s this growth, the performance and growth part. That they mention are, and maybe this is my sort of PTSD experience, but to me are too tied to this concept of like, we just need to get this person promoted. We just get, need to get
them more responsibilities, higher title, a higher salary
Andy: Yeah. If they haven’t gotten that that performance pay increase, then you’ve failed as a manager.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. And I don’t even know if there’s, was there a metric on that somewhere here?
I don’t so. Oh, promotions. MX measures. Number of promotion recommendations accepted by higher management. Number of rejected recommendations. Number of surprised people hearing about others promotions. Yeah, I And you know, the manager’s tools people would call me naive. say probably us, but certainly me. They would say, look, you have this idealized way of the way things should work, but that’s not how the world works. And so if you live in the real world, you have to talk about promotion and you have to talk about performance.
But Andy, man, I don’t want to live in that real world.
Andy: I want the metaverse. No, I
I don’t.
Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Do you, to what you were saying, Andy, about you know, do I know, you know, do I know what goals I’m setting out for? I think that’s important too. I think, you know, if I had a pillar of management experience, I would say, you know, does my manager, does my manager help me in making sure that all the work I do touches the most critical parts of a company, of the organization’s goals?
Right? And that could be many ways. It could be by connecting you with people from around the organization. It could be by clearly connecting your org, your team strategy with the org strategy. It could be many things. But I think that’s a core part, right? Like you want to know that your work matters.
when you do work, you want to know that it touches the most important pillars of what the company is trying to achieve.
And I think your management experience has a big part to play in that.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They have one which is know your direct report. I think I can go along with that. I think, think, I think people should feel like they are known, that they are recognized as individuals and as people. I think absolutely that one should be in there. They had one about you have to know their children’s names.
I think I would fail that one. I’m terrible at names. I, I
Mon-Chaio: where I think their heart’s in the right place. I think the example is poor, but yes, you want to get to know them as people, not just employees. I think we’ve, you know, there’s a number of episodes that we’ve done that sprinkles that throughout. We know that that’s the research shows that that’s what helps.
And it’s just more humanistic, like, you know, you’re there with them eight hours a day, like they spend the majority of their time with you.
And as much as we don’t want you to be, you know, there, they’re there for you. their work parent and oh this is how you grow and here’s the next thing you have to be responsible for and here’s how you get promoted and whatnot.
You still are in some ways their caretaker and so yeah you want to be humanistic. And when I said I disagree with two vehemently with two of their pillars maybe three, well there is that one. Know your direct report. I agree with that one.
Andy: So I think we might want to just leave it there. So what we’ve got is What we think are three pillars which are knowing people So that the that your management experience along the lines of do you feel known? Does does the management structure seem to take into account that you are a person? Then we’ve got The question of do you, does it help you understand how what you do fits together with what everyone else is doing and what the goals are
Mon-Chaio: I would say more strongly than that. Does it enable your best work to align with the organization’s strongest interests or Most critical goals or something like that.
Andy: Good, well put.
Mon-Chaio: Mm
Andy: And then we’ve got the third one which is about improvement. This isn’t career growth, this is about improvement. This is about getting better at what’s desired as well as what the person wants. So desired from the organization and desired from the employee. That’s the way would think about it.
Mon-Chaio: Fair.
Andy: So the question is Mon Chaio, do our listeners have any other ideas of what are the important aspects of management experience?
Mon-Chaio: Well, I’d love to know, and they’ll have more time to think about it than the ten minutes we spent just kind of riffing off the cuff. So, yeah, I want to know that too.
Andy: Yeah So if you have any ideas share this episode share the podcast on whatever social media platform you use and share what you think you could add to this or take away from our ideas or disagree with us about whether or not the manager tools is Is the right way or not? We would love to hear from you, and if you do that try to tag us.
We’re on a few different platforms I won’t try to name them all, but yeah. And if you, if you don’t want to put it out there to the, to the rest of the world, you can always email us at hosts at thettlpodcast. com. Get in contact with us about that, or about anything else that you have questions about, or need help with. So, then, until next time, be kind and stay curious.
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