Managing to Change the World

by Alison Green

  What are Josh’s main priorities right now?

  What was your reaction to X [an event Josh pulled together or a plan he sent, for example]?

  Should we get aligned on X before you go back to Josh on it?

  Have you given Josh feedback, positive or negative, on X?

  What’s your sense of how Josh is performing? What are his main areas for growth? How are you taking those on with him?

  [Where appropriate] What’s your strategy for retaining Josh? Can I be helpful on that?

  Looking across your team, what are you most focused on from a management perspective? How are you taking that on?

  And here too, getting your hands dirty will help. Be enough in touch with the people on her team that you have a good sense of what’s going on, and consider doing a joint visit or meeting with the manager to observe the work of her team. However, be aware of the delicate balance you’re striving for here: you want to understand what’s going on without going around the manager or taking over the management functions that rightly belong to her (unless the manager has a serious performance problem, of course).

  Managing Work Outside Your Area of Expertise

  As you progress in your career, you might also end up in charge of areas you frankly know nothing about! If you’re charged with managing an area of work outside your main expertise, such as information technology (IT), here are five ways to do it effectively:

  1. Get aligned about goals and have clear deadlines—for instance, “We need an interactive Web site up and running in time for our big legislative push, which means tested, launched, and ready to use by February.” This keeps you focused on the end product, and then you can ask questions about the process: “How will we know whether this is on track? Are there milestones you could set to hit along the way?”

  2. Manage by asking good questions rather than suggesting answers. Even without knowing the substance, you can pose basic, useful questions like, “How do you know that XYZ is true?” or “What will you do if ABC happens?” or “What do other organizations do about DEF?”

  3. Use your ignorance to your advantage. Try a lot of “Help me understand why . . .” questions, and probe the answers to make sure your staff member has thought through problems thoroughly. For instance, you might ask, “Help me understand why the network keeps going down when we have high volume on our site.”

  4. Connect the person to her “customers.” Your staffer may be doing work that few others understand but where many know whether they’re getting what they need. Often you find yourself in the middle between “customers” (staff members in other departments) who tell you they want something, and an “expert” whom you manage. Your job is to bring the two sides together. Make sure your managee is talking to customers and agreeing with them on what they’ll have by when. Ensure there’s an ongoing channel for communication and feedback, including periodic surveys or other means that let you and your staffer see how the customers feel. Where appropriate, make clear that producing customer satisfaction is part of the job.

  5. Judge by what you do know. Often you won’t have any clear idea whether 90 percent of what the person does is good because you don’t understand the subject matter. You will, though, understand 10 percent of it even if it’s just something like, “Did this person explain what she was doing in a way customers could understand?” or, with IT, whether your e-mail and networking are running smoothly. Extrapolate from what you can understand, and assume the 90 percent you don’t understand is similar. If the small pieces you get seem great, it’s reasonable to assume that the rest probably is, and if the piece you get seems off, it’s likely that the rest may be too.

  KEY POINTS

  Holding weekly check-in meetings with each staff member provides you a good forum for management. It helps you remain engaged in ongoing projects, ensure that problems are spotted and addressed, balance workloads, provide feedback, and generally check in with the employee about how things are going overall.

  Monthly step-back meetings ensure that you don’t neglect topics like progress toward big picture goals and development needs.

  TOOL 5.1

  SAMPLE CHECK-IN MEETING AGENDA

  EJ/RA Weekly Check-In: 7/19

  This week will be successful if:

  1. All materials for training are finalized and out the door by Thursday night.

  2. The conference presentation is started and is on track to be done by the end of next week.

  3. The newsletter draft is complete and ready for layout.

  Weekly priorities should be few in number (two to four) in order to focus on the most important areas, and they should be presented as outcomes so it’s clear at the end of the week if they’ve been achieved.

  1. Key Updates Training: outline/agenda completed, materials for first training about to be finalized

  Housing: new coalition members

  Outreach: newsletter on schedule

  2. Items for Your Thoughts Program associate opening—candidates/hiring process

  Coalition—getting pushback from A.W.M.; would love to talk this through

  Conference talk—touch base to check my thinking

  3. Lessons Learned Quick debrief of house meetings (my view: pluses were great messaging, clear assignments on our team; main thing to improve was my checking in more with individual leads to make sure all was on track)

  4. On Back Burner/Not Getting to Yet (FYI) Grant proposal

  Online advocacy center overhaul

  5. Next Steps/Repeat-Back

  TOOL 5.2

  SAMPLE CHECK-IN SUCCESS SHEET

  Paste your goals from your annual goals success sheet in [Tool 3.2 in Chapter Three] into the first column, and assess the extent to which you’re on track.

  Questions for Discussion

  What else needs to happen to achieve X?

  Is there anything you should be starting on now in anticipation of what’s coming up in the next few months?

  For goals that are getting off-track: What’s happened to throw us off-track? What are you doing to restrategize your plan for that goal?

  What could go wrong? What worries you? What can you do to plan now for those possibilities?

  Are there items that have been deprioritized that we should move to the front of our attention now? Are there items that we should be focusing on less now in favor of higher priorities?

  PART 2

  MANAGING THE PEOPLE

  Managing the work well is critically important, but having the right people to do the work in the first place might be even more important. Managers, though, often take the makeup of their teams as a given rather than proactively shaping them, missing perhaps their biggest opportunity to get great results.

  To illustrate the flaw in this approach, let’s talk sports. If you were coaching a basketball team and your job was to win, would you want to take players who were chosen for you and then work your hardest to shape them into a strong squad, or would you rather choose your players (at the risk of dating ourselves, let’s say Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in their primes), even if it meant you couldn’t do a thing to alter their performance once they joined your team? No matter how good a coach you are, you’re never going to get a squad of Jerry Hausers and Alison Greens to beat Michael and Scottie.

  The impact of having a team of high performers in the workplace is similarly dramatic. We’re not talking about small gains in productivity and effectiveness, like 5 or 10 percent. We’re talking about massive, startling gains. Think of the difference between the number of points Jerry would score versus the number Michael would (trust us on this; it would be big). We’ve seen that in a variety of situations, high performers outperform lower performers by five times or more. Consider:

  When Jerry was at Teach For America, he replaced one regional director with another, and in one year fundraising in the region soared from $43,000 to $285,000 (and within two more years, to $1 million).

  We’ve both had assistants who stru
ggled to handle the volume of work and who swore that there was too much work for any one person to juggle. In each case, when that person left, the replacements were able to handle all of the duties and then some, to the point that we ended up loading them up with entire new areas of responsibility to make the best use of them.

  In the development department at one organization, a processing clerk couldn’t keep up and created a six-month backlog of checks to process. A new person came in and within one month had processed the six-month backlog and was fully caught up.

  We could go on and on with examples like this. One high performer can have the same impact as five or more lower performers—so imagine the impact of having an entire organization of people operating at this level!

  If the right people make an enormous impact on your results and getting results is your fundamental job, then you should put significant energy into getting and keeping the right people and moving out the ones who don’t meet that bar. The chapters in Part Two discuss how to do that:

  How to find and hire superstars (Chapter Six)

  How and when to develop the skills and performance of your staff (Chapter Seven)

  Ways to make sure your best employees stay (Chapter Eight)

  How to address performance issues, including terminating employees who aren’t meeting your standards (Chapter Nine)

  Managing the makeup of your team pays enormous dividends. When you have the right people with the right skills, you’ll achieve dramatically better results.

  CHAPTER 6

  HIRING SUPERSTARS

  Little about management is more important than hiring well, since you’ll never get great results without having the right people on your staff. But we’ve found that even when managers say they know how crucial it is to have the right people, they often don’t use the hiring practices that should stem from that belief.

  To take one example, the key determinant of success for most hiring processes is the quality of the candidates a manager has to choose from. That is, most hiring mistakes occur not because managers select the wrong person, but because they don’t have the right person to select to begin with. As we’ll discuss in this chapter, the key to success lies in proactively building a strong pool of candidates. Many managers pay lip service to this idea but end up spending little energy doing anything beyond posting jobs on popular Internet sites.

  This chapter explores how to do hiring the right way, so that you maximize your chances of ending up with a staff of superstars. We set out five key steps:

  1. Figuring out who you’re looking for by defining the critical qualities needed for the role

  2. Building a strong pool of candidates

  3. Gathering information about your candidates through interviews, exercises, and reference checks so you can make your hiring decision based on the actual rather than the hypothetical

  4. Making your decision

  5. Selling the position and making the offer

  FIGURING OUT WHO YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

  The first step in hiring well is to get a clear picture of who you are looking for. Who would your ideal candidate be? In order to answer this question and produce an effective job description for potential hires, you’ll need to clarify the role and think critically about what skills and qualities you should look for.

  Get Clear On the Job Responsibilities

  First, organize your thoughts about what the person will do, creating a list for your own purposes (the job description comes later). As we discussed in the section on roles in Chapter Three, it’s helpful to have a clear headline to keep in mind about the fundamentals of the role. Beyond that, think through specific activities that the person might be doing if she were in the role today. For instance, rather than saying, “manage our brand,” your list of activities for your head of marketing might include “work with Jonah to design new recruitment brochure,” “analyze Web data and draft a report to the board,” and “conduct trainings at our October retreat so staff can identify messages that do and don’t fit our brand.”

  Consider What Skills, Knowledge, and General Qualities the Position Requires

  Once you’re clear on what the person will need to do, consider what type of person would thrive in that work. What skills, background knowledge, and general qualities should she have? For instance, if you are hiring a research assistant who will gather information from multiple sources and then draft reports, key skills might include synthesizing data and writing clearly. You might also look for specific knowledge of the subject matter the research assistant will cover. As for general qualities, consider the specific job and your organization as a whole. What traits do the most successful people with whom you work share? Does your organization have explicit or implicit core values that the person must hold? For example, the nature of your organization’s work and culture might require being able to operate in a fast-paced environment. If that quality is important, it should go on your list.

  Separate “Must-Haves” from “Nice-to-Haves”

  As you make your list, distinguish between what is a “must-have” for the role and what is a “nice-to-have.” In doing this, consider what qualities tend to be inherent (the person either has it or does not) versus what can be taught or developed. Underlying talents like strong critical thinking, effective writing, a strong work ethic, meticulousness, or an ability to build strong interpersonal relationships are difficult to teach, so if they are important to the job, they should go on your must-have list. More specific skills or knowledge, like mastery of a particular type of software, industry knowledge, or experience writing for a particular type of audience, can more easily be picked up along the way, particularly when more essential traits (in these cases, critical thinking and strong writing) are in place. There are, of course, times when prerequisite knowledge is essential—for instance, your chief financial officer needs to come in with an understanding of accounting principles—but in many cases, organizations overvalue specific skills or content knowledge and don’t put enough weight on underlying qualities that are harder to develop. In the long or even medium term, underlying traits like critical thinking or initiative or assertiveness are much more likely to differentiate high performers than are things like specific experience in your sector (Figure 6.1).

  FIGURE 6.1. Talent Trumps Experience

  Create a Job Posting

  Once you are clear on your desired criteria, translate the list into a job posting, which should do three things: explain the job responsibilities, list the qualifications you’re looking for, and sell the position and organization.

  On that last point, remember that job postings are marketing tools. We often see job announcements for incredible opportunities that are filled with bureaucratic jargon that sucks the life out of the role. You want to attract people who will be excited about the work, so ideally your announcement will help your target candidates imagine what it would be like to work in this role at this organization, and to feel inspired by it.

  That means that you might talk about some of the organization’s recent successes and exciting challenges on the horizon, as well as how the person in this position will help address those issues. But it also has ramifications for how you talk about the job responsibilities and qualifications.

  WHAT ABOUT PASSION?

  Contrary to conventional wisdom, exhibiting a great deal of passion for your organization’s issue should generally not be a must-have quality for candidates. In fact, we’ve seen no correlation between visible passion and effectiveness. Passion is certainly not a bad thing, but we’ve seen far too many managers use passion as a substitute for talent, hiring highly passionate candidates (or at least candidates who talk as if they’re passionate) who end up not being well suited for the job. So beyond checking for a basic commitment to the objectives of the organization, don’t let a candidate’s enthusiasm about your work overly influence your thinking about her fit for the role. Ultimately, what you most want is a candidate who is passionate about
getting results.

  For instance, when you’re explaining the job responsibilities, avoid internal jargon or getting bogged down with detail. You should convey the essence of the role and key details about it, but at this stage, sometimes broad strokes can more effectively convey what the role is all about. Remember that you want to get candidates excited, not make them think they’ve fallen into a dry internal processes manual.

  In listing the qualifications for the job, make clear what traits are essential and what traits are less important so that the people with the traits you desire will recognize themselves in your summary. For instance, in the case of a research assistant, many potential applicants will assume you want someone with experience in your field. If you value general skills like strong writing more than industry-specific knowledge, you might say explicitly, “We care more about whether you’re a great writer than whether you have experience in the health care field.”

  You also should think about the profile of the ideal person who would fill the role well. For instance, if you’re looking for an executive assistant, do you picture hiring a career assistant who has a great deal of experience, or might a highly organized recent college graduate be well suited to what you want? If the latter, you might make a point of saying that prior experience is less important than being extremely organized and attentive to detail. Tool 6.1 provides a sample job posting.

  BUILDING A STRONG POOL OF CANDIDATES