by Alison Green
Regardless of the exact setup, being the second in command can produce a unique set of frustrations, such as a boss who reverses your decisions when staffers go around you to her, or needing to hold people accountable when they’re working more closely with your boss than with you. Because of this, it’s especially crucial that a number one and number two are aligned and on the same team.
Here are five keys to making a second-in-command position work smoothly:
1. Get explicitly aligned. Because a second in command is likely to be handling tricky or potentially controversial situations, the alignment conversations that we discussed above are even more crucial here. Over time you’ll likely find that you’ve developed basic understandings that will apply from one situation to the next, so you’ll be able to act in more and more situations without needing to check in as often. You should still continue to get aligned on particularly sensitive situations, however.
2. Do your aligning behind the scenes. Just as effective parents show a united front to their kids, you and your boss should generally try to do your aligning in private—and in advance when possible. Of course, if you didn’t talk something through beforehand and you discover while meeting with others that you disagree on an issue, it’s fine to have divergent opinions. In this case, be sure you ultimately send a clear signal to the staff about which way to head, and you should ensure that the two of you are clear about which of you has the final decision-making authority.
3. Expect a learning curve, and debrief regularly. We can almost promise you that things won’t go perfectly smoothly at the start. You might make a judgment call that your boss thinks was a mistake, or she might inadvertently step into your sphere of authority, particularly if a number two is a new position for the organization. This is normal. Don’t get discouraged or upset by it; in fact, see these bumps as useful opportunities to help you clarify expectations and get more aligned. To make sure that you actually do this, agree on a time in advance (say, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. on the first Friday of every month) when you’ll review some specific examples and talk about how things are working and what you both could do differently. Not only will this strengthen your operations overall, but these conversations will help you get more inside your boss’s head so that you become more and more instinctively aligned with her over time.
4. When you’re in the middle, bring the ends together, particularly when one of them is your boss. While you’ll be able to resolve many situations on your own, it’s important to differentiate between when your job is to solve something yourself and when it is to get the right people to talk to each other so that the problem gets solved. This often simply means ensuring that the right people get together and that the right questions get asked. For instance, if you notice that your boss frequently makes extensive edits to the op-eds written in her name by the communications director, don’t get caught up in being a go-between, ferrying messages back and forth or trying to guess what’s driving your boss’s edits. Instead, facilitate a meeting between the two, and rather than focusing just on the most recent set of edits, ask questions to help your boss articulate the underlying principles driving her edits.
5. Your job is to streamline your boss’s involvement, not remove her. As the second in command, you’ll be intimately steeped in the day-to-day details of your organization in a way that your executive director won’t (and shouldn’t) be. It’s key to avoid feeling as if you’re the one who “really” knows what’s going on; that’s a toxic path that will keep your executive director disengaged and eventually frustrated and can harm both of your effectiveness. Instead, use your detailed knowledge to spot and point out to her areas where she should engage, whether it’s weighing in on how to frame a sensitive issue in a press release or congratulating an employee for an achievement.
Tool 12.1 offers a sample plan for establishing a division of labor between the executive director and the second in command.
KEY POINTS
Managing up is about working with your boss in the way that will produce the best possible results for the organization.
One key to working harmoniously with any boss is to get clear in your own mind about what you can and can’t control and to focus on making the pieces you can control go as smoothly as possible.
Talk explicitly with your manager about goals and priorities, how you’ll approach tricky or sensitive issues, how she wants to be involved in decisions, and communication systems.
Put yourself in charge of making the relationship and your communication systems work. Take the lead on rescheduling meetings, raising issues for discussion, and so forth.
Make your boss’s job easy by applying the principles of delegation upward, providing fast ways for her to provide input, reminding her of context, and asking for feedback after a project is over.
Be emotionally intelligent by not taking things personally, remembering that your boss is human, and speaking up when you’re frustrated.
Have your own act together.
If you’re a second in command, it’s particularly important for you and your boss to get aligned behind the scenes and to remember that your job is to streamline your boss’s involvement, not to remove her.
Additional Reading
Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles, “Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer,” Harvard Business Review, May 2006.
BoardSource: Articles, books, tools, and training for nonprofit boards. Some content is available to members only. www.boardsource.org
TOOL 12.1
SAMPLE DIVISION OF LABOR PLAN
Division of labor between:
Ruth Johnson, founder and executive director
Alan Alperowicz, chief operating officer
Functions should be all the areas where there is any role confusion or potential role confusion.
Function Ruth’s Role Alan’s Role
Board Manage board relations and serve as point person Support Ruth as requested
Fundraising Owns 2013 fundraising goal; lead strategist and pitch maker Ensure Ruth has support she needs (help develop plan and manage execution effectively); be a resource to Ruth
External relations Lead spokesperson for and face of organization Serve as spokesperson on occasion and own key external meetings
Issue and campaign management Consult on major decisions and (rarely) use veto power to stop a particular action; give input and suggest ideas on day-to-day issues Responsible for making decisions on all day-to-day issues, figuring out process for decision making (including what meetings need to happen and how they should be run), and consulting Ruth as needed; get Ruth’s input on all major decisions
Staff management Manage Alan and back him up once decision has been made; use veto power sparingly over management decisions Manage all day-to-day operations, including office of the CEO, Communications, Development, Research, Finance, and HR; determine appropriate staff roles and reporting lines; evaluate staff; make hiring and firing decisions, consulting Ruth as appropriate
Annual plan Give up-front input on and have final sign-off on plan Manage to annual plan and ensure goals are met; drive next year’s goal-setting process
Strategic vision Set strategic vision Be a resource to Ruth in setting vision
Legal compliance Consult on key matters Manage legal team around relevant issues in order to ensure legal compliance
Budget Provide upfront input and sign off on final budget In consultation with Ruth (especially on relevant development issues), develop and manage budget
Special projects Develop new ideas and consult on implementation Ensure projects are executed well, with emphasis on building needed capacity (for example, hiring top talent to carry out special projects)
CONCLUSION
PERSONAL QUALITIES OF A GREAT MANAGER
In the preceding chapters, we’ve discussed the practices of great managers a great deal, but we haven’t talked much about their personal qualities. That’s because great man
agers come in many different packages, and we don’t believe that you need to become someone you’re not in order to excel as a manager.
That said, before closing, we’d like to take a look at what kind of person it takes to do well the sorts of practices this book examines. As you read this conclusion, keep in mind that in our experience, even managers who don’t start out with all of these qualities end up bringing them out in themselves as they internalize the practices we have covered in this book.
So what personal qualities do great managers have or grow to have? If you’ve read this far, it won’t surprise you to learn that we don’t think that being a great manager is about having the most charisma or giving motivational speeches. Those things can be nice, but ultimately they’re not essential. Fundamentally, a great manager is someone who cares passionately about getting results. And that can’t be faked. If you are truly determined to get results, it becomes the fire that fuels everything you do—overriding ego, the discomfort of having hard conversations, and even the desire to be liked. It leads you to do the sorts of things we’ve discussed in these chapters:
Rather than delegating and disappearing, staying involved to make sure there’s no implementation gap
Making sure that people are clear about their goals and that those goals represent significant progress
Holding people accountable for meeting high performance standards
Being assertive about moving out staff members who don’t perform
Treating people decently even when you’re frustrated with them
A great manager is someone who cares passionately about getting results.
These are all parts of how you get significant, sustained results.
In our experience, no matter what the rest of the package looks like, this intense determination to get results leads great managers to display qualities like these:
Great managers constantly worry about the real impact of their work rather than appearances. They have deep integrity about their missions, which leads them to pick goals and projects that will represent truly meaningful progress, not just an easy success to impress funders.
When they run into roadblocks that might deter the average person, great managers persist until they find a way past the obstacle.
Because great managers are determined to be successful, they make hard decisions that may be unpopular (such as abandoning a strategy that isn’t producing results) or personally painful (such as letting go a loyal but lower-performing staff member).
Although they may never be entirely comfortable having difficult conversations, great managers put aside their personal discomfort and have them anyway. They make themselves use words like, “I’d like you to do this differently,” or “I’m concerned about something I’ve noticed recently,” or even, “If this doesn’t change, we will have to let you go.”
Great managers are almost ruthless when it comes to identifying ways the organization could perform better (beginning with themselves), and they tend to display a deep commitment to learning from experience and adapting their approach to make it as effective as possible.
Because of this, they are willing and even eager to take feedback and genuinely want to hear dissent. They don’t get defensive or shut out differing opinions; in fact, you may hear them thanking a staff member for sharing complaints or concerns, and they really mean it.
At their core, all of these qualities come down to one thing, which is the same place where we started: a relentless, even obsessive, determination to get results. It’s a prerequisite for great management, and everything follows from there.
We hope this book has shown you how to best harness that determination to achieve significant, dramatic results—results that will help you change the world.
APPENDIX
GETTING STARTED
We hope you’ll come back to this book regularly as you go about your work. But right now, here are ten immediate steps you can take to implement some of the most important concepts we’ve discussed in this book:
1. Take a big project that your team is working on, and use the MOCHA components of ownership—manager, owner, consulted, helper, and approver—to clarify responsibilities related to it.
2. If your staff doesn’t have concrete, measurable goals for the year, pick one person to try this out with and schedule a meeting to start the process of creating them.
3. Make a daily list of the items you should accomplish today.
4. Put weekly check-in meetings with each of your direct reports on your calendar for the next month.
5. Schedule work blocks on your calendar for the next month.
6. Tell a staff member something she did well recently.
7. Think of one person who would be a great addition to your staff someday, and invite her to meet you for coffee to hear about where she sees her career heading.
8. Schedule a step-back meeting with your lowest performer, and draft your talking points.
9. Schedule a debriefing on a recently finished project.
10. Schedule an hour on your calendar to brainstorm a preliminary list of the core values you want your team’s culture to reflect. Then schedule a meeting with your team to discuss them.
Don’t put these off. By implementing them right away, they’re more likely to stick.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people assisted us in the creation of this book with their feedback and patience, and we owe them great thanks.
Many of Jerry’s former colleagues at Teach For America were enormously helpful. Among others, Elissa Kim, Kriste Dragon, Steven Farr, Rebecca Helmer, and Maia H. M. Levner not only read and commented on portions of the original text; more important, they put up with Jerry while he was learning to be a decent manager. Teach For America’s founder, Wendy Kopp, taught Jerry if not most of what she knows about management, at least most of what he knows about it.
At The Management Center, our clients and allies, who are far too numerous to name, served as test cases for early versions of this text. Julie Stewart and Mary Price at Families Against Mandatory Minimums deserve special thanks for their patience and support as our original clients, as does Jon Cowan at Third Way for his insightful comments on the previous edition of this book.
At the staff level, our past and current colleagues made critical contributions to developing the concepts and the content that we set out here. Ethan Fletcher gets much of the credit for the tools at the ends of most chapters, several of which former intern Lydia Poon helped create. Abigail Kim drafted significant portions of the original chapter on time and systems. Amy Huffman and Elizabeth Brown contributed by finding better ways to explain core concepts through our training program, and we incorporated many of their ideas here. And neither this book nor The Management Center would exist without our unofficial coauthor, Rebecca Epstein.
The Management Center also would not exist without its founder, benefactor, and spiritual guide, Peter B. Lewis.
Finally, Jerry’s wife, Liza, not only edited parts of the original text but also put up with his ruining several weekend excursions by dragging the manuscript along with him. (Jerry has since adopted our own advice from the chapter on time and systems and is now a model and attentive husband when he is not at work.)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alison Green has written extensively on management practices, including in a weekly column for U.S. News & World Report and also for her own blog, Ask a Manager (www.askamanager.org).
As chief of staff of the Marijuana Policy Project, she oversaw day-to-day staff management. Previously she worked as the communications director and publications director for two grassroots advocacy organizations and spent six years as a staff writer and campaign coordinator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). At PETA, her accomplishments included making headlines for an effort that resulted in Procter & Gamble’s placing a moratorium on animal testing; designing and launching a campaign to reach college students; teaching students how to work with th
e media and organize on campuses; authoring a guide to campus activism; and bringing the animal rights message to the pages of many conservative newspapers.
Jerry Hauser is the founding CEO of The Management Center in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to help nonprofit leaders turn their good intentions into great results. He brings to this work his dual passions for promoting social change and creating high-performing organizations. His previous roles include serving as the CEO of the Advocacy Institute and as the second-in-command at Teach For America, where he helped the national nonprofit grow from $8 million to $38 million in annual revenue and from three thousand to seventeen thousand applicants each year. Jerry also learned about creating strong organizations while he was an associate at the management consulting firm of McKinsey & Company.
Jerry began his career as a high school math and history teacher in Compton, California. He holds a B.A. from Duke University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal. Most important, he is the proud father of twin boys, Alex and Theo, to whom he hopes to impart his passion, if not his lack of talent, for playing soccer.
A NOTE TO READERS
We believe this book will get better as you put the concepts here into practice and let us know what works and what doesn’t. Please send your comments—things you like and things we could improve—to [email protected].
ABOUT THE MANAGEMENT CENTER
Our mission at The Management Center in Washington, D.C., is to help nonprofit leaders turn their good intentions into great results. We do this by providing hands-on coaching in managing people and running organizations to executive directors and senior leaders of select high-impact nonprofits and by offering training and publications to the broader field. We have worked closely with over fifty national nonprofit organizations since our founding in 2006 and have reached thousands of others through our training programs and the previous edition of this book.
