This cast describes how to give feedback about your employees’ attire.

Mark once was asked to adjudicate a discussion between two managers (one new, one experienced). The issue? “Should a manager give feedback about the clothes an employee is wearing?”

Mark sided with the manager who said no, you shouldn’t.

If you’re surprised, listen in!

In this cast, we share the First Rule For New Managers: the most important recommendation for someone taking over a team.

We have been asked hundreds of times for guidance on what to do as a new manager, and we’re finally ready to start rolling out this series of casts. This first cast will probably surprise some of our listeners, because it’s pretty counterintuitive. On the other hand, we have alluded to it in a few casts before. It’s just not what most people think it should be.

We’ll tell you as well what most managers do…and why they’re wrong.

The first in a series: The Manager Tools Guidelines For New Managers

Several of you have written recently, expressing your appreciation for the work we do on your behalf. Some of what was shared is too good to keep to ourselves.

I am a Manager in a [European] IT company and for 6 months I slogged with my 8 member team unknown and unrecognized in a small corner of the office.

Then last month our clients started reviewing all the teams that were servicing their account and were quite disappointed with the people management systems in place. Or rather the lack of them.

Until they reviewed our team.

They saw strange terms bandies about,like O3, Coaching, employee engagement surveys,constant feedback systems.

Guess what?

My VP promoted me to ‘Process Excellence Manager’ to ensure ALL teams followed the lead of the ‘Center of Excellence’ that my team is now recognized as.

All it is all because of 2 people in a distant country. You make a difference and maybe in the end that is all that matters.

A fan

This cast explains our rationale for why Delegation is the 4th Member of our Management Trinity.

Ah, the FOURTH member of the Trinity. We did this for two reasons – one, to make it easier to remember. Two, because you simply cannot grow an organization profitably without Delegation. You can grow the profitability of a company without new products, without new distribution – think Tiffany’s, or coal mines. But not without delegation. (Delegation is ESPECIALLY important if you don’t have new products or distribution, and we don’t recommend either!)

Effective Managers know how to consciously and effectively delegate. Good delegation leads to more growth at less cost. How can we call ourselves professional managers unless we do something that we KNOW leads to profitable growth?

Two things happened today that I have conflated to remind me of why we’re here.

First, we got our first confessional email from a member who admitted to paying for premium content, downloading it all, and then unsubscribing.

Second, I re-read a column discussing how work is no longer fulfilling for knowledge workers because they don’t produce measurable/visible/knowable output. One guy said that because he resells energy futures, he envies electricians the fact that they can see their accomplishments, which may last a long time.

But then a management consultant said that she envied her clients celebrating a clear accomplishment, and, “‘That must be a tremendous feeling […]one I will never know.’”

While I generally don’t like to define things in terms of negatives, these two items reminded me why Manager Tools exists.

First, Mike and I do spend time talking about how to protect our work, and we do try to be careful. We have a great IP lawyer. And, we generally refuse to work on protecting our stuff when it gets technically complicated OR when we think our best users are going to stumble over the protections. I am SURE that our biases here made it easy for the confessor to do so.

We’re sticking to our plan.

Some people are going to steal Manager Tools’ stuff. We think it’s wrong and reprehensible. We think our honor system rightly mirrors the honor system of managers. If you work for us, we’ll forgive you for cheating…and we will fire you. We believe in redemption AND trustworthiness.

But we’re not going to make it hard for the vast majority of folks to grow and develop because of a few who don’t share our view of honor.

Thanks to all of you, we can’t imagine not feeling a sense of accomplishment. We feel accomplishments every day, all the time! We love getting notes about how you’re doing and how we played a role. (And yes, we still think YOU deserve all the credit).

As we grow, we get more notes thanking us every day. I read each one multiple times. On bad days, I re-read many of them.

We want everyone to get better as managers, so much so we know we’re going to get cheated. And we know it’s working, because we feel it every day.

We would do this for free.

For you.

That’s why we do this.

For you.

This cast describes the role of Coaching in the Management Trinity, and makes a KEY recommendation regarding development of directs and performance management.

This week, we cover the Coaching Model’s inclusion in the Management Trinity. It’s BY FAR the least used of the Trinity. That’s too bad, because it only takes 5 minutes a week per direct to coach them. FIVE MINUTES A WEEK! Who would want to go to their boss and say, “I didn’t coach my people this YEAR, because over the course of the year it would have taken me 4 hours, and I didn’t want to spend that much time on it.”

Not if you worked for us. At least, not for long.

I was asked the other day by a manager who believed that we were stone dead wrong about feedback [”I could never tell my people their mistakes. it’s unprofessional!” Amazing. - H] what the history of the WORD was. It ended up being a funny story, but it’s instructive too.

I told him I got that question a lot [for the wrong reasons, but whatever.] I told him that “feedback” started in the early 20th century, with the advent of microphones. Since inputs into the mics were “feeds”, and they were designed to only work with inputs, if there were “feeds” that came back through the system [usually from being too close to speakers], you’d get an awful noise. That awful noise was named “feedback”, because it was a “feed” that came “back” into the system.

Well, you’d have thought that he’d been handed the talking points of an opposing debating team. He attacked our model for using a term whose origins were legitimately associated with an awful noise. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that feedback was even then useful, and managers who don’t give feedback because they think it’s an awful noise just don’t realize how awful a noise their silence makes.

What I should have said, rather than taking his question literally (no, he did not use the word etymology), was that we use the word NOT because of its earliest origins, but rather because we’re engineers, and all good systems are built with feedback mechanisms built in. The word feedback is NOT inherently negative today, even though that’s how it began, and how managers who don’t want to do it define it themselves. The word usage has CHANGED, to incorporate the value of feedback into systems that touch all aspects of our lives.

Word usage DOES change. It used to be that Bethlehem hospital in London was a mental institution. It was initially derogatory slang to describe a completely chaotic situation as “bedlam”, but it got that name because that was how Bethlehem Hospital was pronounced.

Maybe you as a manager think of feedback as an awful noise, but you’re glad there’s feedback in other systems, we’re sure of that. When your automatic car window STOPS going up because the system has a new force put on it - FEEDBACK - your child’s hand doesn’t get crushed. When your automatic garage door STOPS going down because something interrupts the safety circuit, well, your child’s hand doesn’t get crushed. When someone says, “WHAT?!?!?” when you use a word they don’t understand, or they just don’t hear you, or YOU MISPRONOUNCE it, or you’re not using the language they’re most familiar…that TOO, is feedback.

When you do something, the world responds. That’s feedback, and we’re usually happy to have it.

And so are your directs.

So stop worrying about the WORD - or heaven forbid its HISTORY, and add a feedback mechanism to your directs’ performance.

Just like you want YOUR BOSS to do.

This show describes the The Feedback Model’s inclusion in the Management Trinity.

We continue here our recent theme of revisiting the high level rationale and actions involved in the Management Trinity. In our discussion of feedback, we talk about the basics, of course: What the Feedback Model gives the effective manager, and how the effective manager actually puts it into action.

This theme came out of many conversations we have had with managers about the value they were getting from our high level discussion of the Trinity at both Effective Manager Conferences and at onsite corporate client work.

We’re careful to make every cast actionable. This one IS. We make a specific recommendation regarding feedback delivery you don’t want to miss.