Communicating your Leadership Priorities
My favorite tip for any new manager - give feedback in the first week! Set the precedent that this is a feedback giving and receiving relationship and normalize the feeling of giving feedback.
Here’s my second tip - communicate your leadership priorities. This is a bit tricky, so I’m sharing mine here. Feel free to steal them if they work for you.
Priority 1: Producing high quality work. This is my job. My employer pays me to manage a team and meet a high bar. This means, I will do whatever it takes to ensure the whole team is producing quality deliverables, on time, and on budget.
Priority 2: Coach and upskill each individual member of the team. Through weekly 1-hour check-ins, shared work time, and my deep vault of professional development materials, I invest in coaching each member of my team to help them produce their best work in a way that’s interesting and fulfilling.
Priority 3: Coach the team to be consistently high performing, resilient, and strategic. My personal goal is to develop and lead elite teams. I root the team’s culture in Lencioni’s framework, which suggests that healthy teams have enough trust to engage in debate (or conflict), commit and hold each other accountable to decisions, and focus on results above all else. I facilitate professional development, so that we are learning & agile. I use design thinking processes and retrospectives so that the entire team is focused on improving.
If I’m doing my job well, I get to spend the majority of my time on my third priority! However, I will never hesitate to act in service of my first priority. I have taken over high-priority, high impact work to ensure that we meet my quality bar, and then coached my direct report to meet that bar the next time. (In the same vein, I tell my manager when important work is going sideways and ask her to lean in). Since I’ve been clear about my priorities at the start of our relationship, my team is not surprised when I behave in a way that aligns with them.
What are your priorities? Do they align with mine?
