Last week I was at a dinner for a conference that I was attending at a nice restaurant. It was one of those things where you order off the two choices on the menu and the meals get brought out on a great swarm of activity. At the end of the meal we had a choice of chocolate or rum cake, the desserts were brought out and our table started eating the delicious cakes when someone noticed a discrepancy at the table. Someone was eating a chocolate cake but there was something else on his plate...ice cream. Not just regular ice cream but the delicious homemade kind that makes your plain old piece of chocolate cake turn into a symphony in your mouth. Ice cream wasn't on our menu, so how did this man conduct what amounted to a conference dessert
coup d'état? He said he asked for his dessert ala mode. As we all sat in dumbfounded silence, I realized our collective disappointment was about more than a naked cake, it was about our failure to negotiate a better deal. How many times are we given two options and we confine our selves to those choices? There is a whole suger filled world out there and we are missing it because we don't look outside of what is presented. So the next time you are offered dry chicken or fish at a conference, ask for the chef to whip up a fresh vegetarian option or if you get two mediocre grant proposals, search for something better. You can have your cake ala mode too, you just need to ask.
Respecting your elders and conducting their performance reviews
During my first attempt at managing an older worker, I was rebuffed shortly after the interview. The interviewee called me back and said that she would have remove herself from consideration from the position because she couldn’t see herself being supervised by someone my age (I was 25 at the time). Despite the fact that she wasn’t my top candidate (and was only a few years older than me), my confidence was still shaken. Would I ever be taken seriously or would everyone see me as a fresh out of grad school rookie, even though I had more than 10 years of nonprofit employment experience at that point? I gave myself a little pep talk and offered the position to my 1st choice, who was older than me and more experienced in development but was looking for a flexible position, where she could use her fantastic grantwriting skills and not work 60 hours a week as a Director of Development. Once I fully understood that I had the skills needed to manage the department and could build on the expertise of my new hire to build our internal capability, I was able to be less self conscious about the age thing. Here are some tips if you are managing someone older than you:
Don’t broadcast your age. Be proud of what you have accomplished in a short period of time but there is no need to rub your age in people’s faces or say things like “wow, you're 2 years older than my mom.” It lowers team moral and doesn’t make you look like an emerging leader, it makes you look like a snotty kid.
Be open minded and willing to listen to the ideas of your older workers. Instead of thinking of people as “stuck in their ways”, give them the benefit of the doubt and be willing to try things their way.
Find a mentor who has supervised older staff. Learn from their successes and mistakes so your staff don’t have to be you guinea pigs. Developing good management skills in general will help you better manage staff across multiple generations.
What other pieces of advice would you give?
Worst mistakes of first-time managers
I have become a big fan of Penelope Trunk who is the blogger behind the Brazen Careerist. She writes career advice for Gen X and I think her advice for first time managers is right on track, hope you enjoy it.
4 worst mistakes of a first-time manager by Penelope Trunk
First-time managers are generally nightmares to work for. They are people who got promoted by doing a non-management job well, and in fact they probably have little experience in management. Here are four of the mistakes that will undermine a new manager the fastest.
1. Focusing on tasks instead of people.
Before you were a manger, your number one job was to accomplish tasks. You were someone with skills to get something done. Maybe media buying, or programming, or selling. Now your number one job is to help other people to accomplish the tasks in an outstanding way.Sure, you’ll have tasks, too. As a manager you’ll have weekly reports, budgets, planning. But your tasks are secondary to helping other people to do their tasks. Your job as manager is to get the best work from the people you manage. The measure of how well you’re doing as a manager is how well each individual on your team performs.
Ideally, you should be able to show each person you manage how to see themselves differently so that they are able to produce at a higher level than they ever imagined. For one person this will mean you need to teach organization skills. For another person, you will help her discover what she loves to do and then set her up doing it for you. Each person wants something, and you need to find out what that is. Then help them get it.
In return, your employees will do great work for you. This level of management is superior to task-management; helping people perform at their best impacts the quality of your team’s work as opposed to just getting the work done.
2. Being slow to transition.
Moving into any new position requires that you get rid of the stuff from your old position. This means delegating. It means getting over the idea that you were indispensable on any of your old teams. You can’t do you new job well if you’re still doing your old job.Delegating your old job should take three days. You find people who are taking a step up when they accept pieces of your old job so that they are excited. You give them an explanation of how to do it and tell them where to go when they have questions.
You are going to tell me that one day is not enough, that you have a very complicated job. But think of it this way: If you died today, your job would be delegated in a couple of days.
Delegating is not enough, though. You have to stop caring. If you are no longer on a project because you got a promotion, then you have to stop obsessing about how the project is doing.
Remember how quickly the girl who dumped you hooked up with her next-door neighbor? You need to move that fast, too.3. Forgetting to manage up.
Managing up means steering your team to hit goals that the people above you care about. Figure out what matters to your boss, and your boss’s boss, and make that stuff matter to you, too, because you can only impress your boss with your management skill if you are accomplishing things she cares about.And be loud about your accomplishments. Set measurable goals for yourself and let people above you know that you’re meeting them.
Do this it right off the bat. People’s perceptions of you as a manager will be made during your very first actions. That saying, “People judge you in the first two minutes they meet you,” is true for management, too. So give people reason right away to think you’re doing a good job.
4. Talking more than listening.
My sister-in-law, Rachel, has been a manager for a while. But she just accepted a position where she is managing three times the number of people she had been managing. Her first step was to go on a sort of listening tour of the organization. She had lunch with people to find out what matters to them, she sat in on groups and even visited some people at home, all in the name of figuring out what matters to whom, and how she should set up goals for herself.Consider your own listening tour as soon as you start in a new position. After all, there’s no way to figure out what people want without getting them talking. And the most annoying thing about any manager – new or seasoned – is when they just won’t shut up.
Advice to Those Working with New Foundation Staff- Part 2
This is Part 2 of my post of ways that long-term staff can support new foundation staff members.
• Explain the unwritten rules of your foundation- Each foundation has rules about how the work is done, what types of organizations it will and will not support, and how its staff should dress and behave. Knowing these rules can be the difference between succeeding and failing at an organization, so share this knowledge with new staff. But if you can’t explain the purpose or benefit of some these unwritten rules, maybe its time to reconsider them.
• Help new staff find mentors within and outside of your organization- Mentors are an invaluable source of information about organizational culture and can act as a guide as new staff learn about the politics of an organization.
• Be open to suggestions about how technology can improve staff efficiency- Many young foundation staff have needed to be skilled at using computers since elementary school. Technology becomes second nature for many of these staff members and this can be a great opportunity to use this staff member as a guinea pig to try new technologies.
Having a diverse foundation staff, in terms of age, ethnicity, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and opinion on the local sports team is what creates an effective organization. You are better able to make decisions about impacting your local community if your staff truly reflects the diversity of your community. The true benefit of a multi-generational workforce is the variety of skills and experiences that individuals bring to the job. Don’t lose that benefit by trying to make new staff assimilate to the culture of the organizations’ generational majority.
Advice to Those Working with New Foundation Staff- Part 1
One of my most read posts is Advice to Those New to the Foundation Field. The purpose of that post was to encourage new foundation staff to take control of their personal development. I have gotten lots of questions from long-term staff that want to support young foundation staff but aren’t sure how. I hope the following tips will be helpful:
• Set the bar high- Don’t assume that young foundation staff members will be intimidated by the volume of work at a foundation. Since many can remember the recent experience of juggling multiple priorities and assignments in college or graduate school, the often frantic pace of foundation work isn’t as overwhelming as you may assume. When you give these staff members tough assignments, hide your surprise when they meet or exceed those expectations.
• Use new staff members as an opportunity to identify problematic or confusing operational policies- If you have been at a foundation for a long time, you develop ways to work around parts of the bureaucracy of a foundation that don’t make sense. When you have new staff, pay attention to the questions that they ask about your process, they may see opportunities for improvement that can be missed if you have been working around the system for a long time.
• Provide plenty of training opportunities- It is expense to fully train a new staff member but the quality of their initial training will determine how effective they will be for the rest of their time at your organization. Important training opportunities for program officers include: ethics, analyzing financial statements, legal basics, and any program specific areas that the staff person will be responsible for.
• Have your new staff members map out their long-term career goals- Find ways to support those long term goals and you will have a motivated member of your team that will stretch themselves to help the organization achieve its goals.
• Use the addition of a new staff person as an opportunity to re-institute a culture learning for all members of your staff- Communities change, tools to do your work changes, and the practices of other foundations change. As new staff members are learning about all of these new areas take it as an opportunity to help long-term staff stay current on new trends in the field.
More tips to come on this topic on Thursday.