Leadership through Managing Teams: The Key to Effective Team Management

Like most people I've had my share of great and horrible bosses, I know a lot of people that in fact have never caught a break and often time reference terrible bosses as amazing because in contrast the rest, well they were not the worst. I once had a colleague tell me that our manager was only helping her after a call in which she made her cry. She phrased it something like, "she's preparing me for the real world". Mind you this person also made fun of people that were overweight, including her own sister. If this isn't the definition of a terrible management style, I don't know what is. One of my first jobs, I was promoted within 6 months to managing 40-50 people. It was probably one of the reasons I never wanted to manage people ever again, it took me years to realize what went wrong in my own management style and before I would give it another try (officially) even though I had unofficially been managing people for years. Heading back to my original point, if you have found yourself in in one of the two scenarios, 1. The only way to continue to escalate in your career is by managing people, or 2. You were just promoted without really consenting or acknowledging that this is what you wanted as your next step, let me help you.

During the first year of managing 40-50 people, I had an office, yes. I know, I had a door and everything. The entire tech industry was still not fully developed and having the industrial open floor plan wasn't everywhere yet, I rapid learned Salesforce to manage that many people because it was only way I could report, present, and truly organize that many people's daily work. Within months I was building out the CRM and calling third party vendors to create flows and processes that didn't exist in the industry. You welcome unnamed third party supplier that later created an entire product off of this work. 3 years later, I was off to my new job in the real tech industry, Trulia, before they were Zillow owned or even IPO. And in another turn of events, I was no better off in terms of managers, people that just expected me to know how to manage people, work without any training, support, or even regular one on one meetings. Sound familiar? This is where I learned self advocacy, after my boss was demoted (only took them 18 months), I started inserting myself in calls, asking to be part of the discussions regarding product launches, which often times required me to work starting at 4 am. So what did I learn from this? I learned that no one was going to speak on my behalf as well as I was. So I started saying the amount of work it takes me to do those launches, started getting more people to pitch in with helping, started comped with hotel stays for early releases in the city if it was crucial and most importantly recognition of the hard work I was putting it.

Fast forward to three jobs later, and I had gathered so much valuable information about who I wanted to be as a manager, but most importantly who I didn't want to be. But I had one last very crucial lesson to understand. I had experienced it but hadn't really placed it in a comprehensible structure. I actually didn't until 2 years ago when coaching a person which they thought there were doing everything right when letting their teams know what they needed, how to do it and when it needed to be done. They had it all documented, had verbalized it to their stakeholders, and had help weekly calls to keep the project on track. Everyone was told exactly when how this product would launch except that when it was time to launch it, it didn't happen. In fact, it didn't launch for 6 months later, but everyone seemed to have figured it out except my mentee. And now, I can tell you exactly why this occurred and why it the single more important thing to know when managing teams.

No one likes being told what to do. Yes, I know that you might say, well I knew that, but really knowing and practicing this notion is two very separate things. I know my kids don't like being told what to do and yet every day at exactly 7pm I tell them to brush their teeth and pick up their toys (and that specific order or they will not brush their teeth and blame picking up their toys took too much time). In real day to day practice as a manager what does that mean? It means your job is always to guide people, by asking leading questions, ones that you more than likely already know the answers to but never to tell people what they should or should not do. You can communicate expectations, deadlines, you can even suggest ideas. I have been a salesforce architect for 8 years now. I know so many people and as each one starts their own company or moves into a new start up and needs guidance on how to setup their CRM, I as always get called, either to build or just sound check their plans with their contractors. And even in these scenarios, where I am hired to give people exactly what I think is the best possible foundation I walk through it with them allowing them to build it with me. This is not because I love spending the extra 3 hours it takes or because I get paid by the hour, it is because in order for people to be successful, they themselves need to buy into the idea. If they do not see the benefits, they will often flip flop between solutions create chaos around them. This is the same for managers, if I tell the engineer that they cannot tell their colleague they are wrong because it will bring down morale, but I allow them to go through the scenario with me of their approach, it will not only benefit them, the colleague, but the overall culture of engineering will shift over time to a more collaborate structure. In turn this will result and better solution building because 1 person's solution is never better than the solution of 5 or 10 or 50 for that matter. You will find people challenging each other respectfully and creating astonishing things in your presence. In fact, one of the things I missed the most when moving to management was that, the overall commodore in building something together. But I will like that for another post.

by Diana Villalta