Your management team is the engine that drives your business. Evaluating how and where they need additional support is critical to accelerating your business performance this year.
We’ve put together a reflection exercise that you can use to identify areas of strength and weakness for your management team across five key leadership domains: communication, self-awareness, strategy & goal setting, team culture and coaching.
Your management team’s individual ability will, of course, vary across these five domains but you should be able to identify the strength and weakness they have as a team.
Effective leaders clearly and regularly communicate with their teams to set expectations, clarify roles & responsibilities, remind team members of the goals and inspire them towards action.
When leaders fail to communicate well, teams are left unclear about priorities, uncertain about what's expected of them and lacking clarity over their responsibilities, resulting in apathy and disengagement.
In our communication training, we focus on helping leaders refine their content and hone their style so that they can communicate in an inspiring and authentic way with a range of stakeholders.
Communication questions to consider:
- How motivated do you think you'd be, by a presentation from one of your management team?
- Have your managers given their teams a clear understanding of how their roles relate to your company strategy?
- Do you feel confident that your leaders are able to inspire their team members to do their best work?
- How confident are your leaders in communicating strategy & goals to their teams?
- Are your managers able to provide their teams with real clarity in their written communication? Slack, email, documentation, wikis etc
Your management team needs to be aware of where they need to improve before the hard work of actually improving their management skills can begin. For some people, this is the hardest part of leadership! It starts with having a healthy level of awareness of your strengths and weaknesses as a leader, and identifying ways you can grow.
Beyond that, it's essential that your leaders have the right mindset for leadership, whether that's being able to overcome imposter syndrome, or knowing how to be resilient in the face of uncertainty, or knowing the importance of good delegation!
In order to help leaders increase their self-awareness, we've included diagnostic assessment at the beginning of our course, as well as plenty of training around building their confidence as managers, the importance of delegation, and how to lead through uncertainty.
Self-awareness questions to consider:
- How many of your managers have a clear view of their strengths & weaknesses as a leader and an action-plan to improve?
- To what extent are your managers focusing on the short-term 'urgent' tasks while neglecting the long-term 'important' projects?
- Are your managers able to offer stability and confidence to their teams in the face of uncertainty & adversity?
- How many of your junior leaders have struggled with imposter syndrome (or other confidence-related issues)?
- How well do your leaders cope with the inherent uncertainty of the start-up environment?
- Is your management team burnt out or struggling with issues related to working too much?
- Do your managers bring a consistent, positive attitude to work?
A key part of a manager's responsibility is to formulate and communicate strategy to their teams. Firstly your management team needs to be able to create a strategy that can work. Then they need to repeatedly and continuously communicate it to their teams.
Each individual team member requires total clarity on their personal goals and should understand how their individual goals relate to the wider team and company strategy.
Whilst strategy creation sometimes feels ethereal, we believe that strategy formulation & performance management can be taught.
On our leadership intensives, we'll take participants through a range of case studies to help them develop their strategic skillset, as well as training on goal-setting and performance management.
Strategy questions to consider:
- How well does your management team know the core metrics of your business and how their teams can impact them?
- What proportion of your company knows their individual priorities for the coming month?
- Are you confident that each of your managers has a clear plan to deliver on each of their team's priorities?
- Are your managers taking the initiative to adapt their strategies in the face of market changes & user feedback?
- What proportion of your leaders could articulate the main 3 priorities for the business in the coming year?
- Do you feel your leaders are monitoring their teams' performance against targets frequently enough and understand how they can influence that performance?
- Would a member of your Product Team be able to tell you the objectives of your Customer Success Team?
- Have your managers given their teams clarity over their individual roles?
- How frequently are there problems with a lack of clarity about who is responsible for an area?
The culture of your team and of the wider company is the foundation that your business will be built on.
Leaders have a significant influence on team culture. They play a vital role in helping the team to establish trusting relationships. Trust allows the team to take risks and to give each other honest and challenging feedback.
If problems that many people were aware of remain unresolved until management or leadership requests action then there is usually a problem with your team’s culture.
We often find that recent managers aren’t aware of the influence that they can have on their team’s culture and they don’t have a framework they can use to consider which behaviours they should encourage and model to their teams. Sometimes they’ll need support to realise they are part of the leadership team and need to defend and explain the leadership team’s decisions and not criticise them openly to their teams.
Culture questions to consider:
- Do team members feel sufficiently empowered to take risks?
- Do your managers know the company values?
- Are they actively seeking to reinforce good behaviours and challenge toxic or unhelpful behaviours in their teams?
- Do you think your team members speak highly of the company culture to their friends?
- Are your managers conscious of the importance of building a diverse and inclusive team?
- To what extent are you confident that individuals can provide honest challenge to their managers?
- Does your management team hold each other accountable when expectations haven't been met?
Coaching team members and supporting them to develop in their roles is the bread and butter of all management roles but in the hustle and bustle of start-up life it can be all too easy to deprioritise the basics such as regular 1-2-1s and feedback for team members.
Recently promoted managers in start-ups have often never been given any formal training on how to coach team members. It’s difficult for your management team to systematically improve performance across their teams without regular 1-2-1s which include coaching and feedback.
As part of Greenhouse’s residential intensive all of your managers will be given comprehensive coaching training so that they can be confident running a 1-2-1 and supporting their team members.
Coaching & management questions to consider:
- How frequently do your managers conduct 1-2-1s with their direct reports?
- How confident are you that your managers are able to identify underperformance and help team members to resolve their issues effectively?
- How confident do you feel that your leaders could manage someone's exit out of the business without damaging team culture?
- Do your managers have learning and development plans in place for their teams?
At Greenhouse we’ve gathered a team of start-up leaders, practitioners and leadership thinkers and put together the leadership and management programme that we needed when we started out. Click here to find out more.
