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Lessons I’ve Learned from Managers I’ve Loved

7/26/2023

By Kelly Fumiko Weiss

In this blog post you will…

Hear five pieces of advice from three different managers
Gain insights into how this advice plays out practically in the workplace
Learn about how Allize can help you with training your Managers

It’s no secret that managers make or break a job. If you have a good manager, the company could be burning down around you and you’ll probably stay and ride it out. If you have a terrible manager, you could be in the best job in the world that meets all your goals and desires, and have to quit to save your sanity. Perhaps these statements are a little hyperbolic, but that’s what it feels like, right?

Over the course of the last 20 years, I’ve had every kind of manager under the sun. Good ones. Bad ones. Nearly invisible ones. People older than me. People younger than me. People who love managing people, and some who absolutely hate it.

What I’ve noticed though is that unlike most things in life - where the bad is what sticks with you more than anything else - what sticks out the most to me when I think about the managers I’ve had are the lessons I’ve learned from the good ones. The great ones. The Managers that I’ve loved. The ones that affirm your life and your job and make you want to be a better person. I rarely think about the bad Managers I’ve had. But I think about the good ones all the time.

Not all advice is equal. Maybe the advice I’m about to share won’t resonate with you the way it did with me. But I hope, regardless, it will give you faith that caring about people enough to share your wisdom with them can literally change their lives.

So, here are the top five nuggets that I’ve kept with me from various managers over the years. (It almost feels wrong to share these out; like these little nuggets that feel like they are just for me. But it also feels wrong to keep them.)

Top 5 lessons I’ve learned from Managers I’ve loved

#1 - The hardest part about management is delegating work to people when you know you could do the work better

We’ve all been there, right? You watch someone doing work and you think, “I could do that so much better.” Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s just hubris and human nature. But when you are a manager, it happens all the time. That’s because it’s part of our job as managers to LET PEOPLE LEARN. Our teams have to try, and make mistakes, and try again. People don’t get better at what they do from being told exactly what to do, or having their work highly edited, or from you doing their jobs for them. People learn by doing. Our job is to advise, guide, and when needed train. Our job is not to rob them of the opportunity to figure it all out.

Still, let’s face it. It can still be painful. Things may take longer. Or have to go through more drafts. Or may not turn out the way you would have done it. But that’s okay. You just have to remember that’s part of your job as a manager. And your team will thank you for it.

#2 - You don’t have to point out the asshole in the room

This one needs a little context. When I was younger, and I saw people being treated poorly or differently, I would call it out in the moment. I would get defensive and all my instincts to be a protector and advocate would come bursting out. But I didn’t always choose my moments well. And sometimes I made things worse by letting my emotions show too much. I also didn’t have faith that people higher up than me were noticing. I didn’t have faith that something was being done about it.

That’s when I had to learn that talking to my manager 1:1 about what was going on was far better than calling it out in the room. Checking in on my coworkers 1:1 was more caring than exacerbating the situation. And I learned that HR matters are far more delicate than you might think.

As I’ve advanced in my career, I’ve also learned that from a management perspective, pointing out publicly or even in a small group setting, that someone is being a jerk is feeding into office gossip and contributing to a toxic work environment. We all need to vent to our coworkers. But it must be done in a safe space and should be less about the person who’s being a jerk, and more about finding support for how the jerk is making you feel.

#3 - Compiling your questions and going over them all at once is better than constantly pinging someone throughout the day

I had an amazing manager who I really trusted and wanted his opinion on everything. I also wanted to prove myself to him and show him that I was working hard. He took me aside one day and told me that the constant pings were really hard for him. It was distracting and counterproductive. He said it very kindly and constructively, and presented a solution for a collaborative doc where I could list things out and we could go over them together at a set time each week. If something was truly urgent, then I could book 15 minutes on his calendar.

I was so grateful to him for sharing what he needed, and letting me know how my actions were impacting him. And now it’s something I think about every day. We live in a world with collaborative tools that ping us ALL THE TIME. In the spirit of this advice, my workaround has been to have set times on each day to check all of my pings. So I don’t feel like I’m constantly being distracted as people reach out to me. And for people I manage, I have set 1:1s that they know they can rely on so they have time and space to talk to me.

This advice has continued to resonate with me on multiple levels - being vulnerable, advocating for yourself, presenting a problem WITH a solution, and giving feedback with care.

#4 - Emotions are contagious. And some people (like me) are more contagious than others

I never really thought about how my moods were affecting people around me, until my boss took me aside and let me know that when I’m in a good mood, everyone is in a good mood. And when I’m in a bad mood, everyone is in a bad mood. He said that energy matters. And he gave me a book on the topic of “energy leadership” for me to learn from.

I loved that he was helping me to be more self aware AND giving me resources to learn more about energy in the workplace.

Over the years, I have noticed that he is right. When you are in a group meeting, there are some people that you don’t notice as much. You can’t tell what kind of day they are having and you may even not pay too much attention to them in the room. Then there are others that fill up the whole space and, even if they aren’t talking, radiate how they are feeling.

Learning this about myself has been key to my growth in the workplace. I now take it on as a huge responsibility to manage how I present myself to my team. That doesn’t mean I fake who I am or what I’m feeling. If I’m having a bad day, I let people know upfront so they understand that my energy isn’t to do with them. But for the most part, I try to smile, lead with kindness, and try to have my personal energy help the situations I’m in, not hurt them. I will forever be grateful for this level of self-awareness.

#5 - The most important thing leaders can do is maintain a clear head

We often buy into the idea that we must work all hours of the day to be good at our jobs, to be good workers, to prove ourselves, to hustle, to succeed. But at the end of the day, leaders need to have their full faculties to make the best decisions. So, if I’m exhausted or overwhelmed, overworked or disjointed, I’m not going to be a good leader. This means that we must learn to step away. To take breaks. To take days off. To lead by example and understand our own headspace and put our best self forward. Therefore, the best thing I can do as a leader is make sure my head is clear. And if that means working fewer hours or stepping away when I need to, then so be it.

These are the best pieces of advice I have ever received. As you can see, they are very personal to me, but I hope some or all of them resonated with you.

Moreover, at Allize, we would love to help you train the next generation of managers. We have training programs that give managers practical and actionable advice on how to manage people 1:1 and in teams, all with a people-first, human-centered approach. Our management training can be done in a 1:1 setting, group setting, or enterprise wide. We can focus on first-time managers, or help existing managers shore up their best practices. The most important part is to make sure that your company knows that you value quality managers, and that you are doing your part to make sure that your managers have the training and tools they need to succeed in supporting your employees and creating a quality work environment.

Blog Post Follow-up

Have management training needs? Please reach out to us and we’d love to talk to you about them.
What did you think of our five pieces of advice? We’d love to hear your thoughts! Tell us in the comments.
What is the best advice you have ever received from a manager? Tell us in the comments. We’d love to hear about it!
Go back and read our first blog post about the employee experience. This will also help you understand our approach to putting people first in the workplace

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The Employee Experience: What Different Markets Have In Common and How We Can All Make the Employee Experience Better

7/12/2023

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By Kelly Fumiko Weiss

Over the course of my career I’ve had the privilege of working in multiple markets.

Throughout high school and college I worked exclusively at nonprofit organizations, ranging from helping children with special needs to social service agencies to immigration advocacy organizations. I am currently on the Board of a local food pantry.

After receiving my graduate degree in social service administration I worked in municipal government and later worked for many years in a large public sector school district.

Twice I have worked at religious organizations, including a Christian school in Hong Kong and an Archdiocese Pastoral Center.

And I’ve also worked in the private sector. Most recently at two different large IT consulting firms.

I’m not sure how many other people have crossed markets as much as I have, so I wanted to share some employee experience commonalities that I’ve seen. Spoiler alert: what these markets have in common FAR outweigh their differences.

I know the urge to think the grass is greener can be strong. If you are feeling the constraints of the nonprofit market and think maybe the private sector would be better - I can tell you, there is NO market that has figured out how to prioritize their employees well.

First, let’s talk about what drives these markets. These are oversimplifications, but they paint a broad picture and give us a starting point.

Core Motivations:

Nonprofit Organizations

Fundraising
Mission
Awareness

Public Sector Organizations

Compliance & Reporting
Taxpayer accountability
The press

Religious Organizations

What I call “butts in seats” - increasing participation (and therefore donations)
Mission
For larger religious organizations, the press can also be a huge motivator

Private Companies

Revenue
Image
Client satisfaction
Accolades

Notice something missing from all of these lists?

I do.

What’s missing is the employees. The people doing the work. Without fail, across markets, even at companies that really care about their employees, companies that are a true delight to work at, the employees will come second (or third, or last) to their larger drivers.

Let’s talk about some other similarities in the employee experience across these four markets:

Employees are the most expensive part of any organization. Therefore pay raises, bonuses, cost of living increases, etc. become harder to justify and expertise, longevity, and institutional knowledge become less attractive than “new” (aka less expensive) talent
Because there’s never enough money for all the people an organization needs, people often wear multiple hats, doing two or three people’s jobs at once
Salary and benefits are often seen as perk enough and therefore all other employee considerations are either on the chopping block or have already been stripped away
If employee considerations are in place, and money gets tight, those are the first things to go
HR departments are there to protect the company and rarely have enough (if anything) in place to support employees
Fear of what a business choice may look like to others, to the press, or to leadership will often trump doing what’s right AND often what’s best for employees, in favor of what will outwardly play better
Learning management systems are rarely used, and if they are, training is poorly tracked. Training that is well tracked is training that is legally required
Employees are not trained for management positions; most employees are promoted to management because they are good at their jobs, not because they will be good managers
Employee professional development has to be done off-hours / on top of current work instead of being built in as a part of the 40 hour work week
Paying for professional development opportunities often comes with strings attached - like agreeing to stay at the organization a certain amount of time afterwards and if you don’t, paying the money back
Flexibility in work (reduced hours, schedule shifts, accommodations for disabilities, children, or sick family members) rarely comes with a reduced workload
People that opt to go on FMLA are more likely to be on layoff lists once their FMLA is over
Expenses relating to employees are seen as “off mission” and can and will be excoriated as wasteful spending
Leaders rarely take the time to talk to the “boots on the ground” workers
Communication across departments is rare
There can be a lot of “us vs them” mentalities within the organizations themselves and/or the organizations they support
Performance review processes typically feel icky (yes, that’s my professional term for it) and are often unorganized and more often change from year to year
Job descriptions are not updated
Job expectations are unclear
Company communications come in one modality - usually email

I’m guessing that regardless of what market you are currently working in, most if not all of these bullet points resonate with you.

So, why is it that we don’t put our employees first?

Why is there cognitive dissonance around the idea that if employees are well taken care of, they will be able to better do the jobs they were hired to do?

When did we stop valuing expertise?

Why do we think we can get work for free?

Why isn’t a well taken care of workforce seen as the better business decision?

Let’s face it, we are all complicit in this because we all need our jobs. So none of us rock the boat too much. Being a disruptor can lead to being unemployed.

And if we are in leadership, we are beholden to the constraints of how much money we have and therefore how much money we can spend. These things are real.

It’s easy to say that the employee experience should be better when you’re in the vacuum of an aggrandizing blog post. It’s much harder to push back on the tide of poor employee experiences when you need to get your paycheck and your health insurance OR you are the one that needs to keep the company books balanced.

So, what are we to do?

How do we make employees feel seen and respected at work in the face of immovable institutional barriers?

Here are some suggestions that do not require institutional change, cost no money, AND if enough people do them, intrinsic change may follow. At Allize, we have about a million more of these suggestions, so look out for future blog posts where we will continue to talk about these and other topics.

For employers:

Have language at the ready that backs up your decisions. Worried about how investments in your employees will play out in the press? Curate an answer that supports your employees and justifies investing in them when you are calm and collected. Have it at the ready if/when you get pushback. Don’t leave it to the moment when you may be emotionally triggered to try and craft your response. And make sure it demonstrates how much you value the people that work for you (and therefore the people they are serving.)
Even out what you do. Take a look at who is busy and who isn’t. Who is doing two or three jobs at once? Who has less to do that can help someone with more to do? What work isn’t getting done because you don’t have people to do it? People and jobs are NOT interchangeable. But with some attention and training, the workload can be more evenly distributed.
Scale down what you do. If everyone is overloaded and there’s no money to hire more people, it’s time to scale down what you do. It’s classic project management. Triple constraint of scope, time, cost. If you cannot increase cost, you have to reduce scope. This will carry pains in and of itself, but doing less can often be the better choice. Take the extraneous work off of people’s plates so they aren’t overloaded and can focus on your core services.
Communicate to employees in multiple formats. If you have something important to say, don’t just email it out. To start, email is fine, but make sure to email it out multiple times. Then also post it to shared spaces. Then tell department heads and managers they need to share the message in team meetings and 1:1s. Record a quick video of leadership’s message and post it to the company. Make sure your message is heard. All you need is a smartphone!
Make management training mandatory for anyone who is a manager. I know your first thought is, how do I do this with no cost? There are a lot of ways to do this internally. You can have an experienced manager within your company lead a workshop. You can leverage free resources online. You can curate a list of books that can be checked out from the library. You can curate a list of podcasts to listen to. Create the to do’s your managers must do and then make sure there’s space for them to discuss what they learned AND how they are going to incorporate what they learned into their jobs. The important part is to demonstrate that being a manager is a unique skill that must be learned, supported, and nurtured.
Make sure your employees are part of client project user personas. When working on projects for clients, we often create user personas, creating different buckets for the employees and stakeholders of our clients. BUT when was the last time you saw a user story for your own employees? The people working on the projects are affected by the work too! How does this project impact the team working on it? This is particularly important for long term projects. I know it can seem counterintuitive. And it feels like breaking the proverbial 4th wall to introduce yourself into the equation. BUT there are a million ways you want the client to interact with you. You have needs that need to be met. The project will impact how much time you have to work on other things. The stakeholders will impact the efficiency of your work. Don’t forget about yourself and your team!
Create change management plans for your teams that are just as robust as they would be for your clients. We all know from working with clients, that even the smallest process change will be addressed and incorporated into our change plans. Why not do the same for our employees?
Praise and celebrate. We are too quick at work to breeze past the wins. Milestones hit. Difficult tasks completed. Bids won. We often only celebrate on holidays or at the end of big projects. But there are tiny victories each and every day. We should acknowledge, celebrate and share. Celebrations don’t have to come at a cost. They can be a potluck. They can be a praise post in a shared space. They can be a group walk to a local park. Enjoy the creativity of creating ways to celebrate your people.

For employees:

Document your own job. Keep a running list of the things that you do for your company. Every few months, compare that to your job description. If you see the scope start to drift, bring this to the attention of your boss. Ask for clarification. BUT you must have specifics. It can’t just be a feeling. Use your documentation to make expectations clear.
Be kind. This may seem trite, but it could not be a bigger deal. If you are kind to everyone in your interactions, not only will you feel better but they will feel better too. Being kind does not mean being a pushover. Kind does not equal weak. But showing genuine care, taking a moment to acknowledge we are all human, smiling, paying attention to your tone… it will all go a long way. If everyone is kind, the workplace automatically feels better.
Be communicative. What are your needs? Does your boss know them? What have you learned this week? Have you shared that with anyone? What are the expectations for the project you're working on? Are they clear to everyone? All the questions you have, other people probably have them too. Be proactive and answer them for yourself and others. The key to this is picking the right time and place. Constantly bombarding collaborative spaces with questions will burn people out. Start with 1:1s with your boss. Bundle some thoughts together into one post instead of several. Put the thoughts in the correct channel/shared space. Be communicative, but also thoughtful.
Present problems WITH solutions. If you have a problem at work, don’t just complain about it. Take time to collect your thoughts. What is the problem? Why is it a problem? What is the impact of the problem? What are specific examples of the problem? AND most importantly, what are potential solutions. Leadership may not take your specific solutions up, but it will get their wheels turning on what solutions can be AND it will show them you are a team player, looking to make things better, and not someone who has the potential to lower team morale.
Praise and celebrate. (Yes, this is so important, I’m putting it in twice) Don’t just leave it up to leadership to create praise and to celebrate work. Lead by example and celebrate the moments you see and praise the coworkers that are doing well. Build a positive culture from the ground up.

Like I said, this list doesn’t solve the institutional problems. And there are a million more ideas we could share. But if you enacted even half of this list, what a difference it could make.

We’d like to hear from you on ways you’ve discovered to improve the employee experience at little or no cost. It doesn’t matter what market you are in. The problems are often the same. Please share your ideas in the comments below. We can’t wait to hear from you!

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Lessons I’ve Learned from Managers I’ve Loved

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Lessons I’ve Learned from Managers I’ve Loved

The Employee Experience: What Different Markets Have In Common and How We Can All Make the Employee Experience Better

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About

MWBE Consulting

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