Advice to A New Manager

A good friend of mine recently stepped into an art director role and asked me for any advice I might have. I started to respond via email, but figured other people might find this useful. So, here you go!

1. Listen
   While you’ll have a strong urge to come in and “prove” you are a capable leader (usually through top-down, heavy handed actions), spending the first few weeks quietly listening, learning and observing will make you a far better leader in the long run. This is a new environment, with different members, each with different strengths and weaknesses. Make this about them— you want to learn everything you can about your team, the company, their clients, and their history.
2. Meet each person
   People are not all the same. You need to get to know each team member as an individual. You need to learn what each person’s strengths and weaknesses are. This is especially important with creative groups, where skills and talent can vary greatly, and where individuals hate being slotted neatly into (and rarely fit) a predefined role or job description. Most importantly, you need to learn what makes each person tick—why are they here, and not elsewhere. Fear? Satisfaction? To work with other team members? Convenience? Specific clients? It’s critical that you understand what motivates each team member to do their best. Tapping into these personal motivations will be the most effective way to accomplish your goals as a manager.
3. Cast a vision
   This is the tough one— your team (and depending on the size of the organization, your company) needs to have a clear and compelling sense of purpose. Call it vision, mission, mantra, strategic intent, purpose—whatever! Like the “put a man on the moon” mantra, you need to uncover the shared sense of purpose that unites everyone. Expect this to take anywhere from a few weeks to several months. It took me 5 months to figure this out at Viewzi.
4. Connect the group vision to personal motivations
   Perhaps farther down the road, the key to growing an excited, intrinsically motivated team to is to help your team members connect their personal goals and motivations to the larger group vision. If there isn’t a good fit, then maybe this isn’t the right place for that person. While this is a tough bridge to cross, it’s usually best for the company and individual— it’s critical that people be where they are happy, growing, and excited about the work they are doing.
5. Understand peers and bosses, politics
   As much as you want to focus on you and your team, it’s equally important to understand the culture (and politics) inside the organization you’re working at. If you succeed in truly creating a team culture, you—as a leader—will be looked at to pave the way and clear the road of barriers that would prevent the team from kicking a**. Your job will become less focused on the team and more externally focused on efforts that support the team— managing bad clients, navigating thorny political issues, etc. It’s important that you understand how to do such things.
6. Guide, don’t do
   As a manager, you need to learn to work through people. You cannot do their work for them. I’ll say that again: You cannot do your teams work for them. This is especially challenging if you are really good at what you do (and I know you are a perfectionist!). You will face a crossroad when you must choose: you can do people’s work for them, or figure out how to help them to do better work. The latter road is the much more difficult path, especially when you really want to just jump in and show them how it’s done, but this is your chosen path as a manager— to help those around you rise up and exceed your expectations. They’ll never do that if you’re doing their job for them. While challenging, this is the path that doesn’t lead you to dead ends, late nights, and burnout. What’s best, one day you’ll discover that you’ve surrounded yourself with people who can do what you used to do better than you ever could have dreamed. This is nirvana for managers.
7. Make the subjective objective
   So how do you get people to be better? Frame the problem to be solved. Establishing objective criteria for evaluation is critical to offering valid feedback. It should never be “because my boss doesn’t like it.” It should be “my boss helped me understand why it might not work, or how it could work better.” Whether you’re discussing a Web site or an ad campaign, clients pay you and your company to create these things in order to accomplish clear objectives. As a manager, making these business and design objectives clear to your team is key. Is this more or less usable? Will this increase conversion? How does this fit with our target market? At the end of the day, while expression and art are certainly a part of what we do, we are designers. And Design is concerned with accomplishing a particular purpose. It is these purposes against which we should evaluate our design decisions— not our personal opinions.
8. Meddle when necessary, but be clear about it
   Okay, not everything will be cut and dry. Sometimes you’ll have an idea you want to see given form. Or maybe someone is just not moving past the concept they’re stuck on. In these cases (and do keep them rare), it’s ok to cross the line— just be clear about it: “I’m meddling now.” However, even in these cases where you’re demonstrating how you would solve the problem, the goal is not that this employee would emulate your solution; no, you should want this different perspective to challenge them, inspire them, and provide them with a fresh way to look at the problem that will inspire their own, original solution. You’re jumpstarting their stalled engine, not programming the GPS (and if they do solve it in your way, they’ve made that choice as designers).
9. Designate clear owners…
   Resist the urge to be hands on, if that’s not your role as a director. A sense of ownership is critically important among creative professionals, regardless of talent level. It’s important to be clear about who owns what or who has the final say. Everyone should have some project or some piece of the project they can point to and say “I made this.” Whatever “this” is, be clear about it, and then help them hit a home run with whatever it is they own. This means understanding their unique solution to the problem and either nurturing this idea to be stellar, or helping them understand where the idea is lacking. In an environment with lots of small projects, it’s easier to parcel out the projects to individual owners. However, if there is only one or two project that everyone is working on, ownership can be a bit trickier…
10. …but also prioritize group collaboration
    While a sense of individual ownership is important, it’s often not that cut and dry. And some of your best ideas won’t come from any one individual. Pixar has assembled a stellar team of animators and engineers. They have a great practice of daily peer review sessions, where whoever attends provides feedback on work done the previous day. Programs like these encourage everyone to participate and feel that sense of ownership on a larger project. More importantly, these conversations quickly educate less mature team members on what constitutes a “good” solution. I’ve also found that almost all projects go through divergent and convergent phases; a phase for when you’re generating ideas and a phase for when you’re refining a selected idea. The nature of collaboration changes with these phases. I set aside ownership during the divergent phase, allowing everyone a chance to generate new ideas. Out of this process will generally come a few ideas worth pursuing. I believe it’s very important to let the originators of an idea (who are often the champions for that idea) see it through to completion. It’s at this point that I can say “you own this” and the team will help you make the best of a concept that everyone agreed was worth pursuing.
11. Don’t feel threatened by stellar employees
    Don’t be afraid of people knowing or being better at something than you are. Expect this—and be excited by it— it means your overall team, including you, has that much more to offer. You have your own strengths and weaknesses. And there’s far too much out there to know everything. Let your team and peers complement you where you are weak. And let them step up to the plate in these cases, either joining you in meetings or taking your place. Don’t ever feel threatened by a really strong team member— rather, count this as a blessing and do everything you can to keep this an environment they want to remain in.
12. Let individuals represent their own work
    This one can be risky, but hear me out. If someone has done great work, make sure they get the credit for it. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to see bad managers take their employees good work and represent it as their own. Or worse, credit the employee but present the ideas themselves and butcher the presentation. Let the idea owners present their work. And if they’re not so good at representing ideas yet, help them out. Being able to represent, explain and defend your ideas is a basic communication skill that everyone at all levels needs to learn at some point. Have reservations about doing this? A good friend (and mentor to me) repeatedly said his job was to work himself out of his current position. Help people on your team do those things that would groom them for your position.
13. And a few random comments…
    Most of what I’ve written assumes a fairly talented team. I personally favor the small, flat teams made up of mid-to-senior level folks. In these situations, your job as a manager is much easier. (It’s more like a group organizer than anything else.) However, your situation may involve many more levels and titles, and may include interns and junior level folks. I wouldn’t make exception to anything I’ve advised above. But, the projects people get to work on should be appropriate to their capabilities (and fit with their interest and talents). This means people who do great work with what is given to them will in effect earn the right to do more interesting work. And this has nothing to do with tenure or titles, but rather prior accomplishments.

In the end, the goal of all of these practices is to establish trust. If your team trusts you, well… things are so much easier! They’ll listen to feedback with an open mind. They’ll take you seriously. And on those occasions when the work is not so desirable (which will be more than you’d like), they’ll be more agreeable to continue doing their best work— knowing that you’re looking out for them. You want a team that trusts you, and knows that you are personally invested in their individual growth, wherever that growth may take them.

I could write a bit more about mentoring programs or some of the specific things I’ve tried over the years, but I’ll stop here. I feel this is a pretty good general list of principles that I try to practice. That said, I will point you to three additional sources of great management advice:

1. 10 Tips to Manage a Creative Environment — I first heard this at SxSW. As Sarah B. Nelson and Bryan Mason went through each of the ten tips, I found myself nodding my head vigorously to each one. You can check out their slides here (note: you really need to hear the accompanying audio for some of their points to make sense).
2. One thing I haven’t mentioned here are individual personality differences and how to account for those. For example, most people I’ve worked with enjoy representing their own work. However, for some individuals, this would freak them out. At Adptive Path’s MX 2008, Margaret Gould Stewart, User Experience Manager at Google, shared some practical tools for custom-tailoring your management style for different personalities . She’s put together a set of attribute cards you can use to help understand individual work styles your team members will have. This fun little exercise will help you understand what each member of your team needs from you as their manager.
3. I just came across this post over at randsinrepose.com . It’s a good complement to the advice that I’ve given here as it focuses more on what being a manager will mean for you.

I hope you find some of this helpful. Best of luck in your new position!