Читать книгу The notes of first line manager - Dmitry Artyukhin - Страница 6

This is critical part. I believe this stage is even more important than the first meeting with the team. When you first time faces your team members and introduce yourself you have just little time to demonstrate who you are. When you spend time talking to team members you have much more opportunities to show both positive and negative sides of your character and your management style. So, take time to be prepared for this stage.

First of all you need to allocate enough time for meeting with each member of you team. It doesn’t mean having 15 minutes chat during the lunch into canteen. Make sure you allocate at least 1 hour with everyone and book a room for this discussion. Put together specific agenda for each meeting and make sure you clearly articulate the purpose of this talk. Capture key items you want to cover. If any item into your agenda requires additional information make sure you have this information in place.

The idea of such meetings should be to understand concerns, individual expectations, and learn as much as possible about team members. You will need to listen to people rather than talk. This is not an easy task but you have to learn.

It’s extremely difficult to start this discussion as you have no idea what each individual has in mind and if they have own agenda for this meeting. At the same time you should try to manage the flow. You need to break the ice when you start this conversation. I don’t like a situation when you are treated as a boss. In such case you will not be able to learn too much. You team members should feel that you are on their side, they should trust you to share details. Perhaps it is not easy to achieve in the first 2–3 meetings but step by step you should encourage people to do that.

I had many situations when I was not successful in this exercise. Perhaps I should refer to one of my worst experience here:

We started to work together with one of my peers and after some time I was offered a management role in the same team. My colleague had a lot of concerns and he was very open about that. We sat together in a room and I asked him to share feedback about me as a manager as well as to share his thoughts on future of the team. He was very straight forward by saying that he didn’t see me as a manager at all. Even more he gave the whole list of reasons why. My first reaction was just awful. I understood that he had opinion that I couldn’t change in short term. He was one of the brightest persons I had ever known and one of the best experts in our team that made his voice very powerful. I spent approximately 2 years to change his perception and change myself to be recognized by him as a good manager.

Don’t give up! Even in a situation like this. You should always remember that other people may have different experience with different managers. Sometimes the bar is very high and you as a new manager may not fit into someone’s perception about good or bad manager. The key point here – continue to listen to those who criticize you. You will find a lot of useful comments. At the beginning of your path as a new manager you will have to change a lot into your approach to work and people.