Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they're ready.
— From Unreasonable Hospitality
Many managers struggle with leadership. This isn't entirely surprising as many seem to think leadership is a feature of personality, rather than a learnable hard-skill. Therefore, it isn't surprising when managers also struggle with giving promotions and team-building——initiatives that require looking beyond management, into the leadership realm. In my career, I've seen numerous instances where great teammates were lost due to poor leadership.
The concern
Most managers withhold promotions for a number of logical reasons, which typically fail to hold up under scrutiny.
These concerns are sometimes rooted in our own insecurities as leaders. (Read that a couple times, and let it sink in.)
However, the most over-used, under-scrutinized, and costly reason to avoid a promotion of responsibility is:
They just aren't quite ready yet
Pay special attention to the unspoken comments here:
- "quite ready": They aren't totally unfit for the job
- "yet": They will be ready sooner or later
- "just": The only concern is their readiness
Upon first consideration, the teammates "readiness" is an important concern and not entirely without merit. The underlying concern here is actually compassionate: We don't want our reports failing or being crushed under a new burden.
However, if we can confirm that the person in-question embraces excellence, and we agree that mistakes are an effective way to learn; We should be reasonably sure that presenting this individual with increased responsibility would benefit both the long-term growth of the individual and the business (this goes doubly if this person is an A-player).
See Also
The breakdown
For most team members, "readiness" is a decent heuristic and will lead to good outcomes (Good, not great outcomes).
However, this heuristic does not hold up with a team of A-players. You know the type: industrious, cunning, hungry, and passionate. They're the types that clamor for responsibility and exceed expectations early in their tenure.
I would classify any sufficiently hungry team member, as an A-player. Regardless of whether their immediate technical skills hold up, hunger will carry them farther than their immediate position. A hungry person can learn, and given the chance will learn. Typically, they'll learn at rates 2x, 5x, or 10x their peers.
For this reason, they should be promoted as soon as they can demonstrate rudimentary proficiency in the next rung of the ladder.
Let me be loud and clear:
Conclusion
At the end of the day, every single business is in the same boat: the people boat. You work with them, you serve them, you are them.
And I plan to address these in later posts. I'd love to hear feedback if any of these are of particular interest to anyone!
However, a lack of readiness can be mostly managed through effective leadership.[^1]
Let's not do the disservice to our team by thinking a promotion must rely solely on the grounds of perfect readiness. Readiness is actually a series of sub-concerns:
- Can they achieve the expected results?
- Can they avoid potential pitfalls?
- Can they ease the burden on the rest of the team?
The point of leadership is to beget more leaders--more owners. In order to do this, we have to allow people to grow. People grow in due time, with ample room for mistakes, and encouragement from their leaders. If the leaders clearly communicate the standards and vision, they should trust their teammates to attain those standards in due time.
An effective leader will curb the upper bounds of potential mistakes. They'll ensure the junior developer's half-baked architecture doesn't actually make it to production without edits. But they'll equally ensure the junior developer is allowed the process of building the plan, considering the critiques of the senior engineers, and given space to learn from the process.
Address this: Most failures, are a failure of the leader to properly lead, not of the team members to properly perform.
A-players want to grow, be challenged, and contribute to a team of other A-players. If you remove any of those elements, you will begin to lose A-players.
While worrying about readiness and mistakes might feel like you're doing your job as a manager, you should actually be far more concerned with an A-player leaving due to growth opportunity.
The Solution
Briefly, the solution is as follows:
- Promote team members quickly, with guardrails
- Give Constant feedback
Promote team members quickly, with guardrails
The solution to readiness, is to give full responsibility to the new team member, while providing the necessary guardrails to ensure their failures fall within acceptable boundaries. Let your junior developer design the architecture plan, getting feedback and fixing it with feedback from the architecture team. Let your junior developer implement the project in phases, with constant feedback from both yourself and other senior team members.
Give constant feedback
Once-a-year performance reviews are a joke. Right behind them, though, are weekly one-on-ones. Feedback should be constant, as-in daily or hourly--however often you have a chance to help someone--do it. Constant feedback is your responsibility as a leader, not a feature of company culture. If you aren't constantly praising (feedback), criticizing (feedback), and guiding (feedback)--you are failing your responsibilities to your team. (Note: We don't like the connotation of the word "criticism", but there are been volumes written about how to skillfully deliver criticism to foster growth. Do yourself a favor and READ ON THIS TOPIC!)
Conclusion
Leadership skills are learnable, teachable, transferable skills that every manager should know. I've used leader and manager somewhat interchangeably, but let's clarify between the 2. A leader makes sure the team is doing the right thing. A manager makes sure the team is doing the thing right. You need both, to have a high-performing team. Indeed you need to be both to be a high-performing, impactful manager.