The Manager Trinity: Create Company Value
Driving Value by Brokering Human Needs with Company Goals
A manager’s role extends beyond overseeing individuals. I’ve observed many managers who missed opportunities to create value, both for their team members and their company, by neglecting the other tenets of the job: building effective teams and generating company value. I’m convinced that these two tenets are what set exceptional managers apart from the average ones. If you find room for growth in these areas, I provided actions you can take that will help you work toward mastering them.
To extract the most value out of this story, start with the core tenets of a manager’s job, then read: helping individuals be happy and productive and lastly read: building effective teams.
The Manager’s Role: Beyond Oversight
This piece focuses on creating value to the company. Here’s my insight and short pitch to you:
Humans need meaning for their spirituality, and income for their livelihood. Companies need people to generate value and bring their vision to life. You, the manager, are the broker for this deal.
So, companies hire people, give them money and try to generate a hospitable environment such that people can draw meaning from. Brokering those relationships doesn’t sit solely on your shoulders. But it’s a fertile area where you can add great value, by translating the company’s mission to your employees and matching your team’s abilities to the company’s goals. It’s simple: you can help people derive meaning from their job, and you can help companies extract value from their employees.
Why you?
Because you know your people best, what they can do, and what they care about. You understand them as individuals and you understand them as a team, so you are uniquely positioned to contribute here.
Reminder: A manager’s role is to
Help individuals be happy and productive so they can form happy and productive teams that deliver value to the company.
the core tenets of a manager’s job are: people -> teams -> company. In this post focuses on the company.
Let’s dive into how managers create value for the company.
Creating value for the company:
The final aspect of the manager’s role is to align the team’s skills and aspirations with the company’s business goals. The work assigned to team members should strive to generate win-win situations: help the company achieve its goals — referred to as Impact or Value — and help employees achieve their goals — those are often finding meaning and professional growth. Employees crave to see how their work contributes to the company’s goals while ideally helping them achieve their individual goals (based on their skill set and aspirations). I use “ideally” here because matching everyone’s personal goals with company needs is hard to do consistently, but is doable most of the time.
You’ll be surprised how many managers do their job without paying much attention to this part. I’ve heard (horror) stories about software managers that have no urgency nor need to ever put their software in users’ hands. I can’t help but wonder how those managers are measured 🤔.
So fine, guess I need to take action here, but how? how do you do that as a manager?
Invest in understanding your company’s goals:
In order for you to guide your team’s work and ensure their growth and livelihood — invest time and effort in understanding how you and your team can add value for the company. For that, you need to develop a solid understanding of the company’s goals, vision and mission. In the piece focused on managing individuals we discussed the importance of understanding of your team’s skills, aspirations and needs. Once you understand both sides’ abilities, aspirations and needs, then you can start playing match-maker.
But wait, how do I figure out my company’s goals? — you may be asking
Here are some quick pointers:
- Attend and be attentive in company meetings — vision, mission and goals are often communicated in those meetings. It’s often referred to as Strategy. Note that goals can be long term and short term, and are often updated. So you need to pay attention more than once 🙂
- Listen to senior leaders when they speak, they often talk about the direction, the strategy and so on.
- Ask. if you find that that information is not being pushed to you from senior people in the company — be proactive and ask. It’s always easier to ask in smaller forums, so you can start by asking your own manager, your skip-level manager (that’s your manager’s manager) and go up if and as needed.
- Go smaller, if needed. If you can’t figure out the company’s goal, direction, needs. Focus on the organization that your team is part of. That means focusing on the communication coming from the leader(s) of that organization.
- Be open and honest. Oftentimes these topics can feel vague and unclear, especially to newer and more junior managers. Don’t be shy, it’s crucial that you’ll understand the company’s/organization’s direction and needs to do a good job. So you can be open and say to any leader above you something like this: “I care deeply about my company and my team. To be a good leader I need to understand where we’re going. I tried to figure it out myself and couldn’t. Can you help me decipher that?”
Drop a note in the comments section if you have more/better ideas on how to get this information.
Communicate Company Goals Effectively
Once you figured out the direction (goals, mission etc), remember to relay that to your team. You should communicate your learnings (remember they change over time) to the team in every opportunity you have. Take the time to describe and visualize how the team’s work maps to the company’s goals and roadmap.
Many managers don’t realize they possess insights that others (usually below them) don’t have. They fall into the trap of thinking “everyone knows what I know” forgetting they are exposed to meetings and knowledge that others aren’t. Even if it was true (that your team and you share the exact same knowledge), and I promise you it’s not, the worst case scenario is that you repeated something they knew. The best case scenario is that you shared something they didn’t know — and in doing so added value for them.
Ideas for how to communicate company’s and organization goals:
- In periodic team meetings — it’s good practice to have a slide in your template where you remind the team the top level mission and strategy. The next slide should be about short(er) term goals and roadmap. Then if possible point to the area in the roadmap that your team is working on.
- In product/project strategy updates — when you share updates about the project the team is working on, it’s a great opportunity to remind the team how this helps the company’s bigger picture. If the company is trying to increase user retention and you are working on better bug reporting, you should connect the dots for the team and explain why you believe it will help with that metric.
- In team demos, lunch bags and show and tells — this one probably surprised you but those events are a great opportunity to map each and every feature to the bigger picture, where everyone might actually be paying attention (because they each worked probably at least on one feature).
- In 1:1s — here you can motivate and inspire your team members by explaining how they each single handedly contribute to the company’s success. It’s not something I’d do in every meeting. Depending on the individual situation you can leverage this to re-energize, push forward or encourage unmotivated team members.
Guiding Vision, Priorities, and User Needs
[This part is geared more towards engineering teams]
Many companies set up organic cross-functional teams with engineering, product manager (PM) and user experience experts (UX designers, researchers and more). When those functions are around it’s usually their responsibility to set the vision for the team, the priorities for the work and they ensure whatever the team is producing is actually meeting the users’ needs.
However, in all my years of working on teams, whenever I didn’t pay attention to this area assuming others would take care of this part, it repeatedly proved itself as a bad approach. And of course, there will be situations when you won’t have those peers around you to cover it. Maybe the PM wasn’t hired yet, maybe the UX just went on leave and a new one hadn’t joined yet. Whatever the reasons are, you should actively monitor these activities, because once again, you are the broker between your team’s skills and aspirations and the strategy. Meaning, you can help ensure your team can actually deliver on the product strategy. Imagine the product strategy is to build a mobile app but you have a set of experts in backend technologies. That will be a bad mismatch that will cost the company months to resolve (it happened to me). And on the other side, the more you understand the vision, priorities and users’ needs, the better you can guide your team in building the product and in explaining how they help the company.
So.. don’t drop this ball. And if you find it hard to understand or do, keep practicing and ask for help — so you’d develop this skill over time.
Risks of ignoring this tenet
OK, I’ve said a lot, but I also said that this is one of those “separate the average managers from the great ones”, so it sounds like it might be ok to ignore this tenet?
Well, proceed with caution here. Ignoring this part of the job will result in one of the following:
- A disposable team — if the team does not work on or produces clear value for the company, why is the company paying them?
- Unmotivated team members — human beings crave meaning in their work (see the five dysfunctions of a team and Google research on effective teams). Meaning comes in many forms: being part of a greater purpose, relationships with peers, personal growth, appreciation, challenge and so on. If they don’t buy in to the company’s mission or they do but they can’t see how their work contributes to that mission (e.g. company’s goals they) are likely to lose interest in the work. Similarly if the work doesn’t help them achieve their personal goals, they will also lose interest.
- A low performing manager — if your team doesn’t produce value for the company, you might find yourself in a position where you are loved and appreciated by your reports, but not by your superiors.
Call to Action: Elevate Your Managerial Skills
I listed the key pieces that I’ve seen being effective connecting companies’ needs to employees’ needs to ensure teams are indispensable and growing.
Now, it’s your turn to take action and elevate your managerial skills. Start by delving into your company’s mission, vision, and goals. Attend meetings, listen to senior leaders, and don’t hesitate to ask questions to gain a comprehensive understanding of your company’s direction.
Then, focus on improving your communication skills. Share your insights and learnings with your team regularly, reinforcing how their work directly contributes to the company’s success. Sharing that upwards and sideways is also of great value. Use various channels, from team meetings to 1:1 discussions, to instill a sense of purpose and motivation in your team members.
Lastly, be diligent in aligning your team’s efforts with the overarching strategy, and don’t shy away from seeking assistance when faced with challenges. Remember, your dedication to understanding and implementing these principles will not only make you a more effective manager but also cultivate a team that is both indispensable and motivated.
What challenges have you faced in aligning your team with company goals?
Share your journey and insights with us in the comments section. Let’s collectively strive to become better managers. Together, we can create a workplace where every individual finds meaning, growth, and value.
