Informed manager
By: Damian Turczyński
Tags: One On One, Manager, Informed, Meetings, Information

Information is key. Successful companies make decisions based on data. Successful people know facts that help them make better decisions.

If you are a manager, people will expect you to know. To know what’s coming, what happened, and what the plans are.

How can I know better?

You are already reading slack, emails, and gathering information from your manager. Isn’t that enough? Not really :). You know the information from your bubble. It’s like checking only YouTube videos suggested by “The algorithm.” Once you watch a video with a cute cat, you will keep watching cute cats :).

Get out of your comfort zone and find alternative ways. Below I present three short ideas on how you can become an informed manager.

Meet regularly with other managers

Create regular group meetings with other managers. Pick managers who are somehow related and make a monthly meeting to discuss problems you have encountered and share knowledge.

I found it works well when you ask others to prepare a thing to discuss. If no one comes up with a topic, here are a few which triggered exciting conversation during my meetings:

What problem have you had with your report, and how did you deal with it?

Have you tried something new in you 1:1? How did it work?

What do people complain about in your team recently?

Why?

A broader vision of a problem is always an advantage. Seeing other’s points of view for the same situation makes you more informed and gives you a more in-depth insight into the issue. When meeting with other managers, I often share problems I solved and the approach I took. That helps others but also reinforce my decisions.

I once heard from another manager about the same challenge I dealt with just a few weeks back. It was about promoting to a Senior Engineer. I was able to help by sharing resources and warning about pitfalls in the process.

Make 1:1s with other managers from other departments.

Try to get out of your information bubble. It’s great to have a perspective on what’s going on in another department. I found it useful to have regular 1:1s with other managers. I find scheduling it every four weeks works just right. We don’t want unnecessary overhead.

Individual meetings with other managers are an excellent opportunity to share your management knowledge and learn something new. It’s a great sanity check if everything is working well in your department. If you don’t have an outside opinion, you may start to believe that your team’s annoyances are ordinary. It’s also an excellent opportunity to vent and coach each other.

Why?

To me, it is essential to know about the mood in the workplace. When we were doing a company-wide shift of teams, I’ve learned that other groups are much more affected then ours. That helped me to build empathy in my team and encourage help outside of my team.

Another time I learned about a person leaving the company before they announced it. As a manager, it is crucial to prepare ourselves for unexpected conversations. I find it useful to prepare in advance mentally. In my situation, my report reached out to me because their friend/colleague was leaving the company. This time I was ready.

Write blog posts

I find writing blog posts a perfect exercise to learn. For every blog post, I need to read several other articles, books and gather knowledge. I believe that one of the best ways to learn is to try to teach that skills to others.

If you don’t like writing, you can make notes and share some of your takeaways with others by sharing it during the meetings described above. If you have nothing to share, it may mean you haven’t learned anything recently :).

Why?

When I wrote my first blog post, people reached out to me, sharing some of their thoughts. I learned something new, even after publishing my work.

Writing skills are valuable. We use them every day at work — emails, documentation, replying on slack. I try to improve my English skills every day, especially because it’s not my native language. A week ago, one of my colleagues who doesn’t speak to me regularly praised me as he noticed a difference in my language skills. Thank you, Luke!

Over to you

Those are my ideas which I found useful in my work as a manager. Being informed help me build trust with my reports and keeping them engaged. I want to learn your ideas, as well! You can post them in the comments so I can learn something new today :).