Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Nicola Monat-Jacobs, Director of Enterprise Applications at Getty and a MOR program alum. Nicola may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
For the first part of our careers, our focus is on growing our technical proficiency. Writing code, building systems, fixing bugs, helping users – this feels like “the work” and anything that distracts from it – meetings, emails, unplanned chats with coworkers – feels like a waste of time or a barrier to getting things done, even as we acknowledge that some amount of collaboration is probably required to complete our tasks.
As we move up the leadership ladder, our work becomes more opaque to our team. We spend a lot of time in meetings, answering emails, and having seemingly endless chats with a seemingly random parade of individuals. Disenchanted team members with poorly functioning leadership might see those in leadership roles as useless or obstacles to getting the “real work” done. In a well-functioning organization, leaders might appear more like magicians, able to get institutional support, headcount, or funding for various initiatives via some combination of obscure incantations and catered lunches. What do those directors and VPs do all day anyway?
My desire to connect those dots helped me form my philosophy for being a manager of managers. When you manage individual contributors, you can direct their work very tangibly. Even when managing self-directed senior team members who are used to a high degree of autonomy, the conversation usually involves specific projects and tasks: Shall we implement this framework or another? Whose need is the priority here, and in what time frame? When managing managers with their own teams, the goal is to cultivate good judgment and create opportunities for leadership growth. You want confident leaders who can operate independently without asking you every little thing. If you’re new to this experience, you may wonder how on Earth to do that.
The secret is to shift your perspective from managing to coaching. I realized that if my managers knew some key things, they could make the calls they needed to when needed, even if they couldn’t run it by me first. So I always try to take time in my leadership meetings and one-on-ones with them to cover three things:
● Context
● Philosophy
● Goals
Context of The Work of Leadership
What institutional initiatives exist that may affect your work? Typically focused on operational details, managers may need your insight to see the connections. Is there a new strategic plan? A capital campaign about to launch? A new University President, Provost, or Dean with key initiatives? Is the institution attempting to raise its profile through research or partnerships with industry? A focus on new cost-cutting measures? Are key leaders putting a fresh focus on any specific area of risk or concern? Knowing where possible connections may exist and highlighting what role IT may be called upon to play is helpful so that when a request, query, or concern gets raised, your manager can proactively place it in proper context and ensure it gets appropriately prioritized. They can anticipate and act autonomously, reflecting well on them and your leadership.
Your Leadership Philosophy
We know that IT brings the highest value to our institutions when it operates as a partnership. Our service and partnership model must constantly evolve because technology must continuously evolve. This means that we’ve got to reinforce and interpret that model daily for our institution. What brand do you want your department or group to have on your campus? What are you trying to do more of and what are you trying to do less of? If you and your managers are aligned on this vision, you won’t have to wade into day-to-day negotiations about who should be doing what and who owns what (i.e., “roles and responsibilities”). You can define a general vision that your managers can implement consistently across the IT organization, and your partners know what to expect.
Goal Setting
These are specific outcomes, but still reasonably high-level. You should be able to articulate a desired future state clearly (“We’re out of the on-prem data center” or “Every classroom can support a seamless hybrid experience”) that managers can look for opportunities to implement. Sometimes it’s straightforward – initiate a project – but sometimes the goals require incremental effort over a more extended period. Strategies to accomplish the goal may need to evolve, but as long as everyone understands the destination, they can adapt as needed.
Managers as Mentors
As a senior leader, you can access people, information, and conversations that your managers don’t. There’s no value in hoarding these insights. Our responsibility as mentors and bosses is to develop our direct reports as leaders in their own right who can exercise independent judgment. It may feel awkward at first. They may ask, “What do you want me to do with this information?” But, over time, you’ll see that they will start to pick up on these things independently or ask you about things they’ve observed.
Making these connections and then acting on them takes real effort and time. Sometimes it looks like meetings, reading, or following up with a key campus partner. These efforts don’t just make for stronger, more effective, and autonomous leaders, they also will ensure that your team is working on the right priorities and is well-positioned to advance key IT initiatives. Through your coaching, your managers will see that this, too, is a critical part of “the work of leadership.”
Which has been most helpful to you to have clarity on?
Last week, we asked which coaching question you were most excited to try.
- 24% said “What’s the real challenge here for you?”
- 22% said “If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?”
- 17% said “What’s on your mind?”
- 12% said “And what else?”
- 9% said “What do you want?”
- 9% said “How can I help?”
- 7% said “What was most useful for you?”
While we were collectively excited by the full range of coaching questions posed last week, there were two that excited almost half of us the most. Those questions are meant to elicit deeper thinking, beyond the surface, to the real challenge, to what is receiving an implicit “no” when something else receives an explicit “yes.” Some of our most effective coaching involves helping others access that deeper thinking.