I remember exactly where I was when I got the news that I was going to be a father. My wife and I were visiting her hometown of Baltimore and on the flight up she felt sick to her stomach and so she decided to take a pregnancy test. Moments later I was running around my brother in law’s row house telling everyone, we’re going to have a baby! It was initially a moment of pure joy, satisfaction, and accomplishment. We did it! That was immediately followed by moments of panic and anxiety. Oh crap. What did we just do? Do we know how to do this? Within hours we were at the bookstore where I purchased nearly every book on fathering and parenthood I could find. Sure we had examples all around us, but I still felt woefully unprepared. So, I did what I always do in a new situation: I created a plan.
A year earlier, I’d been promoted to my first managerial job. Similarly, initially I felt excited and proud of this achievement. Someone thinks I’m ready for this? That was all the validation I needed. Sure, I’d been a solid teacher, and later coach. As a result of being a good individual performer, I was being promoted to a management role (sound familiar? It happens all the time). In my case, I was preparing to lead an entire school team of folks responsible for teaching and learning when I’d never been formally trained to do so. Similar to my transition into fatherhood, I had no idea what was about to happen as a new manager. What I did have though was a lot of (untested) ideas.
Looking back on that first year, both as a summer site school director and then as a Senior Program Director, I realize I engaged unwittingly in some managerial malpractice. For instance, I remember one of my first opportunities to provide a direct report with feedback, I completely flubbed it. I was afraid of confrontation at the time and I didn’t know how to set clear expectations or observe with balance. Within weeks, my team was looking elsewhere for guidance and leadership because I hadn’t yet found my own voice. In one seminal moment I invited my team to my house for a meal where I attempted a group reset. It was a big risk for a new manager (and not necessarily something I would recommend to those I coach today), but it worked, at least in the short term. Still, I had a lot to learn about setting clear expectations, creating a culture of mutual accountability, and managing across lines of difference.
In the transition into my new full time role of managing, I wrote the following lines in my plan (I found this in a document labeled Samuel 2008-2009 strategic plan):
This summer I learned a lot as a School Director. Much of what I’ve learned is centered around management. I need to get better at managing others towards outcomes and coaching and development. If I’ve done my job correctly, I’ll experience one of the greatest rewards of leadership (one that I expect my teachers to experience in their classroom). That reward is getting to see the development of other leaders.
This plan which goes on for a good 10 pages had goals and strategies for establishing relationships and methods for ensuring performance improvement of my direct reports and the teachers I would be coaching. It also included ideas about how I would pursue promotion and advocacy for the people I lead. The plan however did not include any mention of formal training or coaching and development that I would pursue in order to accomplish any of these things. Looking back on it, it was more of a wish list in the hopes that somehow I got better as a manager through experience. As I like to tell the people I coach, experience itself is not necessarily the best teacher. It’s the reflection and lessons we take from our experiences that can accelerate learning. Fortunately, then and throughout my career I was blessed with great managers whose core strengths involved coaching and developing. So what I may have lacked in formal training, I received in coaching.
Incidentally, as my first challenge I was assigned another new team member, a black woman who had struggled in her first year as a coach. By the end of the year she was our highest performing staff member (she later went on to become an education attorney, run for office, and we remain good friends to this day). Similar to parenting, I realize that most of her growth was in spite of me, not necessarily because of anything I was intentionally doing. She might argue though that at least I created the space for her to be her full self and unleash her capacity, and that is what made all the difference in her work.
Now looking back on those early years, I grimace when I think about the potential harm I caused. I’m also grateful for the chances I had to grow as a manager. I cut my teeth in an organization that was not afraid of feedback (you might argue we had too much of it). So I was constantly berated with my opportunities for growth. It left a mark. For years I felt incompetent as a manager and it wasn’t until I started to really unpack my more successful experiences and my failures that I began to recognize a pattern of challenges that plague every manager (new or veteran).
For the past several years I’ve worked with a group of practitioners who are trying to solve this dilemma of how do we make the manager role, one that is so crucial to organizational success, a little bit easier? How do we build better managers so that it leads to better outcomes for everyone involved? We’ve trained thousands of managers at companies across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors through our Managing Equitably program. If my experience has taught me anything, its that managers, in particular middle managers, are the key levers for change in organizations. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it. Let’s just make sure we prepare them well.
