Now let’s move on to experienced managers. This is a very different set of challenges. Experienced managers can be awesome. The right experienced manager knows what needs to be done and does it without needing help from you to get there. He’s comfortable with the basics and even has some of his own unique tricks. All good, right?
Of course, there can be major downsides. Management tends to be a very culture-specific task in a company. I can give you best practices all day, but if you either work as a manager or hire a manager for a company that’s not a good culture fit, you’ll have problems. There is a reason that many young companies want to seed their management teams with people who’ve been there from the early days and understand the company’s DNA. They get the culture, they understand deeply what is important, and they have the internal networks already built to get things done.
So, the first challenge is making sure this person fits in with the culture of your team. We talk a lot about culture fit for all hiring, but managers create subcultures, and a manager who creates an incompatible subculture can be a problem if you want your teams to work together well. Let’s say you’re hiring a manager because he has expertise in building a certain type of product, and your company lacks expertise in this area. This kind of hire can be great for bringing in knowledge and perspectives. However, often we overvalue expertise in product areas and allow it to blind us to cultural and process fit with our companies and teams. A person with deep expertise in building enterprise-scale warehouse software may seem great on paper to run warehouse technology at your logistics startup. But he won’t necessarily work well with an agile, on-site team if he’s also used to shipping software once every six months and working only with remote development teams who are not involved in the product ideation process.
If you’re building a dynamic, product-centric engineering team, you need managers who understand how to work with teams who ship software frequently, who are comfortable with modern development process best practices, and who can inspire creative product-centric engineers. These skills are so much more important than industry-specific knowledge. It’s easier to gain access to industry information than it is to retrain someone who doesn’t know how to work in your culture. Don’t compromise on culture fit, especially when hiring managers.
Experienced managers will have different ideas about management than you do, and you’ll have to work out the differences. Working out these differences, however, is different than letting the manager do whatever he thinks is best. Even (or perhaps especially) if he’s been doing it longer than you, be willing to learn from him but don’t be afraid to provide your own feedback. Collaborate on areas of difference, allow him to teach you things, and take an active role in the process.
Again, this is a matter of culture. You’re responsible for cultivating the culture of your organization, and especially when you’ve been at the company for a longer period of time, you should ensure that all of your managers respect and nurture the type of culture that you think is best for the team. If you want teams that operate with transparency, make sure the manager shares information. If you want teams that encourage exploration, make sure the manager schedules time and space for his team to explore ideas. Think about what your culture values, and help your managers embody those values while still respecting that every team will be a little bit different and every manager will have certain strengths and weaknesses that you’ll need to account for.
How do you inspire experienced managers? The difference between an experienced manager and a new manager is that the experienced person should be capable of managing independently. This means that a lot of the coaching you provide will be less about the nuts and bolts of management and more about how he can have a larger impact on strategy and direction setting for his area. Don’t forget to think about tasks that you can delegate to him, and he should be an important advisor when it comes to setting organizational direction. While they may not need as much training as new managers, experienced managers often need help expanding their network both within the company and externally, so look for programs that can help them meet new peers.