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Welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast with me Ben Pearce. Every episode we talk through different aspects of how to really thrive in the tech world and if the podcast isn't enough for you and you want weekly micro learning delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for the Tech World Human Skills Weekly. Head over to www.TechWorldHumanSkills.com to sign up.
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World Human Skills Podcast. It is lovely to have you with us. Well, today we're talking about transitioning from being that technical expert to becoming a successful leader. It's a tough transition and it's a completely different set of skills. Now, we're going to set our conversation in the world of technical presales today and our guest has worked in presales for many years. He's been a solution consultant and then led teams of solution consultants. He's even taken the odd tour of duty into the commercial sales side. And when he's not living and breathing technical sales, he runs the presales leaders forum community in the UK. So, please welcome to the show, Malcolm Murphy. Malcolm, it is wonderful to have you with us. Thanks very much Ben, it's wonderful to be here. Finally talking at last. Yeah, well, I know you're an avid listener to the podcast and so it's wonderful to get you, you're peeking behind the curtain and seeing what it's like behind.
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Exactly, it's very different, very different behind the curtain.
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For all of those people that don't know you, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background?
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Yeah, so as you said, my background, most of my career has been in technical presales. I actually started way back when I was far more years ago than I care to mention on the other side of the fence.
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And UNIX engineer, then I was asked to manage a team of UNIX engineers.
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So building into the infrastructure, rolling it out. Then I moved, my first presales job moved to one of our suppliers.
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And then, then spent various, the last years predominantly in vendor organizations, as you said, sometimes in presales roles, sometimes in sales or sales leadership roles. In, currently working for a company called Mimecast.
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Right now I'm specialising in inside of risk and human risk management. Brilliant, and I've spoken to you many times, we've got to know each other over the last few years in the presales leader forum.
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You've got an absolute wealth of experience, some really insightful stuff to share. And you're not shy in sharing it, if I don't mind saying so as well.
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That's fair, that's fair. Shall we start to dig in?
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They are very different sets of skills, you know. Being the technical expert that gets wheeled out in front of customers, knows a lot of stuff, imparts wisdom, excites people, solves problems, all of those things that you do as a presales expert.
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Is maybe a bit different then to when you start leading a team of people doing that exact same thing, but it's a different set of skills. So should we open that and explore that and unpack that a little bit?
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Yeah, and I think, you know, we're contextualising this against presales right now, but it's applicable to any kind of technical engineering type discipline. So it's the same for where I started out, UNIX systems administrator leading a team of UNIX systems administrators or, you know, a software developer leading a team of software developers. It's often the case that the skills, or we tend to think the skills that make you a great individual contributor lead to you being promoted to management and to leadership. And I think that often is the case, but those people that have made that transition would probably also say that the first six, 12, 18, 100 months, you're figuring out, actually, this is a completely different job.
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And to be successful as a people manager and as a leader, you've got to figure out, hopefully quickly figure out that actually it's functionally a different discipline. It's not just being the best engineer. In fact, if you're trying to be the best engineer on the team, you'll be the worst manager you could possibly be.
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So it's figuring out it's a different set of skills. Yeah. And no one tells you that. No one tells you that when you take the job.
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No. Now, I know you've thought a little bit about, I guess, the taxonomy or the framework or the order or a structure, you know, a way to think about the different aspects of a role when you move into leadership.
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Do you want to go through that with us? Because I think what that does is it sets up really nicely how you think about leadership. So so, you know, what would you say when you move from being a technical expert to a leader? What are the key things you now need to think about doing when you're in that first leadership role? Yes. So so broadly, I think of things. I think there are three buckets. So and I'm going to say managing rather than leading because your first role is probably a manager rather than a leader, although I'll explain. I think there's a lot of overlap, but you're going to be first and foremost managing the people, right? You manage. You step up from individual contributor to managing a team job. Number one, managing the people. But there's two other jobs, two other buckets, if you like. The first bucket, manage the people. And the second bucket is you're managing the business. And here by the business, I probably mean whatever it is that you're functionally responsible for. So if you're managing developers, you're managing to the outputs of that team of developers. I've spent most of my management career in pre-sales engineering. So I'm managing the business is typically managing in pursuit of a revenue number.
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And the third bucket is managing inside the company. Like it or not, when you stop being an individual contributor and you start being a manager, you've got a leadership role inside the company. And that obligation goes two ways. You've got a obligation to push things up that you're seeing on the ground and surfacing issues or areas or improvements or whatever. And then it's a responsibility down, acting on behalf of the company and communicating that down through your team to your team and perhaps beyond into customers and partners and the rest of the wider supply chain, the wider market. Okay, so we've got those three bits that you're talking about. So people managing, so managing a group of direct reports, that you're there as their direct manager every single day, you're managing that team. Then the company leadership, which is the managing up, the managing down, you're the person in the middle. Depending on what your leadership role is, that might have slightly different flavours and the business unit leadership. So in your context of being a pre-sales leader, that's saying, here's our team target. This is where we are managing the success of that business unit. Yeah. And if you think about, maybe a way to think about it, it's very abstract. But I've got a group of company, I'll say resources, I don't normally like saying resources, but I've got a set of company resources, the people in my team. And I've got an output that I need to achieve. It might be a revenue number, but it might be other things. And it's optimising how those people are deployed in pursuit of that company objective. So that's really what that second book is about.
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Now, you walk into any Waterstones bookshop, there is like about a million books on leadership. You can get hundreds of pages on just the tiniest little of topics. We've got half an hour to talk about what you've already outlined as a lot. So I think, shall we for this episode focus on just one of those things? Yeah, three bits. Yeah. Yeah. And I think probably people manager skills, should we start there?
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I think it's a great place to start, not least because that's where people need to focus when they make their first step from individual entrepreneurship to leadership management. Typically managing the people is the first thing you've got to figure out. Right. So let's double click into that for the rest of the episode. So let's double click into that. So people manager skills, how would you break that up and how would you think about that? So again, keeping things in nice ordered lists. Actually, for each of those three buckets, I tend to have got four bullets for each bucket. But for the managing the people bucket, the four things really are. I don't know what to label this one hiring or another way of labeling is get the right people on the team and kind of because implicit in that is figuring out sometimes you have the wrong people for the team and you've got to figure out what to do there. So get the right people on team hiring. Second one is once you've got the people set expected. I'm not quite tell them what to do, but set expectations, make it clear to the team what is expected of them, what good looks like, what the standards of behavior or performance are.
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Third one, and there's a potential loaded beta, this third one is going to be motivating the people, motivating those team members to do their best work. And now I'm probably of a school of thought that says, I can't motivate you.
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What I mean by that, I can't get you to do something you fundamentally don't want to do. What I can do and what I mean by motivation is align what our mission is with what excites you and get by virtue of that alignment help you unleash your motivation to get your best work done. And the fourth one is developing employee skills, employee capability. So the people on my team, how do I help them be better versions of themselves in 12 months time relative to where they are today? How do I help people?
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Not just stay afloat in the rising tide of the standards moving forward, but actually accelerate how to get help them get better than the rising tide. So those four things hiring set expectations, motivation, development. So I think what we do is we'll skip into each of those and maybe you can have a bit of a conversation about each of those and sort of go through those in more detail. I mean, but what's interesting for both the high level bit and the people management. What we're not talking about there is being the best technical expert, being able to get in front of customers and be the best one at nailing the delivery. You know, what we're talking about here is achieving stuff through other people. And that's the big difference.
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Totally. If your goal is to be the best technical expert, to be the best functional expert, kind of don't be a manager.
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The yes, and actually this is something I think people struggle with a little bit because there's a fear, I think, and I've experienced this, there's a fear that, well, if I'm not, quote, the best or the strongest in this area, the team won't respect me.
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And I think that's often misplaced because if you invert it and say, what do I want from a manager? Well, maybe I need some guidance, but guidance isn't necessarily someone having all the answers. Guidance is someone helping me unlock myself. And we've all worked for, most of us have worked for managers who think they know what all the answers are, give you no freedom to do things your own way. That's often not fulfilling. So I think it's a common misperception, particularly from people who are early stage managers or who haven't been managers yet that says those technical functional skills, which are what got me to success as an individual contributor. They are critical to my success as a manager. And actually, you've got to let that belief go because that will get in the way of your success as a manager. It's way more important to do these other four things and relative to maintaining your technical chops. And it's interesting because when I think about that, and I've for many years, I've had career coaching conversations and I've been coached by people as well. You can get to very senior levels without managing people. And I think that that is more open these days than perhaps it used to, like maybe 30 years ago, 20 years ago, you went, I see manager, manager and managers, and that was the career path. Whereas now I've noticed, you know, there are a lot more senior technical roles that have no directs, and maybe they're principal roles, your principal solution consultant roles, or staff engineering roles or technical fellow roles. I've seen lots of these. And so there is a path where you can go into thought leadership and technical leadership and all of that kind of stuff. There's a path to do that. Then there's the other path, which is about scaling. Because the problem with that is you're always a bit of your one person. Whereas when you've got a team, you're scaling so that the impact you can have. But that comes with all of these things that we're going to dig into hiring people, understanding people's motivations, setting expectations, developing people, which is completely different. Yeah, it is. I think you're right to say a lot of companies now, again, certainly compared to when I started work, I think that was that expectation that to progress, you would move into a people management role. I think certainly the last couple of organizations I've worked for got very explicit equivalence of seniority for individual contributor roles and manager director roles. So there was, you know, director level, there's an equivalent level of individual contributor seniority. And I think that's a good thing because not everybody aspires to be or would be good at people management. So I think it's good that organizations are recognizing how to tap and harness the potential of those people. But we're talking about management on this one. So we'll park that. Yeah, we'll have that over there. So, so we're thinking now, right, you've decided you want to manage people. So you're going to be a direct hiring manager. And we're focusing on those people manage skills, hiring people aligning with people's motivations, setting expectations and developing people. So let's dig into each of those. Let's start hiring. Talk to me about hiring, Malcolm.
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Hiring or picking the team, whichever way you want to phrase it. I think the, and depends on the sort of economic climate, it sort of flex it ebbs and flows what people think about hiring.
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But what I would say is this in my observation and my experience, most first line managers do not give hiring the attention and headspace it deserves.
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Kind of, but I've seen people on the street is, or hiring is something I've got to do as well as my job. It's like, no, that's the wrong mindset. Getting the right people on your team is your job.
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And if you think about it, you think about a sports team coach needs a team of 11 players only has seven to put on the pitch on a Saturday afternoon, you're going to lose the game because you don't have people. So it's, it's job management. Number one, it's, it's the most important thing that you can be doing is getting the right people on, on your team. So the problem is it's incredibly difficult to do and certainly difficult to do well, but it is a, it's an out and out discipline in its own right.
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And it starts from, people tend to think of hiring as responding to applicants when they come on board. And that's, that's part of it. But the, the stuff you can be doing above and beyond that you can be thinking about what does my, is my employer a desirable place to work?
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And if you work, for example, for Google, then probably they've got lots of cash in the employer name. So you're going to have no, no problem attracting people who want to come work there. But what if I'm a lesser well-known name? What if there's some, some, you know, I'm not as well known or whatever it might be. I'm not Google. How do I, what's my offer to a candidate? How do I, how do I, how do I project myself and what I have to offer somebody as value such that they would come and it's a two-way process, right? So I've always thought of hiring as a two-way process. I need to get the right person in the role, but equally the person on the other side of the table, this has to be the right role for them. And if you talk, if you think about those other three things that I talked about, about, you know, understanding someone's motivation, helping them develop and, and figuring out what the expectations are and, and helping them understand that and achieve their best work.
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Well, the, I've got to be totally transparent with somebody as to what's in it for them if they're going to come and work for me. So I'll work on my team. So it's a two-way street and, and I think, you know, it's taken me X million years of, of, of hiring and making good hires and bad hires to, to, to figure that out.
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It's not just about, you know, interviewing the person across the desk that a recruiter or a talent acquisition team or an indeed or LinkedIn job advert has put in front of you. It's an, to do it well. It's an end to end process. And this is my number one hints to all hiring managers everywhere. Own the end to end process.
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You might be working with a talent acquisition team or HR and they'll do some of the work for you. But if you put yourself in a mindset that says, I own the end to end process, you'll get better results. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I used to do, of course, load, load, loads of hiring. And, you know, I sort of think that there's some different phases that you were in sometimes. So some phases were, hey, we're in a massive growth phase and I'm like, I'm going to do this. And some phases were, Hey, we're in a massive growth phase now, like, and we've got more jobs than we can possibly try and hire. And that's got its own challenges. I don't think as we record this, that's not what it's like in the industry at the moment. I don't think for many people don't think it is now. Then, then there is the next phase, which is right. We need, we need to change the shape of the team a little bit here where we've got some people in. Now I've not got any more head count. So if I'm going to get head count, I'm going to get head count. That means some people need to leave the team. And that, that's really tricky thing in its own right. So there's that kind of phase. And then, but then the other thing I just wanted to think about was, was succession planning. And I think helps with both of those phases. And I used to love thinking about it, particularly if you're after something different, something a bit more with a bit more diversity, or you're after certain industry experience or you know, those sorts of things. If you're always thinking about hiring and you're going right, okay, who's out there that I'd love to come and work for me? How do I build a proactive relationship? I haven't got any head count now, but I might have in the future. Then as soon as a job comes up, you're like jobs open, what they apply, they go through a process as everybody else does. But you know that they've got a good chance of doing well because you've already talked to them and they're a great fit for the organization. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the, that's one, I think that's a real skill to develop. I've worked with, with and for some, some managers who are really good at developing a bench and having almost a little black book of people who are in the right orbit. And oftentimes the timing's wrong, right? So there might be someone who I really want to come, can work for me, but the timing's wrong. The situation's great where they are. Maybe the package that's offered right now isn't the right thing for them at this particular point in time or whatever it might be. So, so you do need a much longer list in that black book and it can be very, very tiring. Again, when you're early on in a management career, you tend to think that, it tends to think of hiring as transactional, as in I have an open role right now and we're to find someone to fill that open role right now. And then when I close the books on that open role, then that, that goes away. If you do it, well, two things. One, if you do it well, you might be able to keep some of those people who weren't successful this time wanting to come and work with you again. So, so there's, there's always that to bear in mind. But then it's also the case that the, you can be in the jobs market as a hiring manager, even when you don't have a role and people will respond. It's actually okay to be having a conversation with someone that says, look, would you move at some point in the future? What would incite you to move? This is what, what kind of things I look for. It's always okay to have those conversations. And I think as long as it's done respectfully, not like these, I mean, everyone has horror stories of people who are harvesting CVs by advertising roles that don't exist. I wouldn't ever advocate for doing that. But as a person talking to another person about someone's potential future career development, why wouldn't I have that conversation? And why wouldn't I maintain a list of five, 10, 20 people who I think, hey, maybe at some point in the next five years, I'm going to have a career opportunity that aligns with what one of those people might want to do. That's just, that just makes common sense. So building your hiring muscle really important as a new manager. What's the next one, Malcolm? Next one, set expectations. So once you've got the team, basically communicate what the standards are, either at a team level or at an individual level. Again, I look back to what I did in my early parts of my management career. And I'll be honest, I think I was a little bit frightened of this one. I was a little bit frightened of saying, hey, the standard is X and you're at X minus one, X minus two, this, this is what that needs to look like. And again, so if anybody's out there with that, that kind of fear and invert it completely, I'd say most of us, most people want to do a good job. Probably I'd go a little bit further, say most people want to be, do great work. Most people really did turn up and they want to do great work and they're being held back by companies. But when I say companies, I mean their manager, not telling them what that looks like. So if you've ever experienced a situation where you don't know what good performance looks like, you don't know what you need to be doing in order to be achieving and to be, you know, meeting or exceeding expectations. Then that's an opportunity for management to do better. And like I said, if you've experienced it from the other side, where you've been in that lack of clarity, having someone tell you, this is what good looks like, this is where you are is great.
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It's even better if the next part of the conversation is, and here's how I'm going to help you bridge that gap.
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And I think, certainly if I think about my personality type, and I know lots of other people are like this, perhaps don't love conflict. They associate with explaining to people that this is, as you use X and X minus one, X is what I'm requiring, you're at X minus one. That that's conflict, you know, that's going to be a conflict that's going to come, that's going to be a horrible situation. And from my experience, if you can get into the mindset that feedback is a gift, you know, and it's like rocket fuel for performance. And it's and it's a real gift. Like, if you're walking around with your flies undone, right, you want somebody to tell you, you're walking around with your flies undone, you know, or your skirts touching your knickers, or whatever it is, right, you want that's a real gift that somebody has told you that thing. And now that's a bit of a silly, but if you take that into the into the pre sales world, or any of the technical or whatever, it's that exact same thing. If you don't know any better, and you're walking around doing this thing, actually, you want to be great in your good and your manager can tell you that. But it might be a difficult conversation. That's a skill and a muscle to build.
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Yeah, it is. And I think the there's a there's a real fear and hear what you're saying about, you know, fear of conflict. And in our heads, we are probably more prone to making it a conflict than the actual conversation is.
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So, I totally agree with you getting the mindset that it's a gift, I'd go one step further. It's your obligation. So if you want to, if you want to be a people manager, it's your obligation, it is the job.
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You owe it to people to tell them either if there's a performance deficiency or what they need to be doing to get better.
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And if you frame it as an obligation that that should hopefully mean this little bit of conflict that I might have to have to honor that obligation. But that's my obligation to to the team members.
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It's what I owe to people to that. That's my part of the contract. I said 99% of people are desperate for for that feedback, the desperate to know what good looks like. And you mentioned just thinking about this genuinely, I was thinking about this over the weekend.
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The the landscape we're in at the moment with people being laid off and, you know, organizations shedding people and what have you in the UK, at least the the processor company goes through the some sort of selection criteria, often cases that's performance based. You know, if you're a manager and there's something an employee could have been doing and they weren't doing it because you didn't tell them, well, you've let them down in that situation.
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So again, this different way of thinking about obligation.
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But just for it's interesting because we start to go down there. When I think about leadership versus being a technical individual contributor, being a technical individual contributor, something goes wrong. Right. A solution is not great, right? It's not the most performant or whatever. The thing with managing people is you are talking about people's lives, right? And and that comes with an emotional toll with an emotional weight that comes with it. And as much as you can kind of try and be professional and you can't take on all the emotional baggage of what's going on in your team and all of those sorts of things, you're human, right? So it's going to infect you a little bit and it's going to impact you a little bit. And so that people manage a role that I found that that was that could be really quite tough. That could be one of the toughest parts of the roles. Yeah, yeah, it is. And I think the someone asked me actually when I joined the minecast. So yes, probably about four, two and four and five years ago, someone I hadn't been there very long. Someone asked, someone in my team asked me this question. I think they were thinking about moving into management at the time. And they said, what's the number one personal attribute, attribute you need to succeed. And actually what I said to them at the time was you need to care. So you do need to care about your team members. You can't care too much. You can't take on the weight of the world. You take all their weights on your shoulders. But I think you do need to care about their performance and their success and their outcomes and your responsibility or the role that you play in helping them achieve that.
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So we've said building your hiring muscle, that's important. Your ability to set expectations and then hold people to account. That's another skill set you think you need to develop. What's the next one, Malcolm? Motivation. So figure out what makes people tick and help align and unlock that. So some examples. You might find there are things, you might find, for example, I've got someone who on the team who's great at presenting and it makes them tick and they get really fired up by that. So maybe you'll divert a disproportionate amount of the presentation work from your team to that person. It'd be a mistake to divert all of it to that person because if it's a skill for the job, then it's something that everybody on the team needs to develop. But that would be an example.
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Let's extend that a bit further. Let's suppose now I've got someone who doesn't like presenting, but it is a required skill for the job and they've got fear of being on stage or tripping over that. You've got to find out something that they do like or that does fire them up or they're not. They will get reward from and figure out how to align. You've got to stand up in front of these 20 people. You've got to present. How do I... It's almost, I don't want to say Jedi mind trick, but what is the Jedi mind trick to unlock that for somebody and get them to focus on the benefit of this task versus the downside or the thing that they don't like or fear about it. So there's a little bit of manipulation and Machiavellianness about it, but in the defense of the manager, it's for the benefit in helping the team member achieve what they need to achieve. So it's aligning what needs to get done with the motivations of the people. You can see this as well in maybe the way you reward or recognize people. So you know there are some people who love to be fated on stage or they love people around them slapping on the back and setting off the party poppers and cheers and all the rest of it. There are some people for whom that's the worst thing in the world and their idea of recognition is quiet, end of the day, out of sight of people, but just knowing that they're not going to be able to do that. Knowing that someone says, "Hey, I saw what you did there. That was great work for this, this and this reason." So there's no one size fits all when it comes to reward and recognition. It's understanding what makes sense for each individual team member. And then your responsibility as the manager is to align with the team member. It's not to try and expect each team member to align with you.
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So what do you mean by that? So, what I just said you say there was, it's your job to align to the team member, not their job to align with you. Now the last thing we were just talking about was expectation setting. So how do you take those two things together? Because it seems you've got, we need to set the expectations, this is what success looks like, this is what good looks like. Here's people's motivations here.
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How do you align, not align that? Explain that a little bit more to me. Okay, so expectations is the what. This is what we need to achieve. These are the results we're looking for. Okay. Motivation is the how and the why. So, and again, as an individual contributor, if you're promoted to management, you are probably very successful. And therefore you have a blueprint for success that works. And that those things are true. That's fine. The risk is that you think yours is the only blueprint that works. Your methods are the only methods that work. And you then have a blind spot towards those people who aren't like you or who wants to take a different route to the outcome. Your job as a manager is to get the outcome. To get the results, to get the outputs. Your team's job is to figure out how to do that. You are their guide. But Alice is going to do that different to Bob, is going to do that different to Charlie, is going to do that different to Dave. And if you can naturally, your team members will do that differently. If you can harness their natural differences, you'll get better performance. It's not always possible.
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If I'm in a regulated industry and suddenly has to be signed in triplicates and done this way and stabbed. If there are rules and regulations about the how, then there are rules and regulations about the how. But where I've got flexibility about the how, I should be focusing on the what and leveraging or working with the team member on their version of how.
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So this has come back up in other podcast episodes. And the little phrase I like that I think explains what you're talking about is delegate outcomes, not activities.
[00:36:06:17 - 00:36:35:07]
And if you delegate outcomes, then you give people all of this freedom. And that could be in the way they think about things, the functional competencies that they love, neurodivergency. There's all kinds of things that if you delegate an outcome, not an activity, give them the freedom. That doesn't mean that you lower your expectations because we've already set those expectations and treat people as individuals that you're always going to get far better performance.
[00:36:36:16 - 00:37:20:15]
Completely. Absolutely. I think that phrase is spot on. And if you're thinking about that phrase and you're thinking about the way we've just spoken about here, you'll avoid the opposite of what we're talking about here is micromanagement. So where I'm not just telling you the outcome, I'm telling you every step you need to go along the way to achieve the outcome. Well, that just frustrates the life out of pretty much everybody on the planet. And the way that often comes from is this notion that I've got the right blueprint for how to do this task. And sometimes I have a very good blueprint. Sometimes I may have the best blueprint for me, but it's not the best blueprint for you.
[00:37:21:16 - 00:37:28:23]
And sometimes you have to let go of your great blueprint because it doesn't fit the other person and their individuality.
[00:37:30:22 - 00:42:32:03]
Love it. So we talked about getting good people, setting expectations, aligning with people's motivations. What's the last thing we're going to talk about? Last one is develop team members. Everybody wants to do better. I genuinely believe that. And I make that statement. Yes, okay. I acknowledge there's some people who say, I'm just phoning it in. I'm happy phoning it in. I don't ever want to get any better. But broadly speaking, I think most people want to be better this year than they were last year and want to be better again next year. I think everybody would like to be on some form of improvement. I think your responsibility as a manager is to help people with that. So it ties into the second one, right? Ties into setting expectations. Outline a picture of what good looks like. And as I said a moment ago, the standard is X. You're X minus one. That's one conversation. But the next conversation is, and here's how I help you bridge that gap. Okay, so we need to get you from X minus one to X and ultimately to X plus one. What needs to happen? What are the steps along that journey? Your role as a manager isn't as teacher. It's as facilitator, coach, cheerleader, whatever it might be. You're there to help the team member on their journey of improvement. Create an environment where it's safe to be developing, recognize that people will make mistakes, recognize that failure is part of the process. Encourage people to own that part of it and then be supportive when they're taking those steps to try and get better. I, in my experience, if people think that they are learning things by being part of your team, I think you get two benefits from that. One is your employee retention goes up massively, way more than any amount of salary increase. That's any amount. Give me a million dollars. Actually, genuinely believe any amount of no amount of salary increase can make up for stagnation. Because ultimately, you'll hit the wall. You'll hit a wall where if people, if employees don't feel that they're moving forward on a personal development level, it kind of doesn't matter. The salary becomes unfulfilling. I think for a lot of people, if not most people, that is true. So developing employees is working with employees on their development. If employees believe that you care about their improvement, I think that really helps with employee retention and it helps with team performance. People who believe that you're working with them as they strive to get better, they will perform way more. They'll achieve way more than they would otherwise do. So you get better results for the team by working with the team members on what they want to work on and what their personal development journey looks like. Yeah, I mean, I've heard it say, you know, that personal mastery is kind of like a key part of happiness, right? You know, and you know what you're talking about their stagnation. If there's no growth in you, there's no personal mastery. However old you are, whether you're fresh out of uni or whether you're headed towards retirement age or into retirement. You know, that sense of personal mastery, I think is still really important. And I also think there's maybe a couple of ways that you can look at that development. There's the functional development of the job, like you need to be good at presenting to be in this role. Right, so that's a functional part of this. But then there's the career stuff as well that's saying, well, you know, an understanding, where do they want to head in the longer term, and what you can do to help them build that network or build those skills that help them develop for the longer term as well. Yes. And that's one that you just touched on something there Ben, because I think it's really, really important. Sometimes we have as managers we're tempted to think short term, what are the needs of my team over the next three, six, nine months? And how do I get, you know, Bob to have those skills? How do I fix an immediate skills gap? Yeah, okay, that might be part of it. But let's flip this. What does Bob want to be in three years time? Okay, what are his career ambitions? And how do I help him get there? Now, there might not be anything in it for me or my team right now. There might be something in it for the company.
[00:42:33:16 - 00:46:07:15]
But it's still something I should be thinking about aligning with, because in the one two years before the other three year time horizon working to if Bob feels that I'm in his corner, and I'm working with him on where he wants to get to what can we how much more performance and value and strength am I going to get out of that relationship between me and Bob and Bob and the company and Bob and the team? What's the effect of that? It's, I was gonna say it's immeasurable, of course, it can be measured, but it's very, very powerful. And that doesn't necessarily need to be that immediate three month return, because it's not going to be that immediate three month return. It's often quite a small investment in the grand scheme of things from the from the company's perspective. So there are ways and means of helping people with what they want to do. And who knows, in three years time, I might not have the need for an underwater basket weaver today. But in three years time, who knows what what business will be and who knows what the needs of the team or the company are going to be. So it's interesting, the objection I hear from people is, well, if I invest in them, then they just move on, you know, that they leave and then I've got to go through a recruitment process again, you know, and it just slows me down. And, and my challenge and retort back back to that is, well, if you're going back to your point one, which is hiring, and your succession planning other great people, people come in, you develop them, maybe they move on to other great things, maybe they stay a while, but you've got somebody else waiting for you. And you keep working in the wings to come in. And you keep doing that. That is a really desirable team to be in. And you start to get really great people. And what's more, you even get people leaving and finding out that that other place they went to wasn't that good. And then you start to get your boomerangs coming back going, Oh, no, this was an amazing place to work. So if you're just sort of building that continuous cycle of we're developing people, making them brilliant. And we're always succession planning for new people, you just build the reputation as being that manager with the team that everyone wants to be in. Yeah, completely, completely. I think that it's a great testament when you do get the the boomerangs we believe you've got, and it might be hey, I went, I stood in went to the side of the fence grass wasn't as green as I thought it was going to be I want to come back, or it might be, hey, I went, I did my two, three year tour somewhere else, but I want to come back and this organisation is somewhere to come back to. And now I'm a richer person, I've got more skills and experience so I can come back and build further. So so there's there's lots of power there. The other retort you mentioned a great retort to that way of thinking, but the other way thing I'd add to this as well is just ask the question and you've got someone actually, how long is someone's expected career, right? So it's got someone who's in the 30s right now, you're going to be working till you're, you know, 67, 80, but whatever it might be. And what's your, what's your time horizon for this job? I mean, the reality is most people are not going to be working for the company they're working at when today when they retire. So if you just recognise that fact, then of course, somebody is going to leave your organisation. It's just a question of whether they do it today, tomorrow, next week, next year.
[00:46:09:12 - 00:46:54:15]
And is it your choice or is it their choice? By working with people and developing them and investing in them, I believe that you for the time that you are working with them, you get a much greater work product. This sounds very clinical when I say it that way, you get a much greater work product than if you weren't investing in it. People didn't believe you're in the corner. If they didn't feel they were getting personal, you know, self actualisation, personal value out of that manager employee relationship, you get, let's say, if you're developing them, for the time you have with them, you will get greater results out of them as well. I think I genuinely believe that.
[00:46:55:16 - 00:47:10:15]
Just glance at the clock, Malcolm. We're running out of time rapidly. So we've covered all those four things. Tell you what, let's wrap up key takeaways and then we'll sign off. So for people that have been listening, what would be your key takeaways for them?
[00:47:11:16 - 00:47:27:15]
So the assumption that the people listening, most of this conversation, those people who are individual contributors in a technical role thinking about moving into management. The first thing I would say is it's a different set of competencies.
[00:47:28:16 - 00:47:54:15]
The skills that make you a great individual contributor are not the same skills that will make you a great manager. But the good news is, though there are functional management skills and you can go out and you can specifically learn them. As I said, I've broken down to these four, there's other taxonomies and frameworks that people use. I think these four work really well. So that was takeaway number one.
[00:47:55:16 - 00:48:16:15]
Take away number two, if I can put a second one in is that the single the single most powerful thing you can be doing as a manager is getting the right people on the team. So the single most powerful skill. If you're an IC and you're looking to make that transition, the easiest thing you can do is start figuring out how you would develop those hiring skills.
[00:48:17:16 - 00:48:42:15]
And the easiest way to do that is talk to your manager or talk to other manager inside the company you work at and say, how can I help you? How can I get involved in your hiring processes? Easy and you could just be sitting on panel interviews. They could have other things they could ask you to do that. That's a low effort, high impact way to get you exposed to one of the core people management competencies.
[00:48:43:16 - 00:49:10:18]
Yeah, love it. For me, I always like a good taxonomy, a good structure. Not because I then bind you to it, but because it gives you a great foundation from which to spring your thoughts. And so I love the way that you thought about that. People manager skills, hiring, setting expectations, aligning with motivation, developing people, key things to do, nice and easy to remember. So brilliant.
[00:49:12:08 - 00:49:16:15]
Now, if people have really enjoyed what you've been saying, how can people get in touch with you, Malcolm?
[00:49:17:16 - 00:49:45:16]
I've got LinkedIn pages where everyone hangs out. So LinkedIn.com slash in slash Malcolm Murphy, I think it takes you to my homepage. Yeah, hit me up there. I'll put a connection request in and say you listen to the podcast and I'll be accepting, no problem. Brilliant. Well, final thing for me to say is you've got such a wealth of experience and brilliant insight. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and share that with us.
[00:49:46:18 - 00:50:00:22]
My pleasure. I think you said it at the beginning, Ben, I'm not shy in sharing these things. It's a great excuse to rambulon. So thank you for lending me your audience. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very
[00:50:02:23 - 00:50:23:02]
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