What is a manager, anyway?: Great management starts with role clarity
3-minute read
At LifeLabs Learning, we’ve helped managers at over 2,000 of the world’s most innovative companies (like Slack, Glossier, Lyft, Venmo, and BlackRock) become great at their jobs, faster. And over the years, we’ve noticed something curious. The managers we teach and the companies we serve often struggle to articulate what a manager actually is. Imagine if the same were true for other high-impact professions such as pilots, surgeons, salespeople, or engineers.
Given how essential it is for managers to be effective in today’s world, offering managers greater role clarity is a small investment with a big payoff.
What a Manager Is
A simple and powerful fix is to deblur the meaning of ‘manager’ for all employees, including your managers.
Here is a sample definition you can use as your starting point:
The purpose of managers at [Company] is to be our multipliers. It’s a role that exists to help people achieve more than they could do on their own. The manager role is designed to accelerate company results and do so in a way that each person finds rewarding.
What a Manager Is Not
Given the rapidly changing nature of management and the differences in this role across companies and teams, we’ve also found that managers and employees benefit from understanding what a manager is not.
If your goal is to build a culture of high performance, engagement, and contribution, we encourage clarifying that it is a manager’s job to manage conditions rather than manage people. Not only is it universally demotivating to feel “managed,” but it’s also impossible to control people’s actions and outcomes.
Managers contribute to outstanding results by catalyzing rather than attempting to control people’s behavior. Their goal should be to ensure that their team has the right conditions to succeed, such as access to resources, skill-building, information, connections, and the support they need to (a) do the work well today and (b) build capacity to do great work in the future.
Here is a sample clarification you can use as your starting point:
Managers at [Company] are responsible for managing goals, time, resources, and budget. They do not manage people. We believe each of us has a responsibility to manage ourselves. That means that we take personal responsibility for our own performance, growth, and engagement. We lean on our managers for guidance, feedback, and coaching. They are not here to make sure we do our work but to make sure we have the feedback, resources, and support we need to achieve our results.
What You Can Do Right Away
Pulse check: Do a quick alignment audit. Ask 5-7 employees across your company to briefly define the manager role at your company.
Deblur: If the meaning of “manager” is blurry, propose a definition and gather input from a diverse group of employees. Ask: What is clear about this definition? What is unclear? What is missing or misaligned with your definition?
Document: Once your definition is clear, capture it in your hiring, onboarding, assessment, and development materials.
Role clarity + skill capacity = managers who drive unstoppable organizational success! For help quickly skilling up your managers, contact LifeLabs Learning.
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