By the time you get to the level of having your own large team, your job has shifted from being focused mostly on you to having to look out for an entire collective of people.
The team as a whole is this living, breathing organism (team-glob) made of autonomous cells. The cells have free will, and they’re people. That gets messy. But you gotta keep it healthy.
The team-glob is part of an even bigger organism—the company-glob—and its health depends on the health of these smaller units.
So far from being pathetic or overly empathetic, protecting your team (its health, functioning and sovereignty) is absolutely necessary.
It’s your job to safeguard this organism you’re in charge of—this team-glob made out of people. You protect it because if you don’t, any number of things will take it down. You have to be proactive.
I’m not trying to scare you. I just mean: Managing a team at an American company in the 2020's is Minecraft on hard mode.
If you hang out during the night cycle without a structure in place, the zombies are gonna come eat you, right? So you plan. You build.
Here’s what that means in practice:
You'll start spending more time in spreadsheets doing math than you ever expected to.
You'll make a gazillion presentations about how your team's adding value to the company. You'll have 5 of these bookmarked and ready to go at any given moment.
You'll spend a huge amount of time convincing people to give you large amounts of money so you can keep paying people.
You'll end up protecting people on your team who don’t even know you’re doing it. People who didn’t ask you to. People who might actually hate the things you do to keep the team healthy.
They might be happy when your care involves helping them move forward, and angry when your care involves helping others.
They might talk over you in meetings, or talk sh*t behind your back. On the other hand, they might also suck up to you so much that you feel like you have to be an ace detective to figure out what the truth is.
YOU might mess it up, too. Your help might not be helpful.
Even when you do things you think are objectively very beneficial—for individuals, or for the group—the response might still be neutral or even negative.
Guess what? You still have to protect them.
You still do your best to activate them, understand them, even love them. To find and appreciate that weird cool unique human spark they have. (Because when we love others, we try harder to bridge communication gaps).
This is important. This is critical.
Because firing someone—cutting a cell from the body—is a drastic move.
Sometimes, it’s necessary.
But way less often than you think. And it's often way more difficult to do than people realize. It always comes with consequences.
Okay, now I’m probably being scary. Again—I don’t mean to be.
We get lots of chances to make friends in life, even when it seems like we are alone. But we don’t get many bosses.
A bad one can make years of your life feel like torture.
A good one can launch your whole career. Or inspire you to pick yourself up off the floor and believe in yourself again.
So… what kind of boss do you want to be?
XOXO,
Cathy