Practice Management — Improved Performance
Why practice management?
Even the most famous and experienced athletes and orchestra players such as Larry Bird and Itzhak Perlman practice a lot before they go on stage. They continue to practice until their next performance and the next.
One cannot learn to swim or ride a bicycle just by reading or watching videos. You know practice makes perfect in your life: learning a new language, math, skateboarding, driving, and anything you want to get better at.
Software engineers perform at work, and they do need practice as well. There are many resources like tutorials, books, coding katas and LeetCode.
For practicing a new programming language, library, framework or technology, they often use their private time — nights and weekends, or try to cram their work into 95% of the time, leaving 5% for such practice at work.
Some companies encourage using work time for learning via intermissions, hack weeks, hack days, “Friday labs” or more freestyle use of 10% of the work time.
Practicing is what makes us better at what we do, honing our craft, enabling new capabilities, doing things faster and getting new ideas of what’s possible. In short, bringing more value in different ways.
Clearly practicing is important, but what about managers? Do we really want managers to handle things they encounter for the first time without any practice?
As practicing is important for everything we want or need to get good at, management is no exception. Practice is exposure to new situations and getting feedback in various ways, so the next time we encounter the situation, we can perform better, with or without specific goals.
As managers are responsible for their team’s performance, the better they do, the better the team does in favor of the organization. Hence, practicing really helps!
Is it really possible to practice management?
How to practice management?
Yes, managers can practice management in various ways!
To clarify, by practice I do not mean an individual development plan with target dates and goals. I mean hands-on practice, which may be a part of such a plan.
After learning managerial topics from books and podcasts, you can take an active role and get feedback, i.e., practice:
- Specific exercises:
> comparing your job and tasks to the job description and updating it
> preparing for performance reviews
> crystalizing own values
> generating a manager readme
> thinking what you’d do differently in the past 3 months
> answering what does success look like? what might prevent it?
> how did you contribute to the team?
> what change can be a big opportunity?
> what are you afraid of? what are you avoiding?
> how does your current you compare to feedback you received in the past? - Slack workspaces for managers: besides ample resources for managers, there are a lot of topics, questions, situations and dilemmas brought up by members, and you can think of the best course of action and then respond to get feedback and compare to what others are proposing
- Coaching sessions: simulating certain situations like 1:1, giving feedback, coaching and delegating, setting OKRs, and receiving feedback from the coach
- Specific classes or clubs like Toast Masters for public speaking, which includes practice and feedback
- Internal management guild: sessions with other managers in the organization, brainstorming and solving issues together
- Workshops, webinars: online or offline, in the company or publicly available — seek ones that involve practicing and receiving feedback
- Management meetups: learn, exchange ideas and experiences, learn about reactions to situations and how to deliberately plan the future. Maybe even give a talk and receive feedback
- Writing blogs: sharing views and experiences helps with articulating thoughts and is likely to generate feedback from readers
- Being mentored: conversing with an experienced manager, sharing ideas and receiving their feedback. Mentoring others has a similar effect
- Job interviews: many interviews have emphasis on leadership, usually by situational and behavioral questions and presenting a case study. While the purpose is to perform in the interview, there is the additional benefit of practicing while preparing for it and in the received feedback
Besides the deliberate practice, make sure to reflect on your actions and outcomes at work, as well as the feedback you receive from your own manager, stakeholders, peers and direct reports.
