‧⁺˖❁ HAPPY FRIDAY ❁˖⁺‧
Welcome back to On the Desk Of. I changed the name of the publication for something a little more fitting. In my last analysis, Mastering the Case Study: Strategies for Tackling Business Operations Challenges, we analyzed & rated one of my old Business Operations and Strategy case studies. Check it out if you want to learn more about business operations. Today, we are exploring three ways that managers fail their employees and my personal takeaways. Find me on Instagram and LinkedIn. :) And join my waitlist for Bond.
♡ TL;DR ♡
I write about one of the earliest lessons I learned in leadership: to make those better within your care - leadership is not just about achieving goals, it’s also about developing people.
I dive into three ways I failed my employees and the key lessons I learned from each failure.
You’ll learn what sets the best leaders apart & how to enhance your management skills and create more dynamic, successful teams.
★ Simplicity of Leadership ★
I was introduced to this image a decade ago, one of my former bosses had it hung up on his bulletin board. For the purposes of this article, we’ll call my former boss “Matthew”. Matthew was the first manager I had after I graduated college, and his goal was to be a leader (opposed to a boss). This was one of the first times in my life where I saw someone with authority set a clear vision for who they wanted to be (character-wise) and actually work toward that goal with their actions.
This image was hanging on Matthew’s bulletin board to remind him of the type of leader he wanted to be. But in reality, it was the type of person he wanted to be. He wanted to be someone that not only led by example but was on the ground with his team. He did not want to be a boss that barked orders and expected his teams to work for his benefit alone. Matthew knew that we were all working toward a mission, something bigger than ourselves, and he let it be known every single day. He would often say that his goal is to foster more leaders.
He inspired us to reach goals we didn’t know were possible and he tried to build our strengths. Matthew also made mistakes, but he owned up to them and re-aligned himself to where he wanted to be again.
I think about how much his dedication to leadership inspired me to not only be a better leader but to be a better human. I think about how beautiful that is - Matthew wanted to be better and, in turn, he made me (and others on our team) want to be better for him, ourselves, and the organization.
I learned a valuable lesson from this experience, one that I took to my own teams. In its simplest form, I think the definition of leadership is to make those better within your care.
♡ INTRODUCTION ♡
I’ve led and managed teams for almost a decade now - I always say that managing people is one of the most difficult yet one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever had the privilege of doing.
Today, I want to talk about some of the things I wish I would’ve done better as a leader. There are so many takeaways I have from my experiences, and I love being able to grow alongside my own mistakes. I hope that this piece is helpful to anyone that wants to be a manager or is currently and leading their own team(s).
As always, my thoughts and opinions in this piece may change over time. I hope you take the lessons I learned and reflect them back to your own life. I encourage you to challenge my thinking and lessons & message me with your thoughts!
Let’s get into it ♡
★ Things I Wish I Would’ve Done Better ★
Cultivate a Wide Network: Build Relationships Outside of Your Immediate Circle
I didn’t realize the importance of building solid relationships with people outside of my immediate circle (direct reports, supervisors, and colleagues). Since most companies have a top-down approach, employees only have as much inside information as their supervisor. The higher up you are on the corporate ladder, the more access you have to the people above and below you. This is information that not everyone is privy to and comes from building and maintaining trusting relationships.
To highlight this point, the idea of parenting comes to mind. Most of the time, children are only exposed to what their parents are exposed to. When I was a child, my parents had a strong community of other Indian friends and families. Up until the age of 5, I didn’t really know much about other backgrounds or cultures despite living in the United States. I was only familiar with the things my parents were familiar with. Now, I don’t think that this is unusual - I actually think that it’s quite typical. Think about the phrase: you are who you surround yourself with. However, when you are a child you don’t have much of a choice. I’m aware that you can choose where you work and who you work with, however, when there are clear distinctions of authority present, you are usually introduced to things those around you are comfortable with.
There is a clear distinction between receiving 'gossip' from colleagues and receiving information from your manager. Your manager is aware of the information they're providing and can use it to advocate for you. As a leader, you should assume that employees from different departments communicate with each other. Regardless of where your team members get their information, you can also help them gain access to important company information through your own relationships within the company. The goal is always to maintain a trusting and positive relationship with your team and to help them when you can.
For example, knowing that the marketing team has a new hire, the engineering team is creating new software, or the business development team lost a major client may not seem like make-or-break information. However, it becomes crucial when a manager who has built relationships throughout the company gathers this information and shares it with their team to keep them involved. Compare this to managers who don’t have these relationships and don’t know what’s going on outside their teams.
Similar to the parenting example, your team is only as good as your exposure throughout the company. If a team member ever needs an introduction to another department head or another team, they can rely on you to connect them. If a stakeholder speaks to you about your team, you can speak highly of the members of your team and what they’re working on just through your interactions.
Let me ask you a question: which employees are more likely to get ahead in the company? The ones who have the most information about what’s going on or the ones that do not know these things are taking place? The ones whose leader is speaking about their team in different rooms or the ones that aren’t?
I’m not saying that we all need to play the game for our own benefit, however what I am saying is that building relationships is crucial to leadership. Often times, leaders only build relationships with people in their immediate circle (which is also v important). However, the best leaders and managers go one step beyond that and build relationships all throughout the company. In the end, their direct reports and team members can benefit tremendously.
All of this is also very much dependent on doing good work and upholding strong values. No one can control what others think of them - at the very least be kind, respectful and do solid work.
Drive Collective Accountability: Create a Culture of Shared Responsibility
I’ve had the opportunity to lead several teams across different functions within the organizations I’ve worked for. To keep things simple, let’s say I am the Senior Director of Business Operations for a health-tech company leading all day-to-day operations and strategy for the company. In this role, I have four teams under my direct supervision: sales, customer success, product, and marketing.
My goal, as a leader, is to ensure that each team works together to achieve the company’s overall goals and mission. This isn’t ground-breaking - everyone knows that is what a manager supposed to do, however, only a few leaders are actually able successfully execute this in practice.
For the record, I was not one of them.
It’s no surprise that ego, status, power, and money are all heightened at work. However, the best leaders act as coaches and use ego as a tool for ultimate team success.
To illustrate this point, let’s look at sports teams. The best athletes put their own ego’s aside to make plays and try to ultimately win. Athletes have one clear goal: to win. The best athletes give others the opportunity to score knowing that they may not get any credit. These athletes aren’t fixated on whether or not they’ll make the all-star team or if they’ll get a brand deal with Nike or how much money they’ll make that year. They care most about winning with their team.
I used to be hyper-fixated on building individual and close relationships with each direct report & making sure each team I led succeeded in its own regard (making sure the sales team hit their goals or the customer success team hit their KPI’s). However, (especially) in the beginning of my management career, I failed to recognize that what mattered most was our entire team succeeding as a whole - and not in individual parts.
I succeeded in making my direct reports feel seen, heard, and hopefully cared for. I succeeded in setting and following up on goals & expectations for each team under my leadership. However, I failed to fuse all of it together to form an actual team. Meaning that as a leader, I was unknowingly feeding individual egos and individual team success. Therefore, my actions weren’t translating to our entire team winning as a whole.
If I asked someone on my marketing team what the sales team’s quotas were last quarter and if the sales team hit their projected goals, would they be able to tell me? What if I asked someone on my sales team about our marketing team’s goals?
The point I’m trying to make is that we need each individual and every team to be ‘all in’ for the organization’s main goal. Every single person on the team is responsible for sales. Every single person on the team is responsible for customer success. Everyone is responsible for marketing and product.
Because if one department fails, we are at risk of losing the game.
Companies are a little different than sports teams. Sports teams usually have a main event where all of the players come together and play. There is a clear winner and loser at the end of each game. Whereas a company is similar to building an airplane while simultaneously flying it. Although there are differences, the risk is all the same. The worst-case scenario is to lose. The best thing managers can do is set clear goals for each one of their teams, a collective goal, that can be measured easily. Profit isn’t usually the best goal to set, but there are other goals the team can rely on to indicate if progress has been made such as new customer acquisitions (which includes the sales, marketing, customer success and product teams).
All in all, I think that building relationships with each direct report is important and setting individual team goals is important. However, I genuinely believe that driving collective accountability is just as important, and I think that the teams that work together toward shared goals will eventually become unstoppable.
Lead with Integrity: Confront Personal Biases in Management
One of the most valuable lessons I learned maybe 3-4 years into my management career was recognizing how my own experiences and beliefs were impacting the people around me especially in the workplace. Growing up, I was taught to treat authority figures like they were infallible and to never, ever upset them or go against them. I had a deep-rooted fear of authority that was affecting how I interacted with the people around me.
Back when I first started leading teams, all I cared about was my own status within the company. I wanted to be labeled as a “good manager” and a “good employee”. I would do almost anything to stay out of trouble, and I would be afraid to speak up and voice my thoughts and opinions around my managers. So, I would do what I knew would look best.
The issue was that I didn’t lead my team this way. In fact, I wanted to give them the complete opposite experience.
On my teams, we upheld a culture of diverse thinking and challenging each other's opinions and ideas. I knew that strong leaders were cultivated through exceptional problem-solving and reasoning skills, and I wanted my direct reports to put that into practice. And selfishly, I loved hearing different perspectives on how we could be operating better.
But here's the kicker – when my boss was around, I'd completely abandon that approach. I'd just nod along and do whatever they said, all in the name of “looking good”. If my team presented me with new ideas on how we could make the company better, I wouldn’t bring them up to my manager. I would simply sit on them. It went against everything I claimed to stand for as a leader, but I kept doing it anyway. I was terrified of getting in trouble or seeming incompetent. And I was willing to abandon my values to make myself look better for it.
Ironically, the exact opposite happened. For a while, my managers were telling me exactly what to do. It felt like they didn't trust my abilities at all. Eventually, I realized I wasn't just holding myself back – I was holding the entire team back.
There were so many great ideas from our team that I never pushed forward because I was scared of how it would look. It wasn't until I got a leadership coach that I figured out what was really going on. I didn’t think I would be accepted for who I was, so I created a persona that my manager would accept. That persona wasn’t really me - it was a fake version of me.
The crazy thing was that I did everything in my power to lead my teams the exact opposite way. I wanted each person to embrace who they were wholly and individually. I wanted each person to challenge one another and bring up uncomfortable topics pertaining to work, so they could handle conflict together. I wanted each person to genuinely trust each other and know that their team members would be there for them if they needed help.
Even though I led my team that way, I'd still revert to that old behavior whenever someone higher up was around. I had to retrain myself to see the person behind the title and actually live up to the values I claimed to have at work.
I had to ask myself: What message am I sending to my team? I felt like I was teaching them that it's okay to pick and choose when to stand by your values depending on who's in the room. That's not how values work. They should be consistent, no matter who you're dealing with.
Overall, I learned the importance of challenging your own beliefs. At the time, I never knew that thoughts developed from my childhood could hold me back in the workplace. I learned that as a leader, you’re quite literally responsible for those within your care. I genuinely believe that it’s your duty not to abuse that power and act within your values.
✮⋆。°✩ TAKEAWAYS ✮⋆。°✩
★ Key Takeaways ★
Expand Your Network: Build relationships beyond your immediate circle. This broader perspective allows you to better advocate for your team and connect them to valuable opportunities.
Foster Collective Accountability: Encourage your team to work towards shared goals, not just individual or departmental success. Remember, everyone is responsible for the overall win.
Confront Personal Biases: Regularly examine how your experiences and beliefs impact your leadership style. Be aware of tendencies like fear of authority that might hold you back.
Lead with Integrity: Align your actions with your values consistently, even when it's challenging. Don't compromise your principles just to "look good" to higher-ups.
Embrace Diverse Thinking: Create an environment where team members feel empowered to voice different perspectives and constructively challenge ideas.
★ Action Steps ★
Identify one relationship outside your immediate circle to nurture this week.
Schedule a team meeting to discuss collective goals and how each member contributes to overall success.
Reflect on a recent decision and consider how personal biases might have influenced it.
★ Self-Reflection Questions ★
How am I currently fostering leadership skills in my team members?
In what ways can I improve the flow of information between my team and other departments?
How do I react when team members challenge my ideas? Is there room for improvement?
Remember, great leadership is a journey of continuous learning and growth. By implementing these principles and regularly reflecting on your leadership style, you can create a more engaged, collaborative, and successful team.
As always, message me with your thoughts. Until next time ♡
XOXO,
Pal
Great article. As a film director, I sometimes manage the entire main crew members and many actors. After reading this article, I realized that in past I also have made mistakes managing my teams and not to make same mistakes again.