<ul><li>Managers can make daily work meaningful through role design choices like task significance, autonomy, and feedback.</li><li>"Job crafting" helps reframe activities to align with motives and purpose.</li></ul>

Making Work Meaningful

The best way to build trust is to be consistent in your actions and words.

Compensation often motivates irrationally. People loathe small losses more than they like equivalent gains, an effect called loss aversion.<ul><li>Employees care more about relative versus absolute pay due to equity theory.</li><li>The perceived fairness of the compensation process itself also matters.</li><li>A philosophy explaining the rationale behind pay decisions is key.</li></ul>

The Complications of Compensation

Promotions and titles strongly motivate achievement-driven employees yet can backfire if handled poorly. Base promotions on demonstrated competence, outperformance of peers, and legitimate new role needs.Set proper expectations around promotions and use competency matrices. Be cautious with titles as they are hard to rescind and easily devalued if given too freely.

The Heavyweight Title Fight

<ul><li>Providing timely, constructive feedback is a core management responsibility, even though giving and receiving feedback is difficult.</li><li>We avoid giving feedback to be liked and because individuals struggle receiving it since it threatens the ego.</li><li>Effective feedback is objective, data-driven, and actionable.</li><li>Great managers actively solicit input and praise courageous feedback.</li><li>The key is to just start - it will get easier with practice.</li></ul>

Feedback Is a Gift You Need, Maybe Not One You Want  

The best managers are those who are able to adapt their management style to the needs of their team members.

Understanding an individual's dominant motivational need for achievement, power, or affiliation helps structure work, praise, and rewards.<ul><li>Achievers are motivated by goals and progress.</li><li>The power-motivated care about influence and competition.</li><li>The affiliation-motivated care about community.</li></ul>Discover needs by asking directly or using intake forms.

The Trifecta of Motivation: Achievement, Power, and Affiliation

Goals motivate teams yet can also create unintended consequences like unethical behavior, short-term thinking, and stifled innovation.In startups, static goals poorly fit the dynamic environment. When goal setting, be mindful of downsides and don't force goals if they don't fit the culture.

Goal Interrupted: The Good and the Bad of Setting Goals

<ul><li>Often, managers don't clearly articulate what they expect from team members, leading to disappointment and frustration on both sides.</li><li>Avoiding clear expectations stems from not wanting to seem like a micromanager and overestimating junior members' abilities.</li><li>The solution is to set clear expectations when assigning tasks by explaining the rationale, defining success, providing examples if possible, and stating deadlines.</li></ul>

Great Expectations

<ul><li>Putting employees on performance improvement plans when they underperform is key, though subconscious biases can inhibit objectivity.</li><li>Effective PIPs have a timeline and focus on 3-4 improvement areas with clear action items.</li><li>Celebrate PIP successes and use positive examples to shape the culture.</li></ul>

Managing Performance Anxiety

<ul><li>Communication deteriorates as firms grow.</li><li>The key is frequent, repetitive communication.</li><li>Clarify expectations around what will and won't be shared.</li><li>Use specific language to build commitment and closeness.</li><li>Formalize through weekly emails, meeting summaries, and defined strategies.</li></ul>

Talk Is Not Cheap

<ul><li>Pressures to hide emotions at work lead to detachment and burnout.</li><li>"Emotional labor" is the gap between felt and required emotions.</li><li>"Emotional contagion" spreads moods rapidly between team members.</li><li>Allow authentic self-expression but limit contagion's impact.</li><li>Recognize emotions exist.</li></ul>

There's No Crying in Baseball

Bringing Up the Boss: Practical Lessons for New Managers by Rachel Pacheco was published in 2021 by Matt Holt Books. The book provides helpful advice for new managers and covers topics such as leadership, communication, and team-building in the workplace. It includes real-world examples and practical tips to help new managers navigate the challenges of their roles and build successful teams.  

AXIOM BUSINESS BOOK AWARD SILVER MEDALIST — HUMAN RESCOURCES / EMPLOYEE TRAINING Managing is hard. Managing for the first time is even harder. First-timers want to quickly learn what it takes to be a successful manager—like they learned how to code, how to design, how to sell—and put those learnings into practice. But what does it mean to manage, and how do you teach someone to be a good manager? Enter Rachel Pacheco, an expert at helping start-ups solve their management and culture challenges. Pacheco, a former chief people officer and founding team executive at multiple start-ups, conducts research on management and works with CEOs and their managers to build the skills necessary to navigate a rapidly scaling organization. In Bringing Up the Boss: Practical Lessons for New Managers, you’ll learn how to give effective feedback, how to motivate your team members, and how to hire and fire well, among many other critical management skills. You’ll also learn what it means to manage yourself in this new role, and how to navigate the often awkward and sometimes challenging situations that arise in this new position. Pacheco shares what makes a manager great, along with anecdotes, research, tools, and how-to's that help overwhelmed employees become expert managers fast.

RACHEL PACHECO

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Focus on Action

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