Reading people is a key skill for executives.
One question leaders often have is how to effectively manage people who are doing work you haven’t done. If you’re a VP of engineering, you generally have a good sense of what the engineers under you are doing; even if you’re not coding every day, you understand the tradeoffs and questions they are facing.
As an executive, though, you are often managing functions that you haven’t done. You can learn the basics, but you won’t have the same feel as somebody who has spent years honing their craft. So what do you do?
Part of it is setting clear expectations of the results needed, and trusting them to do the necessary work to get those results. But when those results are taking longer than expected, how can you tell whether there’s legitimate reasons for the delay or whether the team is making excuses for poor performance?
It’s about managing the people, not the work. If they don’t have good answers to reasonable questions, that’s a warning sign. Beware false confidence, of course – when are they “bluffing”? Can they articulate several options they considered, and why they chose the one they did? Are they blaming others, or offering solutions? There’s no objective way to judge these questions, which is why this is a skill that requires practice and feedback to learn.
Reading people is similarly important when working with executive peers. Everything at that level is a negotiation about resource allocation and tradeoffs between scope and quality and speed. Working effectively with cross-functional peers requires understanding how they think to earn trust and respect, while also challenging when appropriate. How do you know when it’s appropriate? By reading the people.
Most people don’t understand this about becoming an executive. As a student, and as an individual contributor, and even as a front-line manager, you are rewarded for your domain expertise, and that’s what earns you more scope. But after a certain point, your expertise limits the scope you can take on, because you are responsible for the people, not the functional work. And nobody tells you that, because it’s a fuzzy transition.
How does this match your experience?
#executive #leadership #coaching #people