Paul Tevis 
Most companies use some version of an annual review to provide performance feedback to employees. One of people’s biggest frustrations with the feedback they get – right behind “Why did my manager wait until my review to tell me this?” – is, “This feedback isn’t actionable.”
Delegation isn’t a “fire and forget” activity. As a manager, you can delegate decision-making to your direct reports, but you can’t delegate away your accountability for the outcome. The key is delegating without micromanaging. Effective managers monitor and guide the progress of delegated work – and they do it in a way that doesn’t feel like micromanagement.
Authority is a defining feature of a manager. By definition, managers can do things that others can’t do simply by virtue of their role. This power is neither good nor bad on its own. Unfortunately, many managers are ambivalent about their positional power. This unease hinders their ability to use it well. As a manager, owning your authority means you must come to terms with it.
Effective managers exercise their positional power without overusing or neglecting it. They invoke it when needed and use it to help necessary things get done. As a manager, acknowledging four things about your authority can help you own it so it doesn’t own you.
Delegation is an essential practice for managers. In any organization, one of the vital functions of management is to distribute and coordinate work among the group. However, delegating well requires understanding what delegation is and isn’t. Here are three common delegation myths that effective managers don’t fall prey to.
Telling someone something they don’t want to hear is never fun. When someone points out a problem causing them real pain, you likely want to do something about it – particularly if you’re their manager. Saying no to when someone asks you to fix something is often a necessary part of a manager’s job.
Addressing complaints is essential to a manager’s job but can quickly become overwhelming. Part One of this series shared a technique for sorting through people’s concerns. It also showed how to use your authority effectively to address some of them. But people often complain about things outside your control – and you need to deal with those as well.
Addressing complaints is an essential part of a manager’s job. By keeping their finger on the pulse of what’s bothering people, managers can act as an early warning system for higher levels of management. By addressing their people’s concerns, managers can improve both productivity and morale. At the same time, facing an endless stream of criticism – often about things you can’t control – can be one of the most frustrating parts of being a manager. As a manager, you need the ability to listen to and learn from complaints without drowning in them.
Teams rarely have a shortage of complaints. Most teams have plenty of ideas of what’s going wrong and numerous suggestions for addressing them. Noticing what’s getting in the way of great work is a sign of a healthy team. However, they often focus too much on what others can do to remove these obstacles. When teams ignore what they can do themselves, things rarely get better. One of my favorite tools for empowering teams is Circles & Soup.
Working with other people is hard – for a variety of reasons. One of the promises of working together is that you can help each other to get things done. One of the biggest obstacles to doing this is not sharing a brain. Asking for clarity helps you avoid the trap of only thinking you know what someone wants. But all too often, when someone asks you for help or wants to delegate something to you, you can find yourself playing “Bring Me a Rock.”
For a long time, “managing up” rubbed me the wrong way. The way that people frequently used the phrase brought to mind judgment, manipulation, and deception. It seemed rooted in a belief that your manager didn’t understand how work got done. Just as I thought “stakeholder management” involved carefully controlling your messaging to always make yourself look good, I believed that managing up was fundamentally unethical.
I was wrong. Managing up is about partnership.