How to be a Great Manager

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here, cohost of the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at the job.

John Corcoran: I’m excited today, because we have got Mamie Kanfer Stewart as our guest, and she’s passionate about helping people to thrive at work. She’s the host of The Modern Manager Podcast, author of Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging, and Enjoyable Meetings, and founder of Meeteor, a coaching and training firm focused on building healthy, high-performing teams with a special emphasis on productive meetings. Mamie is an executive coach who works with managers to lead thriving teams.

John Corcoran: First, before we get into that episode, this episode is brought to you by SweetProcess. Have you ever had a team member or team members ask you the same questions over and over again? And it is like the 10th time you sat and explaining it, and you want to club yourself over the head. Well, here’s the solution. SweetProcess is a software that makes it drop dead easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff. Not only do universities, banks, hospitals, and software companies use them, but first responder, government agencies use them in life or death situations to run their operations.

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John Corcoran: All right. So Mamie, I’m excited to talk today. We’re going to be talking about tips for making delegation an easy and successful part of your management team. I also want to ask you, in a little bit… We’re recording this in May of 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, and you’ve got a very interesting family connection to the Purell hand sanitizer fortune, which of course is going gangbusters right now. So we’re going to ask about that in a moment.

John Corcoran: But first, tell me about how you got interested, your background in management. And you were an entrepreneur from a young, really, really young age, right? So you got into managing from pretty young.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Uh-oh, you did your research.

John Corcoran: Yes.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: I started my first business, in quotes, when I was 12. I started a summer camp, because I didn’t like the one that I was attending that my parents made me go to. And I thought, “Hey, I can do this better.” And they were kind enough to allow me to turn their backyard into a summer camp for kids. About 40 kids came.

John Corcoran: Wow.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Yeah, I hired my babysitter, because I was only 12. I hired my babysitter to be the official counselor, and ran this camp for four years. It was a great experience, and set me down a path of entrepreneurship that has led me to where I am now.

John Corcoran: That is crazy. Was it profitable, you charging kids to come to this?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: We did charge, but I didn’t make any money from it because my parents required that I donate everything that we made, and they covered all the expenses. So we made it very affordable, but we did raise over the course of the four years a few thousand dollars, and that was all donated locally.

John Corcoran: Wow. That’s really cool. It sounds like you realized early on, I can’t do this myself, so I’m going to hire my babysitter. That seems like, that was maybe the very beginning of your management experience, and realization on the importance of organizing people. Am I right about that, or did it come later?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Well, I think that’s probably part of it. You have to start, whatever you’re starting a business, and figure out what can you do and what can you not do. So from an early age, I definitely knew all the things I couldn’t do. But I think later on was when it really became clear how you have to build a team and how you have to manage people and include them in that process so that you can be successful in whatever your vision is.

John Corcoran: Got it. Got it. All right. We want to talk about some of the tips that you have for delegating to that team, and making it easy and successful. Let’s just start with one of the biggest barriers a lot of people have, which is, just how do you… Oftentimes, when you start delegating, initially you think, well, this is going to take me more time, I’ll just do it myself. That’s like a big hurdle for people, and so they don’t even want to delegate anything because they’re like, “Well, then I got to fix it if someone else does it wrong.” How do you approach that for people who are stuck in that particular mindset?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Yeah, that is one of the most common things I hear from people, is that, “I should just do this myself. It’d be so much faster.” And the reality is, that on any given one activity, that might be true in that moment. If you have to post on social media five times a week, any single one of those, yes, you might be faster at. But if you have to do that task repeatedly, over and over and over, now, you are talking about potentially hours and hours of your time that, yes, if you spent a little more time upfront to delegate properly, you would then save so much time on the backend. So it starts by understanding the time and the various components, and what is it really going to cost you now versus later, and then, getting past your fears, because there’s a whole lot of fear that comes with delegation.

John Corcoran: What are those fears? Like, for example, that someone’s going to screw it up? Or that maybe the client’s going to like the person you delegated it to better, and that person’s just going to take your client away? What are some of the different fears?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Yeah, exactly. There’s a big fear around somebody else is going to do this better, and therefore it’s going to make me look bad. Which, to me, is the exact opposite of how a manager should be approaching this, right? When someone else does a better job, that’s good. That’s a really good thing because you were the smart person who knew the right person to delegate to. So, reframing that is a win, and positioning that as a good management job is one way to kind of get past that fear.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Another fear, is that they are going to make a huge mistake and it’s going to make you look really bad. So they totally screw it up. Not only is it going to take you time to fix it, but if it goes out to the client or if it goes around to the other teams or to your boss, and suddenly you look bad because you delegated something and you didn’t catch that mistake, and that person screwed it up and it’s on you.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: There are other fears. Like, I don’t know how to delegate, and so I’m afraid that I’m going to look like a bad boss. If I try to delegate something and I screw it up, and I don’t support the person properly, or I give them the wrong information, and I don’t want to look like a bad boss, and so I’ll just avoid delegating so that I can kind of stay in my safe zone.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: But whatever fear it is that’s holding you back, acknowledging that, yeah, that’s a real possibility for sure, but there are things you can do to minimize those risks, and in the long run, delegation is a critical part of being a manager. You cannot do your job if you don’t delegate, so you have to get good at it.

John Corcoran: Right. Right. And of course, one of the challenges is delegation and then oversight. How to oversee it without micromanaging, and without being too far a field without giving enough oversight, how do you manage that balance between those two ends of the trajectory?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Well, I’m really glad that you brought that up, because it’s a problem when we think of delegation as being a one-step, one-moment in time kind of event, right? It really is a process. It actually starts with how you plan for your delegation, which I’ll come back to. But you have to do some pre-work before you delegate. Then there’s the act of delegation itself, and then there’s the support and follow up. You need to think about each of those three phases, and how you are going to act, and what you’re going to expect from the other person in order to successfully delegate from start to finish.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: How you’re going to support them, that last piece, how you’re going to hold them accountable, how you’re going to be there to coach them, starts in that pre-planning phase. So before you’ve handed anything off, you already started thinking about, who’s going to be making which decisions along the way, how am I going to give them the information that they need, what do I want them to do if they have questions later on? And you’ve started to document that for yourself, so that you can share that information with the other person when you get to that second phase, the actual delegation. So you have built into your communication from the start, how we are going to do that support and accountability, and it’s not left up in the air.

John Corcoran: Oh, this is getting me excited now, in kind of a geeky way, because I’ve delegated a lot, but I’ve never heard someone talk about that pre-work, putting together a worksheet, thinking through each of those different pieces. So talk a little bit more about that. What goes into that? What types of questions you should ask? What types of information you should get down before you delegate?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: One of the ways that I work with my clients on delegation, is to use what we call the SWIM framework. The first thing you’re going to do is go through each of these letters, and answer a couple of key questions for each of them. So SWIM, S-W-I-M, starts with S, success. What does success look like for this work? And you want to describe what is the outcome. What are the measures of success? What are the criteria? What does finished look like?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: And if you can’t write it down using words, find some examples. Do you have a past presentation that is a model that they can use? Can you pull something off the internet and say, “This is similar to what I’m thinking of”? Can you give them a blog article that you wrote previously, and say, “I want something in this tone.” You have to figure out what success looks like, and what those criteria are, and have it written down or have some sort of visual that you can hand off.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: The second question is, W, what might go wrong? Stepping back to say, “Where might this person get tripped up? What could be particularly challenging or confusing or complicated? Where is there maybe a mismatch between the person’s skills and their experience, and what I’m asking them to do? What might be obvious? But maybe it’s obvious to me, but might not be so obvious to others.” Try to walk yourself through what could go wrong, and therefore you can start to figure out what can I do then proactively to help them mitigate these potential roadblocks, or what might kind of support I need to offer later on because I can see that these could be issues. [crosstalk 00:00:10:56]-

John Corcoran: Okay, great. So SW, and then the I.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: The I is information. What information does this person need to be successful? And this has a big broad range of information. Things like timeline, any milestones that have been previously set, budget or financial constraints, which people might be available to help them, contacts, setting or past learnings. Along with, what are the SOPs? What are the instructions? Are there any kind of standard models, templates that this person needs? Anything they need access to. Any best practices that you want to make sure they’re aware of. So all of that information gathering.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: And then, lastly, is M, why does this work matter? So putting this piece of work, this delegated task or responsibility in context for the organization, for the team, for yourself and for the team member. When they do this work, what will happen? How will the organization be more successful? How will this team benefit? How will I, as a manager, benefit? How will you, as a team member, benefit? And then, the opposite, what are the natural consequences if this work isn’t completed successfully? What pains will exist? What things might not happen? Might we lose a client? Might the team be behind schedule? So other any kind of natural consequences that could occur. Helping to put this work into context helps somebody understand how their actions matter in the grander scheme. And for somebody who’s like, “I’m not super excited about taking on this delegated work. This doesn’t really feel like fun,” It helps them see why their attentiveness to this task and doing it well is actually critical to the great, grand or good, or how they might learn and grow from it.

John Corcoran: That’s great, how it serves the larger purpose of the organization. I love that SWIM framework. Success, What might go wrong, Information, and Matter. That’s really great. So that’s the pre-work, and then talk to us a little bit about monitoring the delegated activity while it’s going on.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Great. The next piece is how you’re going to handle the support side. First is, what kind of role do you want to play? In this particular delegated process, are you going to be a coach where they’re going to come to you, you’re going to problem solve together, you’re going to ask them questions to help them find their own answers? Are you going to be the catcher, where your whole job is only to stop them from making a huge mistake? So you’re going to give them a ton of independence, but you’re just going to check in and make sure that nothing’s going wrong because you’re just there as the catcher.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Are you going to be the roadblock remover? Do you want them to come to you only when there are problems, and your job is to help them solve the problems or advocate to senior management to get something moving or get a decision made. But other than that, they’re on their own. You’re just there to help with roadblocks. There are so many different roles that you can play. And getting clear about your role will then help you figure out what kind of support activities you need to do later on.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: The other piece of it, is getting really clear on decision making authority. This is the place where a lot of people get tripped up with delegation. We delegate a task, but within that task or within that responsibility, there are many places where decisions have to get made along the way. Decision making authority is not as simple as, you make the decision, or I make the decision, right? There’s ways we can be involved. Like, I want you to bring me a recommendation, and then I will approve it. Or I want you to bring me three recommendations or three options, and then we’ll decide together which is the right one. Or I want you to make the decision, and then tell me about it right after so that I don’t get caught off guard when my boss asks me about it.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: So there are so many different ways that decisions get made. And getting clear about what are the decisions along the way, and how do you want those to be handled. Are you going to own them? Is the other person going to own them? And then, what are the roles there? So who’s going to be the recommender? Who’s going to be the advisor? Who’s going to bring options? Are you going to decide together? All those different pieces. So that’s kind of the second part of how you’re going to do the support.

John Corcoran: That’s great. And then, of all those different landmines along the way, what are most common? What are the biggest mistakes you see people make in terms of that ongoing support piece?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Yeah. Well, this gets to that third component, which is setting regular check-in times. We don’t think about the regular cadence of support, so that it doesn’t become a, “You only come to me when something’s wrong,” or “I always have to go to you to find out what’s going on.” That kind of dynamic generally isn’t good. It depends on the seniority and the kind of work that’s being delegated, but many a times, just having agreed on a regular schedule for check-ins can alleviate a lot of the problems. And half the time, honestly, we don’t even think about stuff until we’re sitting in the room with somebody, until we’re on the Zoom call with them, and then suddenly it’s like, “Oh yeah. I forgot I wanted to ask you about this thing.” So having those regularly scheduled check-in times can alleviate a ton of friction and a ton of problems that come with not being in regular communication.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: You and the other person need to decide together, are you going to meet once a week? Is it going to be a special meeting that’s in addition to your other work meetings? Or is this going to get rolled into your standing check-in that you do every other week? But being clear about when you’re going to have those touch points, and what you expect to happen in those will simplify the process. And then, acknowledging when are the other times where I expect you to come to me outside of our regular check-ins. If something’s urgent, don’t wait till next Friday because we have a meeting on the calendar, come to me now. If something’s not urgent, then either figure it out yourself or hold it for our check-in.

John Corcoran: That’s great. Any other advice on this topic or on best practices for make sure that delegation is easy and that it is not something that trips people up?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: The last part, I would say, is that when you are going through the delegation itself, when you’re sitting down with the other person and talking it through, give them whatever you’ve already written down, use that as your roadmap. If you sit down, and you’re just going through your head and trying to remember everything you thought about, and share it verbally and they have to take notes, there’s too much misinformation and miscommunication that happens. So use your worksheets and then hand it to them, and say, “I’m going to walk you through this. I expect you’ll have questions. If you don’t have any now, I want you to come back to me in a day or two with whatever questions you do have.” And letting them know that they’re expected to not get everything the first time, because you couldn’t possibly have given them everything they needed that first time. And so, this is an ongoing dialogue. And when you set up that context again from the beginning, it will make the rest of the communications flow much easier.

John Corcoran: Well, this is great. And before we wrap up, you mentioned your parents earlier and you grew up… Your father was actually the creator of Purell, Purell hand sanitizer, which is, of course, everyone is trying to get their hands on right now in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. What was that like growing up the daughter of a creator, inventor and entrepreneur? And then, I’ll ask you about what life is like today? Because I know that you’re involved in the company.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: I think entrepreneurship is in my blood, right? The fact that I started a camp at 12 was no surprise to my parents because my grandfather started GOJO, our family business, my father joined him. My whole life, I had been around entrepreneurial efforts and initiatives, and saw what our family business was. So it was a wonderful thing to grow up in an entrepreneurial family, and to have that kind of support to go out and make something for yourself.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: And now, it’s a whole lot of crazy. I mean, like every business right now, we are in the midst of trying to figure out how to become a thriving virtual team and a thriving virtual company. And we are trying to produce as much product as we possibly can, because we know that the frontline workers, whether those are healthcare providers or food service providers or anyone else who is out trying to keep our country going and protect people, they need Purell. And so we are scaling and working our butts off and doing everything that we can to be part of the solution right now.

John Corcoran: Yeah. All the kinds of management challenges in that, I’m sure. But where did the idea come from? Now, GOJO as a company focuses on a lot of different health and sanitation products. You’ve got an array of different products. But at what point did the idea of Purell come along? How did it come along? And it seems like, it’s obviously record breaker for the company. So what was the origin of it?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: So a number of years ago, in the late ’80s, we were asked to produce a faster way for hand-washing. Because we work across markets, we had teams that knew about alcohol-based sanitizers, but they were an emergency product, they weren’t a standard everybody can use during your daytime product. And so we took that as a starting point and said, “Could we turn this alcohol-based sanitizing gel that’s really gross, because it’s only meant to be used like in an emergency and [crosstalk 00:20:33]-“

John Corcoran: Right. It probably didn’t have a nice scent, I guess.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: No, and it dried out your hands, and it just like… It was not a great thing, but it worked. It did the job, right? When you needed it, because you didn’t have clean water or you didn’t have access to soap and water, it did the job. So we looked at that as a starting point and said, “Is there a way that we could actually produce a product that allows you to use an alcohol-based sanitizer many, many, many times a day, whether you’re a nurse in a hospital who’s going between patients, or you’re a mom out with your kid and changing a dirty diaper?” And that was the birth of Purell.

John Corcoran: Wow. And literally, now it’s on everyone’s… Literally on everyone’s a table, it seems like. How big is the industry? It’s like an invention of an industry. I always find that fascinating when you find someone who created a whole new category. Do you have numbers on how big the industry is now? [Crosstalk 00:21:24]-

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: I have no idea, because that’s not the part of the business I work in. I only [crosstalk 00:21:28] to be effective teaming.

John Corcoran: It’s probably 10 times larger than it was a year ago. I mean, wow.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: I mean, my vision and my hope is that everyone will become a hand sanitizer user, whether that’s Purell or a different brand, because it’s such an important way of keeping ourselves and our families and others healthy.

John Corcoran: Now more than ever. All right, before we wrap things up. I was looking through your background, and your history, your recommendations. You’ve got this great, amazing, impressive background, all these different great productivity tips and stuff like that, and I was really excited because your favorite productivity hack, Color Street nail polish strips. How did that become the number one productivity hack? I’m so curious.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: I like to have nice nails. It’s just a thing. But getting a manicure takes forever. Sitting and waiting for nail polish to dry is like the biggest waste of time. And I learned about these nail polish strips, and you put them on, they’re semi-dried nail polish. They go on like stickers, but they’re actually just nail polish, so they come off with regular remover. They look beautiful, and I can literally do them and then go right on with my day with whatever else I have to do. It takes about five minutes, and I have now able to have beautiful nails every single week, and they cost a fraction and they saved me up so much time.

John Corcoran: I love that you are not shy about bringing out your personality in making that recommendation. You did not make some stuffy recommendation of some boring software or something like that that people should use. So thank you for that, and I appreciate you indulging. Where can people go learn more about you?

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Well, you can learn about the podcast, The Modern Manager, at themodernmanager.co. And you can learn about Meeteor at meeteor.com, M-E-E-T-E-O-R like meetings. And you can learn more about me and my coaching work at mamieks.com.

John Corcoran: All right. Thanks so much, Mamie.

Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Process Breakdown Podcast. Before you go, quick question, do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and or policies for your company so that your employees have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for a free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. No credit card is required to sign up, go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy and process like process.com. Go now to sweetprocess.com and sign up for your risk free 14-day trial.