My biggest rookie mistake as a manager was acting for the sake of acting

It was my first leadership role, and I became a manager out of my own team. I knew the place, I knew the people, and I had a clear plan in my head for how I would set everything up better. So off I went.

The plan was good. Only nobody knew it but me.

Pace is not progress

I pushed, I changed things, I made pace. Reorganised processes, recut workflows, abolished things that were obviously pointless from where I stood. In my head that was leadership: recognise, decide, implement.

And instead of progress came discontent.

At some point I stood there and realised nothing was moving. Rather the opposite. The mood was worse than before, so were the numbers, and I had no explanation. From my point of view I had done everything right. I had simply forgotten to ask anyone.

The question that pulled the ground away

Then I started asking questions. Each person, one after another, without an agenda. And in doing so the ground was pulled out from under me.

People did not know which metrics even existed. They did not know the targets, neither their own nor the branch’s. They had no picture of how the company actually makes money, which business carries the margin and which only produces revenue. Work had gone on in the same groove for years, and nobody had ever explained why.

And at that moment the question was no longer why my changes were not landing. The question was how somebody is supposed to improve something they do not understand.

The evening that turned it around

So we all sat down together after work. For the first time in years I put the numbers openly on the table. Revenue, cost, margin, where we stood, where we had to get to. I explained why we do certain things and where I actually wanted to take the team.

Then the pizza arrived and we simply talked. As equals. Everyone had a voice, on equal terms, no matter how long they had been there.

But uncomfortable things came up that evening too. Conflicts in the team I had not been aware of. Resistance to things I had simply pushed through. Tensions that had been there for a long time and that I had plainly overlooked, because I was busy with my plan.

That was not pleasant to hear. I heard a few sentences that evening that landed hard.

But for the first time I had an honest picture of how things really stood.

What happened afterwards

It became a long evening. And somewhere in those hours we went from being a group of colleagues to being a team. I cannot pin the moment down to the minute, but it was there.

A few days later people began taking responsibility for topics nobody had cared about before. Someone started analysing the return rate, because he had seen in the numbers what it costs. Someone else took on route planning. Not because I had instructed it. Because they now understood what it was about.

That is the difference between an instruction and understanding. An instruction produces exactly the action contained in it. Understanding produces actions you would not have thought of yourself.

What I took away from it

You can have the best plan. If your team does not have it, you have none.

That single evening has stayed with me and permanently changed the order of my work. First bring people along, then involve them, then change things. Otherwise every change fails before it starts.

That does not mean everything is decided by consensus. There are decisions a manager makes alone, and I stand by that. But the difference between a decision that was explained and one that was merely announced is the difference between a team and a group of people with the same employer.

And one more thing: transparency costs nothing. Back then I spent nothing but a few pizzas and an evening of my time. The result was the biggest change in performance I have seen in that role.

What were your rookie mistakes as a manager?