HOW TO: Manage - Where to Begin?

One day you are a worker and the next day you are a manager.

If you are lucky you have received some management training, benefited from some mentoring, and had a few good role models to emulate. These three components are core building blocks of success, which create a solid foundation upon which a manager can build.

New media is different. It often has none of these building blocks to offer its managers. New media companies are generally small, start-up companies whose resources are spent on tools, marketing, and survival. These companies struggle with explosive growth and strong competition. Almost of necessity, management is less by process and more by gut and wits.

Welcome to management indeed! Without training, mentoring, or role models how do new or existing managers begin, much less succeed?

Start with the basics -- accurate information about expectations and timing.

There is almost always a problem, a process, or a predicament, that needs to be solved or improved that leads into a promotion into management. It is a huge mistake not to quantify the company's expectations. Identify the problem, process or predicament you are tasked to address. Managers often ass-u-me they know what is expected. But assumptions can be incorrect, incomplete, or dead wrong. Your first step as a manager must be to ensure that you understand why you were asked to manage, and to ensure that you and the company have the same expectations.

Do not complain in retrospect that you did not know what was expected; or no one told you; or you would have done this or that differently if only you had known. Knowing is your job and your responsibility. Some companies may help you to know what is expected of you better than other companies, but the responsibility for knowing rests with you, not with the company.

Managers frequently make false assumptions about how much time they have to achieve goals. Assumptions about time are almost always wrong, and can be very harmful to your career. Many managers assume by default that they have an infinite amount of time available to them. That is never true in business.

Realize that as a manager you must show quantifiable results in a measurable timeframe. How much time you have will shape how you manage. If you knew that you had only three months to produce a result, that timeframe would influence your choices and actions from the start. It is foolish to undertake any task without understanding when it has to be completed. If a timeline is not mentioned, ask for one. If one is not forthcoming, offer one.

Get the information you need about why you were asked to manage and how much time you have. Do not wait for it to come to you through some detached, vague process. Go to the person you report to and establish these markers.

1. What goals are you expected to meet?
2. What problems are you supposed to solve?
3. How much time do you have for each?
4. What resources, if any, can you count on?
5. What are the rewards and risks?

These answers will bring sharp focus to your work as a manager. You will be more likely to be successful if you know what you are tasked to achieve, with what resources, and by when.

But do not be surprised if the answers to these questions are not readily available. It may be that you and your manager will have to craft the answers together, based on the needs of the business and your abilities and experience. This is often the case in a dynamic workplace.

Persist until you know the answers.

Write these answers in a memorandum that restates them to your manager, asking for her confirmation or correction. In an ideal workplace you would be given this guidance when you were given the job. But this does not happen consistently, and the process of communicating expectations is especially lacking in the intense workplace of new media. Get what you need yourself. Take charge of your own career.

When I started my very first part-time job as a summer clerk in a department store I was in awe of management. I thought that there were rules that everyone knew except me. I thought there were magnificent, defined processes that everyone followed. I thought I just had to wait, to stay out of the way of those who knew, and everything would be revealed to me in the fullness of time.

But I have learned that there are no magnificent, defined processes to follow. That there is nothing that comes from waiting for revelations. If you do that, you will be disappointed and most likely unsuccessful.

Management is just people working and trying and doing their best.

However, to do your best, you have to know what is expected of you. Do not wait to be told, and fail in the absence of the telling. Do not be bitter that you thought something else, or blame someone else because you were never told.

Management is not about being told, it is about discovering.

Find out for yourself what you are expected to do and how much time you have to do it.

That is where to begin.

Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2000 by D.E. Summerville. All rights reserved.

The advice and suggestions in the Women in Business column are solely those of the author. DC Web Women assumes no responsibility for its content.

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