In late May 2013 I was a few weeks into my first people manager role.  I had been asked to take on the responsibility of running our organization’s IT Security Governance & Compliance team and our Customer Care team (essentially 1st level helpdesk).  The Customer Care side was about 10-15% of the role; it was a well oiled machine with dedicated staff that I inherited from another manager who ran it very well.  I essentially had to keep it going and look for ways to tweak/improve it where possible.  The IT Security side was much more complex: the team had lost a couple of people the month prior to me taking it on (including the highly experience manager who was promoted to an exciting position elsewhere in the company), it was suffering from an identity crisis within the organization, and generally IT Security is a challenging/high-risk topic.  So pretty exciting except for one minor detail: I had almost no experience in either space.  I had worked on teams and led projects in many areas of IT up to this point but none of them were in the areas I now owned.  The icing on the cake was that I was also younger than all but one of the employees I was now responsible for leading.

Given that context, the topic I want to cover in this blog post is how I thought about and prepped for a particular meeting, one I felt would make or break my ability to be successful.  Picture 31-year-old me about to have my first one-on-one/career discussion with the team lead on the IT Security team who was an employee with 38+ years of experience with the company.  Think about that.  The person’s career was longer than my life!  While prepping I literally remember wondering who would be giving the career advice.

I had a few objectives for the meeting:

1. Build trust, as we hadn’t worked together closely before
2. Determine what I could do to help the person with their career aspirations
3. Request help, given I had no practical experience in that space and needed to learn fast
4. Earn respect as the new manager of the team

#4 was the hardest one to prepare for especially since if I screwed that up it would have impacted the other three objectives.  I didn’t want to come across as a pushover from the beginning yet I also didn’t want to come across like some hotshot know-it-all either.  It’s tempting for people in management roles to be authoritative from the beginning but I really felt that this kind of approach wasn’t going to help me meet the objectives of the meeting.  I was genuinely confident in my abilities but had to ensure that confidence came across in the right way.

To build trust I figured the best approach was honesty (shocker!).  During the meeting I opened up about myself and my family, my career goals, why I wanted to get into management, the knowledge gaps that I had in IT Security, and my weaknesses.  I asked them the same things too so I could learn about them as a person as well as where they saw themselves in the coming years, their motivations, what kind of work environment they thrived in, and more.  This informal approach to start the meeting led to relationship building which is essential between a manager and an employee.

I was fairly blunt in my request for help.  I asked where they felt I should focus, what the strengths and weaknesses of the team were, how I could be most helpful and also how could I ensure I didn’t get in the way.  I asked open-ended questions and let my employee do most of the talking.  By being blunt I was able to set the tone for the next few months: that I would be counting on the person to help me learn and that it would mean more effort on their part, i.e. run the team and train the manager.  I didn’t sugarcoat and by being clear on what I needed from them it set us both up for success.

Almost nobody is going to earn respect in a single meeting so I wanted to lay a foundation that would allow me to earn the necessary respect one needs to succeed as a leader.  I outlined my management style but was honest about the fact that what I had outlined was just a theory and that it would evolve as I grew into the role.  I asked for insight into what they felt were the characteristics of the better managers they had during their career.  What I think was probably the most important thing though was that I created a culture of feedback.  I knew I was going to make mistakes so I asked to be called out whenever they felt I was going down the wrong path.  I wanted them to know that I would take that feedback seriously and without repercussions to them (this also helps with building trust).

Overall the meeting went very well and was the launchpad to years of great work between the two of us and the rest of the team.

As Millennials take on leadership roles I think many of the lessons here are key since they will likely have more experienced people working for them given the current mix of generations in the workforce.  Show respect for that experience and be humble about your current level of skill and experience.  Ask for help and show your appreciation when helped.  Ask for feedback, and more importantly act on it (otherwise you’ll find the feedback will dry up real quick). Yet, be confident because ultimately you were selected to lead based on your track record and potential.  New ideas and perspectives combined with the wisdom gained over years of experience can lead to wonderful outcomes for Millennial leaders and the teams they lead.