5 OBSTACLES I HAVE ENCOUNTERED WHEN WORKING IN A MANAGEMENT ROLE

I’ve been managing people for almost 4 years. During this time, the team size has fluctuated from 4 to 20 people. My management experience is relatively limited but I’ve noticed some common difficulties that other managers and I have shared.

Capacity planning:

At some point everyone who was in my team, or in the same role as myself, expressed that they were too busy and the amount of work drained them out.
There is nothing wrong with people being busy; it is busy-ness after all! It’s quite subjective to make decisions based on hearing people complain about how busy they are. What is a tangible yardstick to maximize people’s capacity, especially between people who are in the same rank in a specific environment?

It seems to be quite difficult to measure the true bandwidth of each person in the same team. It’s even more challenging when people work in different teams under someone else’s supervision, but their collaboration is needed on the project.

Skills tracking:

During the time I’ve worked for 3 different companies, there wasn’t an easy way to find a list of people whose skills match a specific task. If we had such a list, the only matter left would be for managers to consider whether those names are available to work on the task required.

To keep track of my direct report’s skills, I took notes on how they performed. When there was a need to get someone from another team, there was a certain amount of time spent chatting with their managers to find out whether they really suit our needs. There wasn’t a convenient way to keep track of all the direct reports’ skill information in a single source. Excel was the most common solution we could think of, but it wasn’t the best one. As well as observing their performance, we also needed to work on a lot of other tasks. It would be even more challenging when a team had more than 10 people.

There should be a way for managers to know what kind of tasks or projects their direct reports can take part in to improve their performance, gain a new skill, and work with the best skill that they can offer the company.

Time waste in communication:

Internal communication consumes a lot of time. Meanwhile there are other tasks that also need to be handled. Communication is a big part of a manager’s job and interacting with people helps to collect information for the work. However, it’s not always effective to ping 20 people on Slack to ask for different types of information as needed. It consumes too much of a manager’s time, and dilutes the focus on other tasks that also need their attention.

It can be wasteful to keep asking around for all kinds of information. Having more focus on discussing how to solve a problem or execute a project is better use of time. If the basic information can be looked up from a unified source, managers will be more productive.

Risk assessment:

Project risk assessment is challenging. It seemed to be done in an intuitive manner for the managers whom I’ve worked with and myself. Throughout a project, there is a need to be responsive about where it goes, how people perform, and to be aware of any potential failures.
The clearer the task and budget tracking is, the earlier the acknowledgement about the potential level of success for the project. When a group of people handle a project, there was no systematic way that I have known to collect all the information, and then assess it. It would be helpful to have a way to analyse all aspects of a task or project as soon as it is carried out. The risk of failure can be mitigated because it’s always on the radar.

Tailor-fit performance evaluation:

In one company, different teams have different natures. A person whose task is to take care of customer’s requests will be required to have different skills and work differently from a person who works on an internal project. KPIs are not the only way to look at someone’s performance. There are people whose performance cannot easily be represented by a number.

Applying one same performance evaluation, which might have been created by a third party, will not give the best judgement on how each individual performs. There is a need for having a proper performance review which suits each particular team or department.

The ideas above are what I’ve learnt about the difficulties when working in a management role. What are the challenges that you have faced? In future articles, we can explore these topics in more detail.