How to Manage Someone When You’ve Never Done Their Job
Get the best out of your team without micromanaging or being too laissez-faire.
Welcome back to Startup Soup! I think this topic is particularly soup-y — it’s a little murky and can feel like you landed in hot water. The challenge of managing someone whose role or even entire function you’ve never done before is real, and it’s unlikely that it’s a situation you can avoid at an early-stage startup. In order to build a company, you need a multidisciplinary team, and you’ll inevitably have growth periods where you have ICs in functions that report to someone in another function.
Learning to manage a team or an individual where you don’t share the same experience can be tricky. It’s easy to default to either trusting them too much — they’re the expert after all! — or getting so into micromanagement that they can’t do their job.
To help you avoid these mistakes, we’re going to explore several tips for setting yourself up to be a good enough manager for these teammates.
Start with the basics: management 101
Sometimes, managing someone in a different function is also your first time managing someone. If that’s you, take a moment to review some of the essential skills for all managers below. And if not, skip on ahead to the next section.
Creating accountability: Clearly defining roles, responsibilities, and expectations is crucial. Setting clear and measurable goals helps everyone understand what success looks like.
Running effective meetings: Regular one-on-ones provide a space for open communication, feedback, and addressing concerns. These meetings can help you understand your team member's progress, challenges, and needs. Try to separate one-on-ones that focus on the individual from meetings that focus on work.
Providing constructive feedback: Regular feedback, delivered privately and specifically, helps talent grow and develop. Focus on being honest and empathetic when giving feedback.
Offering support: As a manager, your role is to guide your team in becoming self-directed. Provide the tools and resources they need to succeed.
Need more about management basics? Check out this book from Julie Zhuo.
Seek guidance: the value of an advisor
Find an advisor in your team member's field who can offer support at each stage of the process.
Search for an advisor early on — when you realize you might need to hire someone or need to invest in that area. Select someone who has managed a team including the type of teammate you’ve hired. And most importantly, find someone you click with and who has capacity. They should be able to meet with you for at least an hour a week. Consider a fractional hire for deeper team support.
Broaden your search for advisors beyond C-suite executives; managers a few years into their roles can offer valuable guidance, and they don’t need to be the long term solution.
Even if you are the best people manager, you may not know what good looks like within a different function. For that, an advisor can help you identify the right projects, judge quality, measure success, and more. Advisors can also provide mentorship to the teammate. At Range, we often marketed our advisors during the hiring process, so candidates knew we were serious about providing them mentorship and growth potential even at an early stage startup. At Medium, though it was a later stage company, we also recruited advisors in areas that were highly specialized and where our usual team couldn’t provide guidance.
Laying the groundwork: the job description
As we shared previously, the job description is a key part of success for any hire but especially for these teammates. Avoid expecting a new hire to cover all aspects of a function. Be specific about the required skills to prevent overburdening specialists — like expecting a design user research to be able to lead a brand redesign. Even if you already have someone in the role, try writing out their job description now. The process will clarify expectations for both you and your teammate.
Review the job description with your advisor or someone in a similar role to ensure you're targeting the right experience and seniority level, and that compensation aligns with the market’s expectations.
Charting the course: setting goals
Whether it’s a new hire or an existing teammate, setting clear goals is key for managing effectively without micromanaging. Goals help set teammates up for success because they clarify what success looks like and what is expected of them.
Gut check the goals with an advisor to assess if they are reasonable. Plus, partner with the team to ensure they’ve got capacity and the right resources.
Using SMART goals can help ensure you set effective and achievable goals.
Bridging the knowledge gap: do the job
This might sound counter intuitive, but start by doing the job yourself. At Range, we did this by writing content and building up the base SEO ranking for our website before we hired an SEO expert. At other companies, I’ve taken customer support duty, fielded phone calls, shadowed engineers, and more to get a better sense of their day-to-day and what’s happening.
Doing the job allows you to better understand your teammate's experience, validate their input, and more easily assess their performance. It also allows you to build up the foundation that will help them make faster progress when they do start.
If doing the job isn't possible — e.g., you don’t have a background in computer science, then interview people in that role, read relevant books or articles, and learn the terminology, so you can ask informed questions and be a valuable partner.
Trust but verify: a balanced approach
Remember that you hired an expert, so avoid micromanaging and try to trust their abilities. That said, trust can be taken too far. If you lack confidence in your own knowledge of the domain, it can be easy to lean too much on your teammate to tell you the answer. When things go wrong, you can get stuck trying to figure out if the plan was wrong or if there was an execution issue.
To help, verify the work and any problems with research — either through books and resources or with an advisor or consultant. If you do have an advisor, set up a regular meeting to review the teammate’s work with the advisor and the teammate present. This meeting will help the teammate (and you) learn about what to look for and what to do better.
Maintaining this balance of trust and verification is key for effectively managing in a new domain.
Good luck!
Managing someone whose job you haven't done before presents unique challenges, but by focusing on fundamental management skills, seeking help, and committing to learning, you can create a supportive and successful environment for your teammate to thrive and for you to get the best results.
What else should we write about?
Here are also some of our future post ideas about management. If you’re interested in another operations or startup topic, leave a comment or reply to this email.