Talented people who fail to get promoted are often not failing because they are ineffective at their jobs. In many cases, they are outstanding performers. Cornell lecturer Dirk Swart shares how you can elevate your managerial and business acumen to transition into management.
For many employees, the promotion from individual contributor to their first managerial role is the most important promotion of their lives. What does it take to set yourself up for and successfully make this transition?
Join Cornell lecturer and technical entrepreneur Dirk Swart for a brisk conversation on how to elevate your managerial and business acumen to guide yourself toward a lucrative and fulfilling career.
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Chris Wofford: Today on Cornell Keynotes, we are looking at how individual contributors can level up into management or leadership positions. How do you do that? Well, first you identify the skills that you need to work on yourself. Then you begin to emulate leader like communication skills and behaviors. All the while learning how to build enduring relationships and alliances with our coworkers and our teams.
There is a lot to this and there's no singular path to leadership, but it's definitely something that can be taught and learned, and this episode is a solid start. Our guest is Dirk Swart from the College of Engineering at Cornell, and he's an absolute pleasure in conversation. There's lots of actionable advice here that should have you rethinking how to up your game in your transition to management and leadership.
Yep. So be sure to check out the episode notes for useful links mentioned during the discussion and also information on leadership and project management certificate programs at eCornell. And now here's my conversation with Dirk Swart from Cornell's College of Engineering on how to transition into management and leadership.
Or I should say. That this conversation is not particularly tuned to individual contributors on how to become a manager, right? But rather, how to become a better manager, how to eventually become a leader and so on. So I wanted to qualify what we're going to be talking about here a little bit.
Dirk Swart: Yeah, absolutely.
So we're going to talk about those skills. We're going to talk about what we need to move into management, but also how to be effective. But when I talk about management, I'm not talking about being the manager of a Fortune 500 company. We're talking about this first step. Making the first step from being a contributor to line management or to perhaps product project management where you have responsibilities and you have to think differently and you have to be a manager and utilize different skills and then talk about what those skills are.
Chris Wofford: Yeah, exactly. You know, I think you would just answer the question I was planning on asking, but maybe there's more here distinguishing between individual contributor. and manager. How do you think about this? How do you teach it?
Dirk Swart: Great. So, so firstly, sort of characterize that. So in addition to your technical skills, right, you have to have technical skills as an individual contributor.
In addition to those, you have to have three other skills, I think that are useful. So first of all, you have to be easy to do business with, right? So this includes the obvious things, you know, knowing people's names, knowing who you're working with, knowing how to connect with people and, and for better or worse, capitalism functions in teams.
Teams are the way business is done. And so you have to be a productive member of a team. That's sort of like the social pattern. And actually, the older I get, the more I hire people. based almost entirely on the ability to function well in teams. I figure other things I can teach them, but I can't teach them as easily how to function well in teams.
So you need to do that. And you can sort of think of that as giving a boss an easy button. And if there's a rule for bosses or Anyone, I guess, if there's an easy button, they're going to be hammering that button every second of the day that they can. So I'd say that's the first thing, the sort of reducing friction, being easy to do business with.
And the second thing is you need to take work off your boss's plate. I mean, in a sense, what your boss is doing in the abstract is they're getting jobs, they're getting problems, they're getting things that need to be done. And they're farming those out, they're passing those out to the members of their team and coordinating those activities.
And we'll sort of dig into that a little bit. But your boss needs to do that. And you need to help them do that. And for example, if your boss has to constantly check with you, if you've completed a task, that's not taking work off your boss's plate in the same way as if you communicated effectively about doing that.
And you told them when you were finished and you gave them updates. So I guess the second thing to note is that communication with your boss is not a symmetrical process, right? They don't communicate with you as much as you communicate with them. There needs to be more communication upwards. And then I guess finally, I would say there's this idea of submit, finish, work, right?
Your boss is always thinking, could I put this person in front of a customer? You know, in that sense, could I put them in front of somebody who's not part of our organ organization, and would they represent our organization well? You know, and in fact, if you can do that, you know, your managers looking for people who can stand in their place when they're busy, they've got a lot of other things to do, which we'll talk about.
But they want someone who can do that. And so it's important for you to able to do these things. And when you get these opportunities, you need to be able to convert them, you need to be able to convince your manager you did a good job so that they can sort of practice having you in management in some sense.
Chris Wofford: So, yeah, communication is critical here. For some, this may feel like an imposing you know, endeavor, right? I should ask you, I mean, are there. What communication skills or behaviors do you, do you put the most value on? What do you think are, are some areas we, we should focus on?
Dirk Swart: That's great. So, so in our program, this is one of the biggest challenges we face, is getting people to come in and understand the value of this communications.
A lot of the people who come into our program have spent their entire lives in technology, in engineering, in computer science, whatever it is. Yes. And to be successful in those careers, You have to be focused, you have to put an immense amount of energy in being a good engineer, in being a good software developer, in being good at those technical skills.
And that's hard and it takes continuous learning, but it has an opportunity cost. And the opportunity cost is you're not spending time in for a lot of STEM people in spending time in communication. So we sort of have to take our students and grab them and sort of tear them away from this STEM focus and point them towards communication and explain to them.
And they're really sort of two kinds of communication we have to get them to understand. The one is communicating between levels of abstraction. This is sort of a, a superpower of management. Explain this. So, so yeah, so managers are communicators, right? Fundamentally, they're communicators. And when people talk about managing up, they often say, oh, you have to manage up as if that's sort of some magic thing where you just like, you know, open your wallet and see the instructions.
Just manage up. Just manage up, you know? So it's not just keeping your boss up to speed, although it includes that, of course, but it's this idea that, you know, That you can summarize what your team's doing, you can take what your team's doing, and you can explain that in the frame of context, in the frame of reference that your boss has, you can abstract what you're learning and point it into the context your boss operates in.
So if you sort of think of the levels of an organization as being tactical, operational and strategic, you're working at the tactical level, your team is at the tactical level, your boss is probably working somewhat there and somewhat their operational level. So you have to move it up and explain the operational impacts.
Right. And if you can do that effectively, that's very, very powerful because your boss, of course, is doing the same thing, right? They're taking those operational things and they're converting them to strategic directions for their boss. And so on up the chain. You know, this this idea of being able to do this and to context switch so that you can talk to your team.
and talk to your boss differently. If you only have one style of communication, you know, there's that old quote, you know, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? You need to be able to have more than one style of communication, more than one communication tool in your tool bag so that you can use them as appropriate.
And so the more you develop, the better off you are.
Chris Wofford: Building off communication, you and I were talking just the other day in our pregame huddle, and I was curious what you thought of As it relates to communication, self advocacy, what I meant, what I meant by that, and also advocacy on behalf of your team, right?
You've got your technicians here. You want to relay what, what work and what valuable value everyone's bringing to the overall strategic mission, to higher level stakeholders, et cetera. Long way to get there, but communication as it relates to negotiation and self advocacy.
Dirk Swart: I think it's very, very important. And I say this coming from a culture where self advocacy is not done in the same way that it's done in the United States. Yeah. So let me say that I think self advocacy is important within the normative cultural structure of your organization. You need to figure out what that normative cultural structure is and advocate in a way that's consistent with that.
But I think it's very important to do that. And for any task that you get, and this is sort of one of the core learnings of being a manager, For any task that you get, there are two activities that stem from that. There's completing the task, and there's communicating about the task. And those are two completely separate activities that have to be done separately and given the same weight, given the same amount of weight.
So from now on, as a manager instead of an individual contributor, every time you get a job, you get given two jobs. The job to execute and communicating about that job and you can't expect your boss or I mean this is obvious, right? You can't expect your boss or your co workers to magically know what you're doing.
You have to tell them Right. So how far along it is. So I would generally say communicate early and often. And my general feeling is over communicate with your boss. And if they tell you to stop, of course, dial it down. But in general, bosses don't mind receiving more communications because there's no expectation they have to communicate back necessarily.
Right. We're understanding that this is not symmetrical. You're communicating up more than they are communicating. And as you move into management, you need to do that with your bosses. Right. in a way that is effective so that they will see you. Bosses see communication as a core skill, and they see people who communicate as boss material.
So you need to be able to do that and do that in an efficient way.
Chris Wofford: I want to ask you, is are you, are you telling us that you should get more comfortable with the idea of putting yourself out there? I mean, I think you should. Sort
Dirk Swart: of touting your accomplishments. I think you should get more comfortable with getting out there.
Not getting as comfortable with that. I, I'm not comfortable with that personally, honestly. Yeah. I, I totally relate to that.
Chris Wofford: Yeah.
Dirk Swart: But I think there's a difference between bragging about something and being competent at something. Definitely. Definitely. And as a good communicator, right? That's the skill, right?
You can communicate effectively that you're competent to something without bragging. We'll sort of get into the nuances of how to. have those conversations, but I do think it's important. I do think self advocacy is important. And I don't know, maybe we can talk we have an opportunity to talk a little bit about mentors later if we can, because that's also a place where you can get other people to say things for you, right?
You can get other people to advocate for you. Being a good communicator is includes being a good boundary spanner, right? A boundary span is when, right? Boundary spanning is this idea that there are different groups in a system in the sort of societal system of, of your job. And if you are able to span boundaries, You can connect with people who have different skills to you and they can advocate for you and they can, you can, they can be part of your system and building up the system is very important as being an effective communicator so that you can choose the channel.
You can choose the person you communicate with in a way that is best for that communication. You know, just have one channel. Tell me about some,
Chris Wofford: Some, some tools or frameworks that we can, that we can use. As we get into the negotiation self advocacy thing. You, you, you brought some cool tools to the conversation today.
Great, yeah. So, so,
Dirk Swart: so the first one I want to mention is So there's this old joke, right? The, the the three most important skills for a salesperson are know your product, know your product, and know your product. And I kind of like realtors. I've heard the same thing with realtors. I've heard that with a lot of people.
But the question is why? And the answer is because you don't have brain space in a meeting. To think about your product if you're a salesperson. You're thinking about a ton of other things. So I guess the question is what are those other things? So Deborah Kolb has this idea of a shadow negotiation, right?
As parties or groups of people either formally or informally, As they negotiate the terms of an agreement or have a meeting, they're also at the same time negotiating the normative roles of that relationship. They're negotiating their relationships and they're renegotiating their relationships constantly.
So they seek to position themselves for advantage. I seek to look at how other people work and to have that advantage. And she calls this the shadow negotiation. Now anybody who's been in a middle school group should intuitively understand what I'm talking about. There's this renegotiation process going on.
These non verbal cues, the power dynamics, you know, the interpersonal relationships. They determine who gets listened to. whose opinions matter, whose opinions get sidelined. And she has this idea of a move, which is something in, in her definition, which is meaningful to this interaction. Being able to recognize moves is a good communication skill and being able to have a response to a move.
So she calls this a turn, right? A response to a move is very important. And it's very important how you do it. So let's, let's look at you know, an example, if your boss does something, say that is perhaps. You know, it seeks to reduce your power, seeks to demean you. Maybe they look away while you're talking.
Maybe they interrupt you. Maybe they correct you in an, in an abrupt way or something like that. You can think about how to respond, but they're your boss, right? You can't respond in a way that escalates. You have to think about a way to respond that isn't escalatory that reestablishes your power in a way that doesn't create a conflict with somebody who it's just not going to work, right?
Right. And practicing those things and having them in available to you sort of in your toolkit. How do you respond to those is something I think people do develop over time naturally, but I think for people who've been so focused on stem so focused on their career, technically. They need to now realize how incredibly important this is and spend time, like allocate effort and time to do this.
Chris Wofford: I want to ask you, I have a couple questions coming in. Angela's is pretty timely. From the boss's perspective, what kind of self advocacy is a turnoff? We should consider the negative of this as well, right? How do you distinguish between beneficial to the organization self advocacy and something selfish?
Dirk Swart: So I guess for me, I think that there's the concept of the words, but the timing matters as well. Right? So if you advocate for yourself at a time when you've just done something, you can sort of show, don't tell, right? You can go and say, yeah, I've done this thing. Look at this. And again, you understand that there's the action you've done and there's the communication about the action.
That's the time to take that and communicate about that action in a way that is positive. So you're setting up, you're sort of marketing yourself in a way, right? You're setting up a situation where people understand, Oh, I've just done that. And it's okay to say you've just done that and that's cool, right?
So that's one way. And the other way is to have other people in your organization advocate for you. Which means you need to advocate for them. Right, so it's a reciprocal process. They're not going to just advocate for you or they'll try it once and then stop pretty darn quickly So you need to be aware of the conversations that are going on And you know throw them a lifeline or if they're being cut off if they don't understand this moves and turns conversation We talked about Help them out so that they can you know, they can help you out and have work with people to understand that dynamic
Chris Wofford: good I'm glad I asked that and I'm glad you asked that Angela.
Thank you very much. Thank you. There's a second part There's a companion piece to the Kolb PDF download by the way, I should mention this We're gonna share the URL heads up for that in the chat Dirk has provided us with the, this PDF that gets you into the Kolb philosophical way of doing things.
Then we get into the language part. There's almost a behavioral psychology to, to some of this. I'm, that's what I'm hearing here. Right. Tell me a little bit more about language, how critical it is. So let
Dirk Swart: me, if I can, step back a little bit. Please. And talk about this philosopher guy called Ludwig Wittgenstein, right?
Okay. He was a philosopher from the 20th century. And he created what's generally accepted to be the best philosophical work of the, of the 20th century, right? This philosophical investigations. And he was, he was a great philosopher and he wasn't a very nice person, it turns out. Actually, he was kind of a not nice person.
But to him, Context was everything. And he called this context understanding the language game. So he came up with this concept of language games. So language is the transfer of information using symbols, right? So the world we see is defined and given meaning, the words are given meaning by the context and by the way we choose them.
So in his philosophy, in Wittgenstein's sort of way of thinking, A sentence or a word only has meaning as a result of understanding the context or the game as he called it being played. So let's sort of look at an example to kind of make this more real, right? So, when a parent says to their child, you know, everything's going to be fine, right?
They're not playing the, like, rational prediction from facts game. . In his, in his phrasing, right? They're playing the words as reassurance game. So the child understands that innately and they feel comforted, right? So your main job as an individual contributor, you're moving now to being a communicator, you need to understand these games and you need to understand which game is being played.
So let's take an example from perhaps, you know, home life. Imagine you're with your partner, you come home from work, come home from busy day at work, And your partner says that you never help. Now, they are probably not playing a stating the facts game, right? So if you responded with a list, you say, you know what, let's compile an agenda of the places I have actually helped.
And I can list out for you where I have helped. How do you think that's going to go? I know where that's right. That's that's escalatory, right? That is going to result in not a good evening, right? And they are playing the help and support game. So you need to respond to them by offering them help. They're asking
Chris Wofford: for your help.
They're
Dirk Swart: asking for your help. They may be saying it in a weird way, but they're asking for your help. And you need to first respond by offering them help and support. Right, that's the language game that they're playing. So now we have a sort of an interesting dynamic going on. Right, we have this idea of language games which can change.
Right, the game that you're playing can change. And we have this idea from Deborah Kolb that language, the, the shadow negotiation she called it, is determining the rules of the game while the game is being played. Right, so you have a situation where From Kolb's perspective, you've got these rules and Wittgenstein says these are language games.
You need to understand that there's a meta thing going on here, right? Every time you're having a conversation, you're sort of having two conversations, right? And the reason that a salesperson has to know their product is Is they don't have time to do anything to think about their product. They are spending time thinking about who's got the power, who's talking, looking at people, is the person I'm selling to glancing at another person, suggesting that maybe they have to get by, I have to get buy in from that person or there's somebody who can kill the deal.
And I see a lot of the time I see people in meetings and they're different kind of meetings. I'm talking about not talking about working meetings, but, you know. They have individual contributors who are buried behind their laptops, and they're not paying attention to this game. They're not paying attention to who's speaking, who's got the power, how is this power dynamic changing, and how do I, as a person, fit in so that when I have communications to make, they're mostly impactful, right?
I'm not getting cut off, I'm not doing these things. They're sort of buried behind laptops, and I feel, I mean, you can, we're all short of time, right? We're all trying to be efficient, I totally get that, but you have to understand this. If you're not paying attention to these conversations, other people are, and you may not then be in the best position to communicate.
So you need to think about communication as an activity that deserves time and effort. And when you start, you may not want to put that time and effort in because it's got a low reward, but as you get better, that reward increases.
Chris Wofford: Yeah. And, you know, you talked about the kind of being buried behind the laptop kind of thing that, that, that displays a, to some degree, maybe a lack of emotional intelligence or capacity to do this work.
Dirk Swart: Sure. I mean, I, I think, I think that, I mean, managers, I mean, they're natural, right? They want to hire people like themselves. They want to hire people who are good communicators. They want people who are going to take work off their plate and make it easier. And being a good communicator, and I'm kind of hoping that I'm going to say this so often that the audience are going to be sick of it.
Being a good communicator is very, very important as you go in with a plan, as you start being a manager.
Chris Wofford: Good segue here. Pardon me. I'm gonna do a couple things. Kathleen asks, any helpful hints for managing folks that were previously coworkers on the same team? Here's part two. Yvonne asks, please, please elaborate on how to reestablish authority without escalating during a discussion or meeting.
Part three, this question that I'm gonna ask you, 'cause these are all sort of. It's cut from the same cloth. They're interrelated. You've just been promoted to management. What do you do? What's your 90 day plan?
Dirk Swart: So let's start off with answering the question of managing the co workers. Now if somebody's been a co worker, you're a manager, the relationship has changed.
And how that relationship change matters, right? Because you're setting the stakes going forward. So the first, I mean, we, we do actually a role play of this in my class and negotiation class, we have a role play. So there's not a very quick answer to this question. Sure. The answer is in some sense, the, my favorite answer to some things, which is, it depends.
Chris Wofford: Yes.
Dirk Swart: It does depend on a lot of things, but in general, you, your role has changed. And you need to have that person as an ally, right? If you, they're a co worker and they've worked with you, they're a friend maybe, you need to have a have them as an ally. And it can be very powerful having them as an ally.
So you can sit down, have a conversation with them and say, look, this is a situation, things have changed. And find a good time to have that conversation, right? Timing matters. And listen to them, try to understand, are they jealous of you having been promoted? Do they feel they should have been promoted instead?
Do they feel you can't do the job? These are all concerns that could be going through their head and they may not have fully thought those ideas through. So you need to sit down and my first rule is, keep the lines of communication open. My second rule is, negotiate first at the edges. When you're negotiating with somebody who's.
potentially adversarial. Don't start with the main issue first, because if you disagree then you've reached impasse. Find places to agree. That's what I call this negotiating it. Just find places to agree. So you know we're actually so different. Yes I'm in a position of authority, yes things are different, but we still do this, we still like these things, we still have the say, you know, we still both support the Sabres or whatever it is, right?
Find those ways to have a conversation. And thirdly, Find ways to interact outside of your formal relationship, you know, and we have this idea that everyone hates going to office parties. Everyone, oh my god, I can't believe I got another office party. The office parties exist for a very important reason.
If you don't think it's worth going to the office party, that's okay, you should still go. The reason is so that managers can have difficult conversations with staff, they need to have those conversations with outside of the workplace environment. You're there as sort of a supporting cast. Right? So be in favor of that.
Those conversations can be very important. Now I want to touch on the next thing you said, which is you mentioned the plan. If you're being promoted as a new manager, I absolutely suggest you have a 90 day plan. In fact, I suggest you write it down. You have a 90 day plan where you explain to yourself what does success mean, how do you succeed, and what are the steps you're going to do, and you give yourself some different things to do.
You're going to be doing really a different activity. Instead of doing well for yourself, your job isn't only that. It's now doing well for your team, making your team do well, not just you, right? Your team is your force multiplier and they can accomplish more than you could ever possibly do on your own.
So think about how to make your team succeed. What are you going to do as a manager to make your team succeed and show them success? Because they're going to look at you very carefully. You're very important to them, right? You have a lot of control. You have, you know, authority now. You've got direct power and referent power over them.
They're going to look at you and try to figure out the rules of the game. What are the new rules of the game that I've got in you, boss? Find ways to succeed and celebrate success. And the one other thing I would suggest, is overtly model ethical conduct, right? I mean, you intrinsically should be ethical and should behave ethically.
But your team are looking to you as a role model. And you should take care to overtly have a strong ethical context. So you can enforce that on your team, and let them know what is normative behavior. And if you don't want to do it for any reason that you think it's a good idea, just do it for enlightened self interest.
Because if your team are not ethical, the person that's going to be hurt the most is you. So just sort of be sort of in terms of enlightened thought. Try to make sure that you set these normative rules of ethical behavior and hard work and those things going forward.
Chris Wofford: I want to, I want to dive a little bit deeper.
So how do you model ethical behavior? What particular ethical behaviors might you highlight to your students? We're talking in abstractions here a little bit, so I just want to, Understand maybe an example, one thing to focus in on, maybe, maybe what people are happen to be pretty good at, just need a quick win in,
Dirk Swart: right?
So it's sort of the two different things, right? There's that there's a win succeeding at something in your organization, getting a deliverable knocked out. Don't forget, they're all mired as they should be in being completing tasks, right? They're task individual contributors are focused on completing tasks, and you want to your job in some sense is to bring that down and distribute tasks to them in terms of the of ethical behavior.
I mean, I think like speaking truthfully about things. I think being consistency is very important. I think those kinds of things and communicating clearly with your team. If things are going well, say they're going well. If things are not going well, say they're not going well. Sure. And I mean, my response always if things aren't going well is say they're not going well and then explain your plan to fix them.
That's right. Which you have thought out in advance, right? Because you didn't just like see something bad and go, Oh my gosh, this bad thing has happened. You thought of a plan. You want to communicate with your team and with your boss in a way that celebrates them, that makes them successful. People are going to watch, they're going to pay attention.
Is this a team I want to be on? You know, well, if people are successful and teams succeed, that's team people are going to want to be on. So those are sort of ways to also behave ethically, but also entrench your power. Now you're taking control, you're changing, and you're imposing the way you want to do things, your rules of the game, onto the team.
Chris Wofford: Thank you for answering that three part question, which included one from me. Okay. So yeah thank you viewers for those. I want to pivot back to our audience real quickly. Again, shoot that QR code, check out the URL in the chat where I'm going to ask you, and this is an open text, word cloud kind of situation here.
What do you value most in a leader? It'll be really interesting. Let's come back to this in just a, in just a minute, Dirk. Let's allow that to populate. So let's kick it up a level. What do you think are the most critical leadership qualities?
Dirk Swart: So I think the question is sort of what do leaders do, right?
In, in the mind of John Carter, who's a, an academic from Harvard, what leaders do is they prepare organizations for change and they help the organizations cope and move through that change. And how do leaders do this? If you're a, we're talking about now being promoted to the first level of leadership, right?
That's the most important promotion of your life where it's important because what you're doing fundamentally changes. Right. You're going from an individual contributor to doing things, to being a communicator and a leader. And it's the most important and biggest transition of changing the way you do things at your workplace.
Right. So you have this change and you know, you, you do this change. You do these changes in John Carter's mind through your chain of command, right? Your CEO, your CDO, your leadership team. Are trying to move your organization through change. That's, that's the goal in his mind. And your goal is to understand that and to percolate those changes down, to receive that information, how they want to change their vision, their strategy, and to percolate it down to your team so that you can, your team can be effective in this new environment, in the new world that your CEO or leadership or directors are creating.
And sometimes we call that sort of line of sight, right? Your, your, your individual contributors, your team have to be able to see. How what they doing contributes to the organization, and it's important that you can explain that. I mean, not least of which they want to understand it. But if you can't explain it, I guess the question I would have is, What are you doing here?
You know, are you the right person to be leading this team? You can't explain how your team is contributing to the operational and then strategic level of your company. You know, maybe, maybe this job is not for you, but you have to do that. And what do you do? How do you do that effectively? When traditional top down leadership frameworks aren't fast enough, you know, we're in an age where change is happening pretty quickly and not everyone in your organization, in your team, changes at the same rate.
Everybody changes at their own pace and it's very difficult to change the pace that people adapt to new things at. But that's part of your job, is to make that realizable. Peter Drucker, who's sort of a thinker from the 80s, very famous, said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Right. And I think that's that's absolutely true.
It was true then and it's still true now. Leaders are cultural flag bearers, right? And as a junior leader, your role is understanding what your company's culture is and percolating your culture and doing that in a way that your team can understand and sort of getting on board. I mean, when people say get on board, what they often mean is understand the unwritten culture of your organization, understand what your leaders are trying to change and help your leaders do it.
Be a part of that process.
Chris Wofford: Let's see what our viewers had to say about what they value most in a leader. The usual suspects, no huge surprises. But transparency, the runaway favorite. It is a runaway favorite, but the, you know, there's a through line here. Integrity, with integrity comes transparency and vision.
Vision's. Nice. Clear communication, authenticity, et think I saw
Dirk Swart: trust. I like that one. Trust,
Chris Wofford: absolutely. Very nice. Honesty. So, interesting. I, I actually thought that there would be maybe a, a different mix. I didn't know what, what is it gonna look like exactly, but transparency, trust, honest, honesty, clarity seemed to come, come ahead of vision or strategy or.
Dirk Swart: I mean, I'm not surprised to see that. I mean, I think that if you're an individual contributor, I mean, if you're anyone like, like, trust matters, right? Integrity matters. It's a thing. It's a real thing. And it matters. And it's something that your team who your team are going to go into bat for you, they're going to go in and do work for you.
They need to trust you, they need to know that You have integrity and you need to find opportunities to what I sort of call leak information. And by that, I mean, you need to find opportunities to demonstrate to your team that you have trust. in them that they can trust you that you have integrity in what you do.
You need to find ways and then communicate about those ways so that your team not I mean you can say you have integrity till the cars come home but you have to demonstrate it and you once you've demonstrated it you need to make sure that your team understand the message. That they've seen you demonstrate integrity.
They've seen you demonstrate trust. And that requires consistency and discipline from you. It's, it's not always that easy, right? But it's very, very important in building a strong team.
Chris Wofford: When we find ourselves in managerial or in leadership positions, things, the, the intensity ratchets up a little bit.
Things get political pretty quickly. How do you develop political abilities or political persona? How do you, how do you recommend that people operate in that world that they haven't been a part of?
Dirk Swart: That's a great question. I mean, it's a great segue from trust, right? Because where does trust break down?
It breaks down in politics, right? Absolutely. So, so Pericles said that just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean that politics isn't going to take an interest in you, right? That's like 450 BC, right? Yeah. Office politics is a fact of life. Managers. are involved in politics.
And that's just the reality. That's how it works. And you don't have to actively participate in that politics. In fact, if you come from a STEM background and you're a junior manager, you've just been promoted, actually don't really recommend it because you're going to get eaten for breakfast by people who are very skilled at politics.
But you do as a manager need to at least know how to survive. in in a world of politics. And politics is a distraction. In fact, a lot of the time, the fact that it's a distraction is an accident, right? It's intended. People who are politicking against you intend to distract you so that don't be surprised if political crises arrive at exactly that time that you're busiest, right?
Because that's sort of the strategy, right? You max, max you out. So you start doing bad work. You got too much on your plate. You need to understand how to deal with politics and that varies by the organization, but the one sort of piece of advice I would give in dealing effectively with politics is as a manager, you should never be completely maxed out 100 percent busy.
As an individual contributor you in some sense should be, right? You need to be efficiency is a metric and you need to be doing as much as you can as productively as you can. But as a manager, I think there's value in you personally keeping 5 percent back, you know, being productive. not more than 95 percent busy because that allows you a little bit of brain space to respond to crises to respond to these things and responding to crises immediately well can make an enormous difference on the total like size of the crisis how bad it gets right and so as a as a manager that's sort of the first rule of survival is is keep a little bit back you know keep some time so you're not 100 percent maxed out weekends because it's very easy to do that and the second one is you Surviving in politics means developing relationships.
Politics is a social activity, right? It means being a good listener, it means protecting your reputation, protecting the reputation of your team, and that means having friends in the organization. So all these conversations we talk about, all these things, if you have a mentor, you're working with your mentor, find ways to build up these networks.
Your team, we've already said, are maxed out, they don't have time to do it. So there's in some sense relying on you to do it. Build up these networks and relationships so that your team can be protected. So that other people can do the talking for you when you're not there.
Chris Wofford: There's a bit of an unspoken through line in the conversation.
This is something that I'm hearing, you correct me if I'm wrong. But what I'm hearing is to some degree, just get out there and practice. Go out there, make some mistakes, do the reps, and learn from them.
Dirk Swart: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's the case. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, how do you get there? Right.
So there's this quote that's attributed to, to Gary Player. So Gary Player was this golfer in the 1970s and 80s. And there's this quote attributed to him where he was being interviewed after a game and the interviewer said, you know, you're so lucky. And he said, you know, the funny thing, the more I practice, the luckier I get.
Right now, Gary Player actually himself attributes that to another golfer, Jerry Barber, you know, but I think that the fact remains. The more you practice, the luckier you get. And again, practice is not repeatedly doing the same action. It's doing the same action with the earnest intent to improve, right?
If you've been a sports person or you've practiced, you know, a violin or an instrument, you know that just repeating it isn't going to do a darn thing. You have to analyze what you're doing. You have to introspect and you have to get better. And the advice I have for introspecting is when something happens, honestly, look at it.
Look at how you could have been better, and maybe you screwed up or something, maybe you messed, you made a mistake. Look at how you could have done it better, analyze that, take the lesson with you, but leave the experience behind. Right, so, you know, I'm done with that. I did that, I'm not going to do that again.
Don't beat yourself up and don't wake up at two in the morning like, oh my gosh, I could have done that better. No, learn the lesson, but leave the experience behind so that you don't have that sort of, you know, And you know, remember, 80 percent of life is just showing up, right?
Chris Wofford: Yeah, and a lot of it is getting out of your comfort zone.
Absolutely. Making the same mistake a hundred times, or making mistakes a hundred times, learning from them, and you've emboldened yourself at that point, right? Absolutely. After you've maybe made a fool of yourself for a little while. I have a question here I want to bring in from an audience member who asks, Steve asks, and this is a good one.
Any advice for advocating for a managerial position when all manager positions may require previous management experience. So this takes me to, we didn't really talk about this because despite talking about teams and organizations and, you know, higher level strategy kind of stuff. Maybe to some this feels like it is a solitary endeavor, right?
I'm aspiring to be a manager or leader. What about identifying people in organizations who can help us, a mentor or otherwise? How do you approach that? Absolutely. Yeah. I
Dirk Swart: mean, there's this sort of thing, you know, you, you can't be a member of the union unless you're a union member, right? That, you know, you know, you can apply for this job for a manager if you've got managerial experience.
Yeah. We see those all the time. And I think there are ways that managers or hirers used to filter out, to filter out people, but absolutely. So let's talk briefly about mentoring because One way to get over that problem is to have a mentor. So a mentor, somebody in your organization, but often not, almost always not in your direct line of, of promotion between you and the CEO gives you a relationship where you can have conversations that you can't have in other ways, right?
It lets you say the quiet part out loud. Right? You've got this formal social construct that sort of, I think of a sort of a diagonal construct, right? They're normally more senior than you, but they're not in your, in your chain of command, right? And it provides you this mechanism to understand the organization for that person to give you mentorship and explain to you how to solve the problem, which is different for every organization, but also to advocate for you.
So I really, really recommend getting a mentor. And when you get a mentor, One of the first things you should think about is what value am I giving to them, right? What is the value I give that mentor? Because if you're not giving any value to them, why should they do it, right? Make sure that you're doing that and that might be You're giving them access to a level of communication that you know to understand what people at your level are thinking.
It may be to understand how your team is solving problems. There are lots of reasons but you should have a conversation with your mentor and find out what do they want to get out of it out of the conversation. Make sure that you provide that to them. Having people in your organization but not in your chain of command advocate for you.
It's a very powerful way to overcome that hurdle. And again, it's, yes, you need to self advocate, but it helps to have people who advocate for you. And again, the bigger your social relationship, the more social connections you have, and the more people can see you being a person they could quote unquote put in front of a customer, right?
A person they could see being a manager, the more you behave like a manager, the easier it is for them. You're a good candidate every single time you get promoted. Every single time you get hired, there's one person at least who went in to bat for you, right? Somebody thought you were the best and they went in to bat for you.
Make sure that you find ways to say thank you to them and make sure that you find ways to appreciate them. And, Make sure that you've removed reasons to say no, right? Don't have like, Oh, I can't hire this person because of X, right? Make sure you remove reasons to say why you shouldn't be promoted, right?
So behave in a way that facilitates that by combining all these skills, understanding this, you know, if your mentor is talking to you, don't be working on your laptop, right? Give them the respect that they deserve. All those things combined. And what I find, A lot of people struggle with when they come from technical fields is they don't see this as an efficient exercise.
They're like, yeah, but it would be much more efficient if I did this and I did this at the same, yeah, I'm sure it would be much more efficient. But that's not the coin of the realm. The coin of the realm is making sure that you're communicating and building out those relationships. You know, sure, you could do that commit and be more efficient, but that's not going to get you ultimate goal.
Chris Wofford: Check out the episode notes for info on eCornell's leadership and project management certificate programs from Cornell University. Thank you again, friends, and please subscribe to stay in touch.