Managing People

Honesty and transparency. Those are the two leading qualities that research shows generates the highest productivity in workers.

Most of your new role is going to be putting your people together like a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe Suzy is great at assembling widgets while James is perfect for quality control. But James wants to actually assemble some stuff too. You need to balance tasks and get everyone aligned for what is best for the team and provide opportunity. If you are honest about the decisions you make and transparent in why, everything becomes a bit smoother. So Suzy doesn’t get mad that you are taking away her work and James knows he has to mostly do what he does best but will have opportunities to grow.

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I would extend transparency to include knowledge and information about the larger picture. I think people are more invested when they know what’s going on, why what they’re doing matters.

I could write a book on managers. My managers have all been over the top excellent, or comic-book level villians. I had an ASA level bosses-boss make everyone come in on the weekend to do testing, for a fake emergency. I got grief, we’d been planning on attending my daughter’s recital for a month. I skip the recital and go to work. The bloody ASA comes in at noon and tells everyone they had to come in late because…their daughter had a recital that they couldn’t miss. that was 20+ years ago, and look at me, still not happy. If that was today, I’d have been unavailable, no further details.

I had a boss that did this for me. It was much appreciated.

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Oddly enough, transparency was one of my weaknesses when I used to manage people. I had a very hard time not being transparent so when I had to repeat the corporate script for various things my reports could always tell. They thought it was hilarious and they’d keep pestering me with questions until I’d answer with, “I’m not allowed to answer that.” Eventually I’d just print out the stupid talking points email so I could just the read the answer rather than try to put it into my own words.

Maybe I’m old school, I still very much adhere to the principle that the manager gets all the crap, and the team gets all the credit.

One other piece of advice I got way back when was to manage the situation, rather than managing the person. You may have a team member who is really, really good at A,B, and C, but they don’t know X, Y, or Z. So if you have a task in the A/B/C bucket for them, you can probably direct them broadly and they’ll be fine. But if you put them to work on X/Y/Z you may need to manage them much more closely and define what you expect much more explicitly.

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Conversly, best manager I ever had was the manager at my first truely actuarial position. Dude hired me over better candidates because I was an internal candidate. Noice. Then he spent an absurd amount of time answering my questions and explaining in detail all the tech stuff I needed to know. He took the acturial training component of management very serious. He occassionally even developed projects where I had to reserach and draw conclusions, where it was clear to me that the primary purpose of the project was to teach me what I needed to know. I.e. I did a three week study on IBNR’s that I did report on, but was intended to teach me the in-the-trenches parts of IBNR/s.

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Put managing first. If you are working on an urgent project, and your employee is stuck and needs help, or needs permission for something, or…
Make time to do the management task.

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Situational leadership is the term for that. And it’s definitely important.

Also if you have someone who sucks at A, B, and C it’s good to understand whether they don’t understand the task, or they hate doing it or something else.

These are 2 areas where I have really differentiated my past leaders. Are they telling me everything that they can and are they telling me the truth? These are things my current direct report values about me so I am doing good with a small team, stepping into a larger team will obviously be more mouths to feed, but this is something I am high on maintaining.

I am no longer an actuary, but I will be leading one actuary in this new role. She has not been taken care of as far as giving space to study and perform on exams since she joined this team. One of my first exercises will be to find out what she needs off of her plate so we can get her through the exams she desires to get through. I understand the importance of this, but not everyone in the broader organization I work in does. This might fall under the $***block category @Vorian_Atreides was talking about earlier.

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Actually, I’d place that in the “development” category in general.

But if people on the team are giving birth to bovines because of the appearance of “less work” or “not pulling her weight” . . . that would fall into the $h!t-block category, IMO.

Just make sure that others that want to develop get the same considerations as well.

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I think one hard thing about managing people is that it is inherently less concrete and more ambiguous in quality than actuarial work. An operator produces a concrete product, like a report, that is usually pretty clearly good or bad. A manager goes to meeting and negotiates relationships, with a quality of work that is harder to judge. The manager must accept this additional ambiguity.

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