jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #25 on 22 May 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other
Google Spent Years Studying Effective Bosses. Now They Teach New Managers These 6 Things - Michael Schneider, Inc
Google’s New Manager Training - re:Work, Google
Effective Management for New Managers - Angela Riggs
I’ve written about Google’s Project Oxygen before in this newsletter — an effort that launched half-expecting to find that technical management didn’t matter ended up discovering that it very much did. Project Oxygen was the effort to better understand which management behaviours improved team performance, and their re:Work effort is their (largely public) management training material
The Inc. article describes their new-manager training effort. Training focusses on six areas:
The training material is worth going through. Sections 1-3 likely really require a facilitator, but the material on 4-6 is less hands-on and pretty solid.
None of the material is very unique, because the skills it takes to manage well aren’t specific to one company. Rigg’s series of articles covers much of the same ideas in blog-post form, but the workbook and slides are very nice for a classroom session.
The need for frequent, prompt, and behaviour-focussed feedback is nicely called out in both sets of materials. Google’s Situation-Behaviour-Impact model (“At this afternoon’s staff meeting, you arrived 15 minutes late, which broke the flow of Bob’s presentation and require extra time while we caught you up”) is very similar to seen elsewhere but well described. Rigg’s (correctly, I think) goes farther and integrates requesting change into the model.
Would re:Work or similar training courses being offered be something of interest to you, for yourself or people in your organization who are on their way to becoming new managers? Have you seen this done elsewhere? One of our readers has had training done for their team, but I think most of us are mostly left to our own devices.
