75 - Being Easy To Manage - Symbiotically Lucky

The essential foundation to being easy to manage

I’m writing about being easy to manage. How it has a critical impact on the performance of a team, as well as a huge impact as a virtuous circle superpower for a person’s career learning and growth. This is the advice I would have benefitted from early in my career.

I’ve previously written about how being easy to manage is absolutely not about being a yes man or woman. Now into the positive contributors. I was chatting with Pauline, who’s recently joined our team and has made a great start. I expressed how lucky we were to have her as part of our team and grateful we are that she chose us (she had a couple of other offers). Pauline in turn expressed that she felt lucky to be part of our team. We could have gone back and forth in an infinite loop of gratitude expression tennis. We didn’t. But the conversation stuck with me in the context of writing this series.

That mindset of feeling lucky to have the job is the fundamental foundation to being easy to manage. To demonstrate: try to imagine a person who is both easy to manage and doesn’t feel lucky to have the job. As a manager, you want and need to feel lucky to be managing that person. Your ability to feel that way is paradoxically tied to the extent to which the person you are managing feels the opposite: that they are lucky to have the job. It’s managerial magnetism, with the opposite charges attracting. This is what I mean by symbiotically lucky.

It’s no different in principle to the dynamics that apply to a romantic relationship. Imagine one in which partner A feels lucky to have partner B. And partner B feels the exact same dynamic applies, that partner A is lucky to have them as a partner. That is a recipe for unhealthiness and ultimately, a doomed relationship. Eventually, partner B’s attitude and sense of entitlement will mean that partner A no longer feels lucky to have them as a partner. The optimal social contract for a romantic relationship, just like a working one, is that of reciprocal, symbiotic, feeling of luck.

This is a post about the substance rather than form; internal mindset vs external statements. It is about how the mindset manifests in actions over time as the foundation of being easy to manage. It might also take a bit of time to develop. Take a person who has been actively searching for a role for some time, gets hired by you, potentially chooses you from a number of other options. They are likely to feel a conscious sense of luck more acutely and promptly than someone you proactively hire from within your network, who may not consciously feel the same sense of choice and trade offs. That sense of symbiotic luck can develop over a (modest) period of time. But I’ve come to see that it’s the essential foundation for someone being easy to manage. And it must develop intrinsically. Granted, I’ve never tried it. But I can’t see how any explicit conversation in which a manager is pointing out to their report why they should feel lucky to have their role, would work. It would be untenably parent-child and so by that point, the horse has likely already bolted.