The 2nd Line Manager’s Job: How Leaders Help Managers Excel?
Strategies for Effective Leadership of Leaders
I mentor someone who recently transitioned from front-line management — also known as first-line management — to managing managers — also known as second-line management. You may recall this from this playbook for communicating during team growth and change:
The transition reminded me of my struggles as I went through the team growing under me, which in turn motivated me to define the role of second-line managers, how they spend their time, their challenges, and advice on mastering the transition.
This story focuses on the role of second-line managers, while a soon-to-be-published article will focus on the other parts.
“The manager trinity” articulates the three tenants of a manager’s job. Let’s adapt that framework to those who lead leaders.
The role of the leader of leaders is:
Help leaders be happy and excel at leading happy and productive teams that deliver value to the company, by investing in their personal growth and facilitating peer relationships.
Summary: comparing 1st and 2nd line managers
Helping Individuals be happy and productive
A front-line manager hires, fires, mentors, guides, and coaches, manages performance, and helps people grow and develop.
As a second-line manager, you continue doing all of these things, but your “customers” are now people leaders. Occasionally, you might jump in to help with those activities for your indirect reports—those reporting to you through the managers under you—but your primary focus is the managers under you.
This raises the stakes. Why? The ratio between managers and ICs is 1:n, and managers act as force multipliers. Effective managers amplify happiness and productivity, and low-performing managers stifle teams’ happiness and productivity.
Like the front-line manager, to excel here, you need to genuinely care about your people, proactively support them, and help them succeed.
While as a front-line manager, you used your functional (engineering, data analysis, etc.) expertise to teach, guide and nurture your employees, you now shift to teach those under you how to be great people leaders.
Shared Ideology is Crucial
Hiring, grooming and appointing managers is a harder task compared with hiring ICs.
When hiring ICs, you first seek them to have the functional chops. Then, you look for them to add value to the team regarding personality, seniority, diverse opinions, etc. You also check for culture fit for the team and company.
Selecting managers who closely mirror your managerial style and beliefs is crucial to avoid frequent disagreements. For me, entrusting my team to a new manager feels akin to entrusting someone with my children. This sentiment stems from years of nurturing and shaping my team, both as individuals and as a unit, aiming not to see this effort wasted. Therefore, these managers must be in sync with your vision of good leadership, which can vary from one manager to another.
Essentially, you want the managers under you to embody the leadership principles you prioritize. For instance, if delivering impactful results is a top value for you but the hired manager favours minimal tech debt, conflicts are inevitable.
Helping teams be happy and effective
This is an area that most senior managers need to capitalize on fully.
While many managers focus on individual 1:1 management, they overlook the significant value that can be added by moulding these individuals, even managers, into cohesive, highly effective teams.
In my 25 years of experience, having spent most of them as a manager, I saw most 2nd line managers treat their reports as individuals rather than as a team. They rarely take action to drive cross-pollination between them.
Not only can managers act as a team (yes, even if they work on entirely different goals, domains, or areas), but they will also really benefit from the camaraderie and a feeling of community, just like most human beings.
Your opportunity as their manager is to help them learn from one another, support each other and even vent — management often feels very lonely. Managing multiple teams (through managers) is an opportunity to make the whole more significant than the sum of its parts.
Managers Team Meetings
Managers’ team meetings are an opportunity to build a happy and strong leadership team and streamline repetitive communication into a group conversation, using activities such as:
- Managers share the challenges they face, soliciting advice from their peers.
- You share upcoming strategy, people changes, or anything you want to mentally prepare your reports for. Group manager conversation is a great setup for this, as it role models transparency and authenticity. Everyone feels they are in the know, and everyone knows exactly who knows what — which mitigates rumour mill about changes.
- Facilitated respectful dissent: Let the manager bring up issues they see, even if that entails feedback from you. If you want their honest and constructive feedback, you need to teach them it’s okay, welcomed, and acted upon.
Managers Learning Sessions
In my last job, a manager under me initiated “the manager playbook.” It was a monthly meeting with the 14 managers in my reporting chain, where we discussed managerial topics. Examples included how to manage low/high performers, how to support our promotion candidates best, how to hire, etc.
It was beautifully orchestrated. The facilitator initiated it. He rotated speakers and topics monthly, which meant every manager on the team had an opportunity to lead a session about something they felt they were good at, and the rest benefited from the conversation.
1st and 2nd Line Manager Shared Ideology
As first-line managers often follow design and implement specific processes for their teams, the 2nd line manager can create organizational standards and apply them across multiple teams. Examples:
- If you are a firm believer in demos — you can set up cross-team demo sessions.
- If you are a scrum proponent — you can work with the teams to implement and run that.
Creating Company Value
As a second-line manager, you usually have better visibility into the company’s priorities and more wiggle room to deliver on them.
From this vantage point, you can start, stop, shrink, and expand project teams and shift people between investment areas.
Reminder: number of employees x time on project = $$$. So, while most managers don’t own a PnL (profit and loss account), they make investment and divestment decisions, controlling the number of people you have on a project over time.
Okay, that overviewed the three management tenets as you shift from a first-line manager to a second-line manager.
