First-Time Managers Leading People with Strengths

Part 3 of First-Time Managers Leading Their People with Strengths. Before you ask who has room for the next project, ask who the work would feed.

Part 2 of this series sent you into your one-on-ones with three questions, and you came out with a page of answers in your people's own words. This article is about the first place that page earns its keep: the next time a piece of work needs an owner.

Who has time?

A new project lands on your desk. It needs an owner by Friday.

So you do what almost every new manager does. You look around the team and ask one question. Who has time? (Or the other version: who never says no?)

It feels fair. It is also how the same two people end up with everything, and how good work lands on whoever looked up at the wrong moment.

Who would this work feed?

Before you ask who has time, ask a different question first. Who would this work FEED?

Every assignment has a shape. Some work is starting something from nothing. Some is finishing what somebody else started. Some is digging until you find out why. Some is walking into a room of strangers and winning them over.

Your people have a shape too. That is what their top five CliftonStrengths® themes have been trying to tell you.

What Liv taught me about the job I was worst at

I have written a lot about Madi in this series because I learned a lot from her. I learned just as much managing her identical twin sister, Liv.

Having Liv around was amazing for the team, because she had an emotional maturity and intelligence that a team of doers badly needed. I am very bad at reading people and gauging how they are doing emotionally. That was Liv's world. With Empathy® she can't help but feel other people's emotions. So any time I needed a temperature check on the team, I just asked her.

She became the invisible glue that held the team together emotionally, and I am so glad I did not try to do that job myself just because "I'm the leader."

That is the part new managers miss. Delegating is not only handing off the tasks you do not have time for. It is handing off the ones somebody else is wired for, including the ones you think a leader is supposed to do.

Three checks before you hand off the next thing

1. Name the shape of the work.

One sentence. "This needs somebody to chase down twelve people and get answers" is a different job than "this needs somebody to sit alone with a spreadsheet until it makes sense."

2. Match it to a theme, not a calendar.

Read that sentence next to the answers from your one-on-ones. Whose top five does it sound like? What talent themes will someone need to use over and over and over again to be successful at it?

3. Tell them why you picked them.

"I am giving this to you because of your Analytical®" is a very different handoff than "you looked free." Same work. One is an assignment with a reason. The other is a leftover.

Themes do not get anyone out of the boring parts

Now, sometimes the right person really is slammed. And some work is not shaped like anybody, at least nobody on your team. (Because yes, there ARE people who love filling out those TPS reports.)

Themes do not get anyone out of the boring parts of the job. But they do help you spot the people who get excited about the thing YOU think is boring.

And if every assignment goes to whoever has room, nobody on your team ever gets the work they are best at on purpose. They only get it by accident.

The assignment: assign one thing on purpose

Don't reorganize the team. Don't redo anybody's job description. Take the next piece of work that needs an owner, name its shape, match it to a theme, and tell that person why you picked them.

For now you only have to ASSIGN one thing on purpose.

Then watch what happens when they do it well, because the next article is about what you say next, and why the same thank-you lands on one person and bounces off another.

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More in this series

Part 1: Why the Golden Rule Stops Working When You Become a Manager

Part 2: How to Run a One-on-One That Is Not a Status Update

Part 3: How to Delegate by Strengths Instead of by Who Has Time (this article)

Part 4: coming October 27

If you are planning a workshop

I facilitate CliftonStrengths®, team development, and first-time manager workshops. A manager who hands out work by theme instead of by calendar gets the best version of each person on purpose, not by accident. If first-time managers are on your company's 2027 budget list, connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me about it. 

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