A couple times a quarter we turn our all hands gatherings at Remind into a guest visit. Bringing people in to speak about their life experiences and the challenges they’ve overcome provides inspiration for the work we are doing every day for educators and students. These visits also enhance important perspectives for those of us living and working in the rarefied air of Silicon Valley. Our most recent all hands guest visited on the last day of August during the flurry of our back-to-school efforts. Eric Guthertz, Principal at Mission High School in San Francisco took a chunk of his Thursday afternoon — while his own back-to-school season was still coming together — to visit with our team and share some of what he has been a part of building at Mission High for going on 17 years.
Sitting astride from Delores Park in between San Francisco’s Mission and Castro districts, Mission High opened in 1896 and today serves a student body that is 91% minority. As described in Krista Rizga’s 2014 book “Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph”, it took many of Mission’s educators coming together under Guthertz’s leadership to support a student population who would not be best served by standard test score driven approaches. Indeed, Guthertz shared with us many of the reasons Mission has succeeded in improving its graduation rate and the percentage of those grads who have then gone on to college.
Mission High hasn’t been an overnight success and the first steps of turnaround began when students demonstrated in the early 2000’s against the school’s dismal results. Guthertz shared with us how first as an English teacher when he joined the school in 2001, and continuing since he took over as Principal in 2008, the seeds for student success have been sowed by teachers collectively investing in reaching and teaching each student where they are at that moment in their life. As Guthertz shared more insights about how Mission High connects with students on a personal level, he described one specific element teachers employ in the way they work with students. “We are warm demanders,” he said.
Warm demanders? What a perfect, more modern and more appropriate term for what many of us might recognize as “tough love”. (In fact, at a lunch with a couple Remind team members the day after Guthertz’s visit, one of them actually made the connection between warm demanders and tough love, and she acknowledged that warm demanders resonates with her better than tough love). While Eric continued his discussion at our all hands, my brain kept processing the phrase “warm demanders”. I wondered whether the phrase might apply not just to how educators connect with students, but how people managers could connect more deeply with the team members they manage in the modern workplace. So, with Guthertz as my inspiration, here are a few thoughts on how we might apply the phrase “warm demanders” to how our managers work with their team members.
Warm. It’s important to begin with this word versus the “tough” of tough love. Like educators with their students, people managers must start from a premise that long-term success helping their team members will stem from the authentic relationships that they create with those individuals. What does this look like exactly? It starts with getting to know the people you manage. Where did they grow up? How did they get to the company that the two of you now spend 50, 60, or 70 hours a week trying to make a success? What do you know about their family? I like to know what the parents of my team members did for a living when my folks were growing up. Our parents’ work efforts during our formative years shape much about the present self that we bring into the workplace.
Once you get to know your team members, you then need to show that you care about them. You must be empathetic and meet them where they might be at any moment in their life. A family illness, a divorce, or even the pain of their child not getting into that special Kindergarten, all life events shape the mindset our teammates bring to their work lives. Listen closely and pick up the visual cues. Give space and be there as a friend. Yes, being there as a friend is perfectly fine. This is life. It’s short and we’re not robots (as much as many in Silicon Valley would hope we could just advance to that future state). Most important, you have to really be “warm”. You can’t just go through the motions or let your team members think you are checking boxes. And yes, there will be some connections that are easier for you to make than others, but a great manager invests in making each of the relationships they create with the people they manage meaningfully warm.
Demander. Only when a people manager authentically builds a “warm” relationship with their team members can they also be a “demander” in the way that Eric Guthertz spoke about this term. People managers do their team members much good when they work with them to define important outcomes (e.g. goals) and then articulate that they expect to hold each other accountable to everything that needs to happen to achieve those outcomes. As a manager, be specific. You want your product manager to ship “XYZ” product and see “ABC” levels of engagement by the end of Q2? Then put that down in writing somewhere before the beginning of Q2. You want your engineering manager to find a way to ship fully-featured (and on-time!) the products in this quarter’s calendar AND to deliver on the first two initiatives that advance the company’s technical architecture to a more developer-efficient state? Then put that down in writing somewhere before the beginning of the quarter. You get the point. You can apply the same approach to marketing, sales, finance, operations, and any other functional area that represents an important part of your org chart.
There’s an additional point worth making per the “demands” managers make of their team members. Be sure to frame these outcomes and goals in the larger context of what it means for the company but also in terms of what it means for the employee. People are motivated by achieving big things, so make sure to share the big, hairy audacious goals (the “BHAGs”) that the company aims to achieve so that when you warmly set out what is demanded of your team members in a given month or quarter, they can connect the dots and see for themselves the key role they play in helping the company achieve those BHAGs. Take that product manager example from above. Sharing with her the vision of how your company’s broader product roadmap will make you #1 in “XYZ” industry — and therefore able to serve more customers than any other company on the planet — will energize her to define her personal goals in a way that always stay connected to the North Star for the company.
Finally, and this is crucial, make sure that the “demands” you set as a manager are also defined by the employee in the context of where they want to be several years from now. As English writer Lewis Carroll famously penned, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there”. A key part of building that “warm” relationship with your team members includes spending time helping them articulate where they want to be in five, ten, or more years from today. What do they see themselves doing professionally and personally? And for you as their manager, how can you incorporate this view into what you “demand” from them in the near term? Actually, this is how the whole idea of “warm demanders” really comes together. As a people manager, you know where the company is trying to go, and if you know where your team members want to go, you can help them define the right demands that align with what supports the near and long-term goals for the company. Simultaneously, you are able to provide feedback that allows you to be an important supporter in helping your colleagues on their personal development path long-term.
There you have it. A simple way to apply the “warm demander” concept that Eric Guthertz and his colleagues have applied to the educator-student relationship at Mission High to the modern workplace and the important relationship between manager and team member. I would like to close, however, with one personal addition to the “warm demander” idea — a simple reminder that we must all be “warm demanders” daily. Living this powerful concept is an every day commitment. It happens through lots of conversations — from the weekly 1-on-1’s that managers and team members commit, to the hallway chats that happen multiple times a day, and to the dinner or glass of wine together that pops up after a particularly great (or challenging) week. Remember, as a people manager you owe it to your team members to show up every day, to show them by your actions that you care, and to show them every day that it’s about their success not yours.
Originally published on Medium on September 11, 2017. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.