Welcome to the new Manager podcast.
I'm your host, Kim Nichol. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well.
My name is Kim Nickel and you are at the New Manager Podcast
episode 180. I was looking back at the
episodes I've produced for you over the last year or so and I
realized there was a topic I haven't spoken on very much, but
it's really important. And so today's episode, we are
going to focus on it. And the topic is money.
Money at work and specifically when you become a new manager,
you are now going to have responsibilities that involve
money in a way that is different from when you were an individual
contributor. For a lot of people, money is a
very uncomfortable topic. You might have been raised being
taught that it's impolite to talk about money, or it might
just be uncomfortable for you. It is true for a lot of people.
And so it's important to understand that talking about
money is going to become a part of your job.
And there are three specific dimensions that I want you to be
thinking about and that I want you to bring some curiosity to.
When you learn about how money works in your organization and
how it works in your role, you're going to be learning more
about relationships, about power and influence, and you are going
to develop a more connective perspective both on what your
role is, your team's role, and how you work with other people
and other functions within your organization.
All of that perspective is really helpful because there
might be times when you need to advocate for your team or for
yourself, and understanding the bigger picture of how money
plays into some of the decisions that others will be making
becomes important. So number one, budget.
When you become a new manager, you want to get curious about
what kinds of budgets are you responsible for, what kinds of
budgets will affect you and your team.
So even if you don't have responsibility for them, you
want to know if they exist. So for example, you might ask,
hey, do we have a budget for team off site or for team
learning? Do we have any discretionary
money that we can use over the course of the year?
If I want to do something nice for my team, like what does that
look like? How does that happen?
Sometimes there's budget available, but nobody will tell
you not because people don't want you to know you know it's
not. It's not always about
gatekeeping, but sometimes people won't tell you because
they are busy and it will just not occur to them to let you
know what budgets there are. So get curious.
You might ask your manager, hey, now that I'm in this new role in
managing these people, what are the different budgets that I
should be aware of or mindful of?
It might be around headcount. Do you have budget to hire
additional people? Or it might be around, do we
have budget to hire contractors or temporary help.
You want to ask those questions so that you know what you have
to work with when you're asking about budget.
You also want to ask about timelines.
So how much do we have and when do we have to allocate or spend
it by? When does that budget get
revisited or renewed? You want to understand when in
the course of the year, will those conversations be happening
so that you can prepare for them in advance.
You might not know exactly what questions to ask, and that's OK.
You might not get a lot of clarity from, you know, whoever
is working around you. Also OK, I want you to come in
with the mindset of being curious.
Huh. I wonder what budgets will
affect my team. I wonder what budgets I have
available that maybe I don't even know about yet.
Start to ask some questions. If you have an HR business
partner or like the equivalent of some, you know, partner on
the finance team, then reach out to that person and find out what
they know. That might help you understand
how budgets work for you and for your team.
So that's number one #2 this is a big one.
Raises and bonuses. You can think of it as
compensation when money comes into play for compensating your
team now and yourself as well, but especially your team.
Because the decisions that you are making about their
performance reviews and the way you are evaluating them.
The way that you are communicating whether someone is
on track or if they've gone off course a bit and you need to
have maybe an uncomfortable conversation to get them back on
track. You want to realize that all
those conversations can roll up into decisions about their
compensation, about their salary, their bonuses, about
whether or not they are ready for a raise or for advancement.
Those are like, that's a really significant responsibility.
And so you want to understand how does it work in our
organization? How do raises happen?
What is the bonus structure? Do we even do bonuses?
Just what's the timeline here? What's the process?
What do you need to be thinking about now in case your team
member brings this up at the next performance review or at
the end of the year? So ask around, find out how does
that work? And every organization is
different. Some are very structured and
there's not a lot of discretion about how those things will
happen. Other companies, it's like we're
making it up as we go along. You know, it's different
department to department. There might be a lot of variety
about how that happens. So get curious because you know,
the conversations that we have around money at work, around
raises, bonuses, all of those can be fraught with tension and
stress, both for the person who's perhaps asking you for the
raise, but also for you if you are trying to decide, gosh,
maybe you really like this person, but you're not sure if
it's in the budget or if you have the authority to grant them
what it is that they're asking for.
Or if there's discomfort and tension.
Because maybe you like them as a person, but the quality of their
work product is not yet at the level where you feel that they
merit a raise or an increase or a salary adjustment.
So you want to understand just, you know, how like how, how does
it work so that you're not surprised if and when someone
asks you, you know, because they will, right?
It's at some point in your career, somebody will ask you,
hey, you know, I'm ready for a raise.
I feel like I earned this bonus. So find out how does that part
of our organization work? When you know the answers to
some of those questions, you'll be able to start planning and
preparing for those conversations much earlier.
You won't be, you know, caught off guard and feeling uncertain
about how to respond or what what your decision will be.
And then third, think about how does money come into your
organization? This is the question of trying
to understand how does your organization function in that
way, Like how does money come in?
And this is a really interesting one because it can be very, very
different depending on what kind of organization you work in.
So for example, if you work in a government agency, the way that
money comes in to your specific Bureau or department, like
that's really different than if you are a nonprofit, right?
Or if you are a startup that's perhaps just raised their first
round of funding. So get curious, how does money
come in? Are you a government agency?
Are you a nonprofit? Nonprofits are interesting
because I think sometimes there's assumptions that they
all generate income the same and they don't.
So it's not all by donations, it's not all by grants.
There are some really innovative ways that organizations that are
organized as nonprofits generate revenue.
So for example, there was an energy company that I did some
work with a few years ago and they had this really cool model
where they essentially had developed this proprietary
service and they would partner with different local governments
to help them with both like green transportation and green
buildings and helping to facilitate like make like making
policies real on the ground. They would partner with
organizations and they would receive payment for their
service. So they were generating as a
nonprofit all of their operating income and all of the the income
to do their work. They were operating kind of like
a for profit business, but they were organized as a nonprofit.
But they didn't do, you know, fundraising drives.
They didn't apply for grants. They didn't, you know, take
donations. That's not how they were
organized around the money part of their organization.
So we get curious about how that works.
Are you an NGO, right? Like how how does the money work
in your NGO? Again, if you're a startup, if
you're Series A versus series D versus, you know, this being
still held privately, how does the money come in?
And what is the relationship to the work and the organization
and you know where the money is coming from if you are working
in a Family Foundation or in a philanthropic organization, if
you're working for an enterprise level organization where you
sell products or services to a global market.
I mean all of the different ways that organizations are
organized. You can be curious and ask this
question, how does money come in?
What are the relationships that make that happen?
And understanding how that works can help you to understand how
the leaders in your organization will be making decisions about
budget. It will help you to just
understand how do we operate and function, who's getting nervous
and why? What are the relationships that
affect the budgets and the money that we have available for
compensation, for growth, for, you know, hiring new people and
even for learning and development or things like team
off sites or learning opportunities that help the team
to work Better Together. So by getting curious about that
and understanding sort of how does the business part of the
organization work and how money comes in and where it goes and
what are some of the different factors, it'll help you to have
a perspective that sees how your specific team, wherever you
happen to sit, is connected to that money flow within your org.
So these are three things that I think are really valuable for
any manager to get curious about, but especially when
you're a new manager because very often you know, when we're
individual contributors, we're often not concerned about that,
you know, unless we work in a part of the organization that
has a customer facing or money facing side.
So if you work in sales or finance or a customer support or
anything like that. But for so many of us, when
we're doing the work, we're just focused in on our narrow part.
When you start to rise up into higher levels of leadership and
responsibility, it becomes important to understand how does
the money work here? What do I have available for
budgets? What do I have available for
compensation? How does you know the money
coming into the organization? You know, where does it then go?
It's interesting too. You can get curious about what
does this organization seem to have an easy time spending money
on. Just go through your regular,
you know, work day and ask like, hold that question in mind.
What does this organization seem to have an easy time spending
money on? Because that will give you clues
about the mindset of leadership. It'll also give you clues about
the values of the organization, whether they are explicitly
stated or not. It'll also help you to
understand if there's something that you want to advocate for.
It might give you a sense of where there might be leverage or
where you might need to really, you know, present your ask in a
very compelling way so that it's aligned with the values you're
seeing expressed through the decisions about where money goes
and how it is used. The other final point I'll share
is that it's so interesting when you start getting curious about
what budgets are available. You know, as a manager, you may
have discretion to redirect funds from one budget to
another. And this is something I see a
lot because not every organization has a professional
development budget. Like not every organization has
money that's specifically set aside to help the team learn and
row. And yet what I see a lot is that
when someone goes to their work and says, hey, I'm a new manager
and I want to get better at this role, and I found, you know, a
coach or I found a program that I want to take, here's what it
costs. Do we have budget for that?
I have seen so many times where the work will look for budget
for that purpose and that often sounds like, Oh my gosh, what a
great idea. We would love for you to have
that. You know what, I think we have
some budget over here that didn't get used for this thing.
And it would make sense for us to reroute that money to cover
the cost of your coach or your, you know, learning program or
you know, whatever it is that you're asking for.
Sometimes there are resources available, but you don't know
it. So being curious and opening
those conversations and starting to build those relationships can
be a very good use of your time and a very valuable way to to
develop yourself. So that is what I wanted to
share with you today. Think about that in the coming
week and I will talk to you next time.
When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your
life, and when you're happier in your life, you're more effective
at work. I can help.
Go to my website, kimnickel.com and sign up for a coaching
consult. It can get better.