When you’re promoted from the frontlines into your first manager role, you immediately become immersed in ‘management language’. These are words and expressions that come up in every meeting, one-on-one, and strategic planning session, and you’ll be expected to understand them.
And unfortunately for you (and indeed for all of us), you can’t depend on any formal training to get you caught up. Survey data shows that only 39% of new managers receive formal training, and the biggest training gap for managers is communication.
But how important is it to learn this ‘management language’? After all, isn’t it all a bunch of non-sense buzzwords and clichés? Sometimes, the unfortunate answer is yes. A lot of leaders introduce these words into their lexicon without really understanding them. In some unfortunate cases, they even use them to try and fit in or sound authoritative.
However, these ‘buzz-words’ are actually powerful expressions, and when used correctly, can put a complex concept into simple terms. When you find yourself in a leadership meeting or a strategic planning session, you’re going to need to be able to use them. If not, you’ll risk coming off as a non-contributor, or worse, incompetent.
This article will help you get comfortable with the common management terms you’ll need to know before your next big meeting.
Meetings & Communication
Since meetings and communication dominate a manager’s life, we’ll start here:
Agenda
This is your meeting ‘to-do list’. The agenda is a one or two-page document that includes important details (name of the meeting, day, time, location and attendees), and a list of topics you’ll cover.
The thoroughness of an agenda can vary. Some (like me) prefer more detail, like start and end times for each topic, the person leading the discussion, and some context.
There’s no universal way to prepare an agenda. However, be sure to send out the agenda early enough and with enough information that your participants can prepare ahead of time.
Minutes
The ‘meeting minutes’ are a high-level record of a meeting. They include succinct details of the issues that were discussed, decisions that were made, and work that was delegated. Generally, one person writes (or ‘takes’) the minutes during the meeting, thereby freeing up the rest of the group to focus on the discussion. Some meetings will have a dedicated staff person to take minutes, and sometimes it gets delegated to an attendee.
Pro-Tip: The person chairing the meeting should not be the person taking notes. The chairperson needs to focus on managing the discussion, and it’s impossible to do both effectively at the same time. You’ll either lose control of the discussion and/or slow down the meeting to catch up on notes.
High-level
High-level means a low-detail description of a situation. Strip away the details, and think of what that other person wants to know. Just the impacts, timelines, and risks to the organization, plus anything that requires a response. No more than 1–3 sentences, whether spoken or written.
Parking Lot
While discussing a meeting topic, you can get sidetracked into another important topic. You need to stay on track, but you don’t want to forget about that new topic that came up. Therefore, you write down the word ‘parking lot’ on the agenda, and under it, make note of the topic. If you’ve got time left at the end of the meeting, go ahead and cover it. If not, add it to your next team meeting agenda.
Rundown
Jim Halpert didn’t know what a rundown was, but he should have — they’re super common in the business world. A rundown is just a quick summary of where you are at with your projects.
To give a rundown in a meeting, take 1–2 minutes to share the high-level details of whatever it is you’ve been working on. Something like this: ‘Phase 1 of project x is on track, deliverable x will be complete on x date. The next step is x.’ Be as succinct as possible, and if people want more details (they rarely do), they can follow up afterward. If you’re asked to submit a rundown by email, it’s the same thing, just typed instead of spoken.
In almost every meeting, someone takes 10 minutes to give their rundown, complete with context, rationale, hypothetical challenges and more. No one needs that much information, and it takes time away from everyone else. Don’t be this person.
Meet Offline
In a meeting, conversation topics will come up that only matter to two or three people. These are often technical discussions that most of the group can’t understand, nevermind participate in. When this happens, the folks involved should offer to ‘take the conversation offline’. This means they’ll get together after the meeting to discuss on their own’
People often fail to recognize when the rest of the room is impatiently waiting for them to wrap up their exclusive conversation. When this happens, the chair should cut in and ask them ‘take the conversation offline’.
Strategic Planning
Part of a manager’s role is to contribute their knowledge and experience from the frontlines to help the organization succeed and grow. As a result, you should expect to participate in at least a few strategic planning sessions. Here are some of the terms you’ll need to be familiar with:
Vision Statement
A vision statement is a surprisingly literal piece of information. Essentially, it’s the aspirational dream or ‘vision’ of what leadership wants to unfold. For example, Amazon’s vision statement is “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Vision statements describe a situation that the organization hasn’t achieved yet, because it’s meant to give them something to work towards.
Vision statements are typically used to provide direction for an entire organization. However, you can have a vision for any group of people, including a department, project or working group.
Vision statements are the guiding statement for an organization — their ‘raison d’etre’. If you’re in a leadership position, you have to know the vision. A lot of senior leaders like to spontaneously quiz managers about the vision, so you better memorize it.
Mission Statement
Where a vision statement describes ‘what an organization will become’, a mission statement describes ‘how we’ll get there’. It describes the company’s literal function and sometimes includes business goals and philosophies.
For example, Amazon’s mission statement is to “serve consumers through online and physical stores and focus on selection, price, and convenience.”
Sometimes, organizations try and make vision and mission statements that pander to the consumer. This is a mistake. The purpose of the vision and mission statement is to provide direction to leaders and staff inside of the organization. Every decision that’s made inside an organization needs to align with the vision and mission.
Core Business
The main activity of a business. Businesses will aim to protect their core business. Decisions around layoffs, mergers, and divestments are made with the intent to protect their core business first.
For example, Amazon’s core business is online retail, but they have secondary businesses in cloud computing and digital streaming. If Amazon gets in trouble and needs to shrink their company, they’ll probably make cuts to cloud computing or digital streaming before they touch any retail operations.
As a manager, you need to understand your company’s core business and protect it in whatever way you can.
Corporate Social Responsibility and the Triple Bottom Line
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) describes a business philosophy of acting with an awareness of your impact on others, particularly vulnerable people. CSR practices are measured using a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) composed of the Financial, Social, and Environmental effects of their actions.
Historically, organizations measured only their Financial bottom line, which led to financial success at the expense of human lives. Today, government policies and economic data support the need to focus on all three bottom lines to remain viable.
Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is a company’s mission, strategies, and practices to support a diverse workplace. Often, D&I practices are seen as both an act of CSR and a way to leverage the effects of diversity to achieve a competitive business advantage.
D&I falls under the umbrella of CSR. But where ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ suggests voluntary or proactive measures, a lot of Diversity and Inclusion practices actually come from government regulations.
Project Management
Managers are expected to improve their workplace. They do this by finding ways to boost effectiveness, innovate, and enhance the workplace culture. To do this effectively, you’ll need to know how to manage a project:
Goal
An observable and measurable end result. A goal needs to describe the specific outcome you are trying to achieve. Examples could include ‘implement a new-employee onboarding program’ or ‘increase sales revenues by 10% YoY’. Most organizations encourage the use of a goal-setting standard like ‘S.M.A.R.T.’
Milestones
A Milestone is an objective, a sort of ‘mini-goal’ that feeds into a larger goal. For instance, every goal has milestones that mark progress towards completion. If your goal is to ‘implement a new employee onboarding program’, milestones might include ‘strike working group’, ‘hold focus groups with recently hired employees’, ‘develop onboarding packages’ and ‘launch test pilot with 5 new employees’.
Key Success Factors
Key Success Factors (KSF) are the outcomes that MUST be achieved for a project to be considered a success. Ahead of any project, you’ll determine what the strategic ‘purpose’ is for doing the project, and the KSFs are measurements to see if you achieved your purpose. These factors are determined at the outset of the project and inform all decision making through the planning process.
For instance, imagine you’re hosting a conference, and you’ve decided that the KSFs are that the conference doesn’t lose money, draws attendees from the industrial sector, and has at least 200 attendees. If your conference is profitable and 500 people go, but no one from industrial sectors attends, then your conference was not a success.
Key or Critical Issues
These are the highest-priority problems or opportunities of the organization. These are usually the realm of middle and senior leadership. For example, a key issue would be the rising cost of materials for a manufacturing company, while a non-key issue would be the appearance of a mouse in the factory.
KPIs
A Key Performance Indicator is a measurement that shows how effectively a company is achieving its objectives. Organizations use KPI-based targets at every level to evaluate success. Generally, each department will have KPIs, and every employee in that department will have KPIs that feed into them.
High-level KPIs usually focus on the overall performance of the business, such as revenue targets. Low-level/frontline KPIs focus on more detailed processes like sales, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
Best-Practices
A ‘best-practice’ is a method or technique that consistently delivers good results. When you are about to do something new, you’ll want to find out what the best-practices are first. The best-practice for learning about best-practices is to contact others within your organization who’ve already done what you’re trying to do.
Benchmark
A benchmark is a standard that’s used as a point of reference to evaluate performance or quality. Benchmarks can come from an organization’s own experience, from other industry leaders, or from legal requirements like environmental regulations.
Stakeholders
A stakeholder is any person, group or organization that’s affected by an organization’s actions. Your stakeholders are almost always your customers and your staff, as well as staff from other departments. Other common stakeholders are creditors, government, suppliers, unions, and the community.
You could undoubtedly consider everyone in the world to be a stakeholder in some small way. For this reason, you’ll hear people talk about ‘Key Stakeholders’. These are the people who will feel a noticeable impact, and who should be involved or consulted.
Subject Matter Expert
A subject matter expert (SME) is a person with strong expertise in a given function, such as a software, policies and regulation, or processes. SMEs are typically brought in to help solve specific problems, and can be internal staff or outside contractors. As a manager, you might employ an SME to help solve a specific problem, have them participate in a working group, or train others.
Finance and Budgeting
The majority of finance and budgeting is managed by accountants and senior leadership. However, every manager has a role to play in supporting the organization’s financial goals. To do so, you’ll need a basic understanding of these concepts:
Fiscal Year
A fiscal year is a one-year period that organizations use for financial reporting and budgeting. Organizations often choose to report their financial information on a non-calendar fiscal year that better represents the revenue cycle of their business. For example, universities often begin and end their fiscal years according to the school year.
In publicly traded companies, year-end reports are scrutinized by shareholders (their ‘key stakeholders’). This is why you’ll hear leaders put great emphasis on meeting targets ‘before the end of fiscal’.
As a manager, you’ll need to know the fiscal year cycle so you can be strategic with your actions. For instance, you might want to spend your annual budget for new equipment before the fiscal year ends. Likewise, if your fiscal year ends in two days and you’ve already hit your annual sales target, you may want to wait to call back that sales lead.
Revenue
As a manager, the revenue you’ll be concerned with is the money earned from the sale of products or services. There are other types of revenue, but that’s the realm of accountants.
Earning and growing revenue is the #1 consideration for almost every organization. When leaders meet, every decision is made with consideration of the organization’s revenue. Even if the word ‘revenue’ doesn’t come up, know that it’s on everyone’s mind and it has to be on yours as well.
A manager is the steward of a unit that was put in place to either earn revenue or to support the revenue-generating units. For this reason, you need to understand the revenue goals of an organization and what you can do to support them, no matter what unit you manage.
Return on Investment
Your Return on Investment (ROI) sums up the value of taking an action. Think of it like this: (what you get) – (what it costs you) = ROI.
For example, imagine you’re a farmer, and you want to sell your surplus vegetables before they go bad. You rent a booth at a farmers market for $200, and pay a person to run it for $200. They sell $300 worth of vegetables. Your ROI = $300 revenue – ($200 booth rental + $200 staff wage) = ($100). You’ve lost money, it’s a negative ROI. Alternately, you could run the booth yourself and incur no wage expenses, in which case your ROI = $300 revenue – $200 booth rental = $100. You’ve made $100, you’ve got a positive ROI.
When calculating your ROI, you have to put your analyst hat on. For instance, if you choose to run the booth yourself, that means you’re giving up doing something else. If you could have made more money doing something different, then that’s an opportunity cost. Likewise, maybe you send an employee to run the booth, and she earns a $200 wage while she’s there. But what if she’s already on your payroll, and you have no other work for her? You might lose $100 dollars, but if the employee did nothing and you still had to pay her, then it’s actually worth it to have a booth at the farmers market.
Training and Development
Whether a manager succeeds or fails depends entirely on the performance of their employees. The problem is that most early-career (and a lot of late-career) managers don’t have a good or accurate understanding of key training and development concepts. The first step towards good training and development is to know what tools are available to you:
Coaching
Coaching means personalized, non-judgemental feedback and training to improve an individual’s performance, informed by close observation.
Picture a Quarterback’s coach. They closely observe the Quarterback throw the ball, and give feedback and tips to correct their posture, footwork and throwing motion. Not into football? Imagine a Yoga instructor. After giving direction to the class, they’ll go to each individual, correcting posture, offering feedback, and providing blocks for support when needed. These are both examples of coaching.
Managers need to do this too. If you manage salespeople, observe a sales pitch, and have a discussion afterward about what they’ve done well and should continue to do, and what they could try doing differently next time.
I won’t go into detail, but I do want to express that that EVERYONE needs coaching, even the best, most experienced employees. Consider this: Even Tom Brady has a Quarterback coach, and he’s probably the best Quarterback of all time with over 20 years of NFL experience. As a manager, you’re the coach, so don’t let people fall off your radar just because they’re great at their jobs.
Mentorship
Mentorship is similar to coaching, and depending on the mentor, there can be a lot of overlap. Essentially, mentorship means regular guidance provided by a more experienced individual to a person who hopes to learn from that experience. A mentor shouldn’t be a person’s direct supervisor, because a mentee needs to be comfortable talking about work-related feelings they might not want to share with their boss.
Mentorship relationships look different everywhere. Some organizations have formal mentorship processes in place, and some have nothing in place. Some people maintain mentor relationships throughout their whole career, while others come and go. I encourage managers to find a mentor for yourself and offer to mentor someone as well.
Performance Review
A performance review is a formal assessment in which managers evaluate an employee’s work performance, identify strengths and weaknesses, offer feedback, and set goals for future performance.
If you work in a large organization, you’ll likely have HR policies around performance reviews, and you’ll be expected to follow them. It’s common to see monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual performance reviews, or some combination of them.
Don’t confuse a performance review with coaching. For one thing, they’re not frequent enough to drive any real change in performance. Second, a performance review is an assessment, sort of a ‘report card’ of their performance. There’s a goal-setting component to it, but driving progress towards those goals is done through regular coaching and feedback.
Feedback
Feedback is when you observe someone perform an action, and you let them know whether they did it correctly and should continue to do so, or they did something incorrectly and ought to make an adjustment.
Good feedback is non-judgemental and includes information on how to improve the way they do something and why.
In my opinion, terms like ‘constructive’ or ‘positive’ feedback are redundant. All feedback is constructive because you’re either reinforcing effective behaviors or correcting ineffective ones, an inherently constructive action. And all feedback is positive because it’s done in the spirit of supporting growth and building confidence. By naming feedback as ‘constructive’ or ‘positive’, you’re sending a signal to your employee that you’re either giving them a hard time or praising them. That’s not what feedback is about.
Performance Management
Performance Management is a management tool used to monitor and evaluate an employees’ work, with the purpose of helping employees meet the expectations of their job. A formal performance-management process provides clarity around job expectations and formalizes the dialogue and progress towards meeting those expectations.
In most large organizations, a formal performance management process is activated jointly by management and human resources when an employee consistently fails to meet expectations. It includes scripts, regularly scheduled check-ins, documented meetings, and sometimes even modified duties.
The performance management process includes accountability measures to help the employee meet expectations. If an employee continues to fall short of expectations, management will have gathered enough evidence along the way to support the termination of the employee. This should almost never happen.
Discipline
Discipline is not feedback. It’s a formal action or condition that’s imposed on an employee to correct behaviors that are detrimental to an organization. Common forms of discipline include write-up’s, suspensions, and temporarily modified duties.
Discipline is not meant to embarrass or degrade an employee, though there’s no shortage of managers who do (and ought to be disciplined themselves). Discipline must always be as confidential as is operationally possible.
The purpose of formal discipline is to acknowledge and make a record of the unacceptable behavior, describe the consequences if the behavior continues, and leave the employee with a clear understanding of how they can avoid further discipline in the future.
Discipline is a scary thing for an employee, and you need them to take it seriously. However, as a manager, you want your employee to feel confident that they can recover. You want them to believe that, if they exhibit the right behaviors going forward, this incident will be forgotten. When I formally discipline an employee, I want them to leave my office thinking “I’m going to bounce back and be the best employee here!”, not “I better update my resume because my career here is tanked.” I’ve helped many employees move on to promotions, and at one point or another, I’ve formally disciplined them all. It doesn’t have to be a career killer.
Recognition
Recognition is the acknowledgment of a team or individual’s exemplary performance. The goal of employee recognition in the workplace is to reinforce winning behaviors that support organizational success. There are two main categories of recognition: Planned and spontaneous.
Planned recognition includes things like awards and competitions. Employees are usually aware of these and work hard to win them. Most large organizations have annual awards that recognize all kinds of things such as top sales, best customer service, best ambassador, and so on.
Occasionally, a team or individual might do something exemplary that merits spontaneous recognition. In this case, you might make an announcement to the department, give them a card or even just have a quick meeting to let them know their work is noticed and appreciated.
An important consideration with spontaneous recognition is that you know the individuals and recognize them in a way that they’re comfortable with. For instance, some people love public recognition, and some are mortified by it. As a manager, you need to know your team and get this right.
🗣️ATTN: #Managers
— Chris (@ChrisjBergen) April 12, 2020
What terms or expressions did you wish you knew going into your first Management job? Any embarrassing examples of being lost in a conversation because you didn’t know a term🤦♂️#Business #Work #Management
Final Thoughts on Management Language
This is by no means a comprehensive list of the management language and terms you’ll hear throughout your career. However, you should now have a foundational knowledge of the common words you need to know before your next conversation with other managers and leaders.
One other objective I tried to achieve with this article is to help you see how many of these words get misused so you can avoid misusing them yourself. After all, misuse is how these words stop being powerful descriptive concepts and become cheesy buzzwords found in Dilbert comic strips.
Good luck in your management role (or your eventual management role, if you’re currently working towards it). I hope you have a phenomenal career!
And lastly, please let me know if there’s any other management language or terms you think I’ve missed and should include in future iterations.
Thanks for reading!
