Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Spot Hidden Skills In Their Team
Transcript
- Lucas: We spend a lot of time talking about the structural changes that happen when someone gets promoted—title, salary, reporting lines. But I want to talk about the perceptual shift. The most dangerous mistake a new manager makes isn't being too harsh or too soft. It's managing only the surface area of their team. You look at an org chart and you see five roles. You think you know what those five people do because that is what their job descriptions say. But the actual work of any knowledge-based team happens in the cracks between those descriptions. Luna: Right, because the job description is usually written by HR and the CEO, not by the person doing the work. The reality on the ground is almost always messier. Lucas: Exactly. Let me give you a concrete example from last quarter. A client of mine, let's call her Sarah, was promoted to head of product operations at a mid-sized software company. She came to me stressed out because her team was missing deadlines. She had three project managers who were drowning in status updates and two analysts who seemed underutilized. She tried to fix it by adding more meetings and stricter Gantt charts. That didn't work. She was treating symptoms, not the system. Luna: And what did she actually change? Because usually the fix isn't more control, it's better visibility. Lucas: She stopped trying to manage the tasks and started mapping the latent capabilities. She sat down with each person for thirty minutes and asked a very specific question. Not 'what are your goals,' which everyone rehearsed. She asked, 'tell me about a problem you solved recently that wasn't in your job description.' One of those analysts, a quiet guy named David, admitted he had been building automated scripts to clean data because he hated manual entry. He had never told anyone because his title said 'data analyst,' not 'automation engineer.' Luna: That is such a common pattern. People hide their side projects because they don't want to be seen as distracted or overstepping. Lucas: It is fear, mostly. Or they think those skills aren't valued by the organization. Sarah realized that David wasn't underutilized; he was misallocated. She shifted forty percent of his workload to automation tasks, which freed up one of the project managers to focus on stakeholder communication instead of tracking spreadsheets. Within six weeks, the team's velocity increased by twenty-two percent. No new hires. No budget increase. Just a different view of the same assets. Luna: So the manager's job isn't to assign tasks, it's to act as a translator between what the business needs and what people are secretly good at. Lucas: Precisely. And this requires a level of curiosity that most new managers skip because they are terrified of looking incompetent themselves. They feel like if they ask questions, they're admitting they don't know the answers. But the opposite is true. The best leaders are the ones who admit they don't know where the leverage is hiding. Luna: But how do you ask that question without making people defensive? If I'm a junior employee and my new boss asks me about problems I solved outside my role, I might think they're auditing my performance. Lucas: That is a valid concern. The framing has to be about relief, not audit. You have to start the conversation by acknowledging that their current role probably doesn't use all of their brainpower. You say something like, 'I know your official title says X, but I get the sense you're capable of Y. Help me understand where you feel most effective.' When you frame it as an invitation to stretch, rather than an inspection of compliance, people open up. Luna: I like that. It shifts the power dynamic from supervisor checking boxes to partner exploring capacity. Lucas: Let's dig deeper into the mechanics of this mapping. Sarah didn't just have one conversation with David. She created what she called a 'capability matrix.' On one axis, she listed the core deliverables the team needed to hit every month. On the other axis, she listed the underlying skills required to do those things efficiently. Then she mapped her team members against both. Most people fell into the center: they could do the deliverables, and they had the basic skills. But outliers appeared in the corners. Luna: Like David, who had a skill that wasn't explicitly tied to a deliverable yet? Lucas: Exactly. But also, she found another person, a senior coordinator, who was incredibly skilled at conflict resolution but was spending half her week scheduling vendor contracts. That was a mismatch. She was burning high-value social capital on low-value administrative friction. By swapping some of her scheduling duties with a junior intern, she gave the coordinator room to step into a mediation role during cross-departmental disputes. That coordinator became the glue that held the team together during a particularly turbulent merger integration. Luna: It sounds like the manager has to be willing to disrupt the status quo, even if it means admitting the original hiring decisions weren't perfect. Lucas: Absolutely. And that is uncomfortable. New managers often feel they need to prove they inherited a well-oiled machine. Admitting that people are in the wrong seats implies the previous manager—or the hiring process—made mistakes. But you have to decouple your ego from the organizational chart. Your job is to optimize the human capital, not protect the legacy structure. Luna: Do you think this applies equally to remote teams? Because in a remote setting, you can't observe these latent behaviors happening around the water cooler or in hallway conversations. Lucas: It is harder, but actually more necessary. In an office, you see people helping each other. You see the informal networks. Remotely, everything is siloed unless you actively dig for it. Sarah used async video updates for her weekly check-ins. She asked her team to record two-minute videos not just about what they finished, but what they struggled with and what tools they wished they had. The comments section became a goldmine. Someone would comment, 'I actually built a template for that, let me send it over.' That is visible evidence of latent capability that wouldn't show up in a text-only Slack channel. Luna: So the digital footprint becomes the map. You're looking for patterns in how people help each other solve problems that aren't assigned to them. Lucas: Yes. And you have to incentivize that behavior. If you reward only individual output, people will hoard their clever solutions. You have to make sharing those solutions part of the performance review. Sarah added a metric for 'knowledge contribution.' It wasn't about writing documentation for the sake of it. It was about solving a recurring bottleneck for others. When people saw that their peer to peer teaching was being measured alongside their own sales numbers, the culture shifted overnight. Luna: That is interesting because usually knowledge sharing feels like extra unpaid labor. How do you make sure it doesn't become a burden? Lucas: You protect their time. That is the critical piece. If you tell someone to mentor a colleague but don't reduce their core quota, you are just adding stress. Sarah carved out 'innovation hours'—two hours a week where no meetings were allowed and no direct reports were expected. The sole purpose was to build those templates, automate those scripts, or document those processes. It was protected, paid, and prioritized time. Luna: It feels like a lot of trust to give people that kind of autonomy, especially if you're still establishing your authority. Lucas: Trust is built through clarity, not control. If the expectations are clear—if everyone knows that their primary goal is to hit targets and their secondary goal is to make the next target easier to hit—then the autonomy is safe. The risk for the manager is thinking that autonomy means lack of direction. It doesn't. It means direction is set on outcomes, not methods. Luna: I wonder if this approach helps with retention. People stay where they feel challenged and utilized, right? Lucas: Data supports that heavily. Engagement surveys consistently show that 'opportunities to learn and grow' are top drivers of retention, often outranking compensation after a certain threshold. When you map latent capabilities, you are essentially offering a personalized career path inside the current role. You are showing the employee that you see them as more than a ticket number. That psychological contract is powerful. Luna: But what about the people who don't have those hidden skills? What if you ask around and everyone is exactly what their job description says they are? Lucas: Then you have a hiring problem, not a management problem. But that scenario is rare in mature organizations. Even in rigid roles, there is usually some spark of efficiency or creativity. If you find a team where absolutely nobody has any latent capability, you need to look at whether you are asking the right questions. Maybe the culture is so punitive that people are afraid to admit they have ideas. In that case, your first job is psychological safety, not capability mapping. Luna: So the diagnostic tool depends on the existing culture. You have to read the room before you try to rearrange the furniture. Lucas: Correct. And that reading of the room is part of those first ninety days. You listen more than you speak. You watch how people interact. You notice who gets interrupted and who gets listened to. Those are your first clues about where the latent energy is being suppressed. Luna: It sounds exhausting, honestly. To constantly be observing, analyzing, and restructuring. Lucas: It is exhausting if you try to do it all at once. Start small. Pick one person. Have one conversation. Test one hypothesis. If David the analyst works out, you have a proof of concept. Then you roll it out to the rest of the team. Momentum builds from success, not from a master plan. Luna: I appreciate that pacing advice. It keeps the manager from getting overwhelmed too. Lucas: One final thought on this. When you start finding these hidden gems, resist the urge to promote them immediately. There is a temptation to move your star players up the ladder as fast as possible. But if you pull your best problem-solver out of the weeds, you lose the person who was keeping the engine running. Instead, elevate their influence. Give them a platform to teach others what they know. That scales their impact without removing them from the operational core. Luna: That is a really smart distinction. Scaling influence versus scaling headcount. Both require resources, but one leverages what already exists. Lucas: Exactly. You are multiplying the value of the existing asset class. It is efficient, it is respectful, and it usually yields better results than bringing in a new person who needs six months to ramp up. Luna: Before we wrap up, I want to pause here for a moment to talk about how we keep this conversation going. Lucas: If we've helped you think through a career move or decision, or simply given you a framework to see your team more clearly, we rely on listener support to keep this show ad-free and independent. It costs us nothing to produce, but it does cost time and effort to maintain quality. Luna: If you find value in these deep dives, consider supporting us directly. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Any amount helps us keep digging into these topics without corporate interference. Lucas: Thank you for that. It allows us to take the time we need to research these cases thoroughly. Now, back to the topic. Luna: I am curious about the long-term effect of this on the manager's own reputation. Does being known as the leader who 'sees people' create other challenges? Lucas: It creates a specific kind of pressure. People will come to you with requests for growth, for lateral moves, for creative projects. You have to be careful not to become a free consultancy for everyone's career. You set boundaries early. You say, 'I love that you want to explore X. Let's schedule a dedicated time next month to discuss how that fits into our quarterly goals.' You channel that energy into structured development plans, not casual hallway chats. Luna: So you maintain the openness but formalize the commitment. That prevents burnout for you and confusion for them. Lucas: Exactly. Structure enables freedom. Without structure, the desire to help everyone becomes a distraction that dilutes your focus on the actual business objectives. Luna: It feels like a balancing act, but a necessary one for modern leadership. Lucas: It is. And the payoff is a team that feels seen, valued, and engaged. That is hard to put a dollar sign on, but easy to measure in retention rates and output quality. Luna: So the next time you sit down with your team, maybe skip the standard agenda and ask about the hidden work instead. Lucas: Try it. You might be surprised by what you find hiding in plain sight.