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.