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Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however. The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust. And trust, real trust, requires the ability and willingness to be vulnerable in front of each other. So, your manager will hopefully treat you like a human who has a life outside of work, and spend a few minutes talking about that life when you meet.
Asking your manager for advice is also a good way to show that you respect her. People like to feel helpful, and managers are not immune to this sort of flattery.
It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else.
Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.
Can you super highlight something? Can I get this tattooed?
The idea that the tech lead role should automatically be given to the most experienced engineer, the one who can handle the most complex features or who writes the best code, is a common misconception that even experienced managers fall for. Tech lead is not the job for the person who wants the freedom to focus deeply on the details of her own code. A tech lead who does this is not doing her job.
One final piece of advice: get as much feedback as you can about the new hire’s perspective on the team in that first 90 days. This is a rare period, where a new person comes in with fresh eyes
One manager I knew used a shared Google spreadsheet to keep a running list of topics for discussion that both he and his reports had access to, so each could add to the list whenever a thought came up, and they would review it during the 1-1.
Empathetic leaders can sometimes allow themselves to get sucked into an unhealthy closeness with their direct reports. If you start focusing a lot of energy on hearing reports’ complaints and commiserating, you’re quite possibly making the problem worse. You don’t have to have a to-do list, but problems in the workplace need to be either dealt with or put aside by mutual agreement. There is very little value to repeatedly focusing on drama.
you have an employee with performance issues, feedback meetings should happen more frequently, and if you’re thinking of firing someone I advise you to document these feedback meetings.
It’s important to remember that being a good leader means being good at delegating.
When you feel like you want to micromanage, ask the team how they’re measuring their success and ask them to make that visible to you on an ongoing basis. Then sit on your hands if you must, but wait a week or two to see what they give you.
The worst micromanagers are those who constantly ask for information they could easily get themselves.
Even better, look for something to recognize weekly for everyone who reports to you.
I usually give people a printed copy of the review as they’re leaving on the evening before the review is scheduled. This practice gives them a chance to read it at home, and then come to the meeting ready to talk about what it says.
One of the basic rules of management is the rule of no surprises, particularly negative ones. You need to understand what a person is supposed to be giving you, and if that isn’t happening, make it clear to her early and often that she is not meeting expectations.
However, at this level, if you don’t stay in the code, you risk making yourself technically obsolete too early in your career. You may be on a management career path, but that doesn’t mean that you should wash your hands of technical responsibilities. In fact, I mention specifically in my engineering lead job description that I expect managers at this level to implement small features and bug fixes.
It’s hard to make up lost time when you stop writing code, and if you do it too early in your career, you may never achieve sufficient technical savvy to get beyond the role of middle management.
Humans, by and large, feel good when they set small goals and meet them regularly.
My advice is to dedicate 20% of your time in every planning session to system sustainability work (“sustainability” instead of the more common “technical debt”).
You can make the situation worse by undermining your peers in front of your team, so even when you are frustrated with them, try to stay positive and supportive of their efforts in public.
Using your managerial power to override technical decisions is usually a bad idea.
If layoffs happen in another part of the company and the team finds out from someone else, rather than shielding your team from drama, you’ve created a situation where they feel like something bad is happening and no one wants to admit it. If you instead communicate information about such events in a straightforward, low-emotion way, you alleviate the gossip and quickly neutralize the impact on your team.
The nature of leadership is that, while you may only have the authority to guide decisions rather than dictate them, you’ll still be judged by how well those decisions turn out.
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But there is such a thing as artificial harmony, and conflict-avoidant managers tend to favor harmony above functional working relationships. Creating a safe environment for disagreement to work itself out is far better than pretending that all disagreement does not exist.
Ironically, conflict-avoidant managers often seek conflict when it comes to other teams. They identify strongly with their own team and will aggressively react to what they perceive as threats from outsiders.
Your first goal is to protect your team as a whole, the second is to protect each individual on the team, and your last priority is protecting yourself.
Almost everyone who goes from a heavily hands-on technical role into management has a transition period where they question frequently whether they’ve made a mistake.
Becoming a great manager requires you to focus on the skills of management, and that requires giving up some of your technical focus. It’s a tradeoff, and one you’ll have to decide if you’re up to making.
Healthy meetings require involvement from all parties, and a culture that favors short but productive meetings requires that participants do some up-front work to come to the meeting prepared.
How much time have I spent this week on urgent things? Have I managed to carve out enough time for things that are not urgent?
In my experience both going through this transition and managing people in it, if you don’t feel a little bit overwhelmed, you’re likely missing something.
Use Complex and Infrequent Tasks as Training Opportunities for Rising Leaders
Develop your talent and push decisions down to that talent so that you can find new and interesting plates to learn how to spin.
Prevaricate
It’s important to remember that, as a technical leader, while you may not be writing code much, you’re still responsible for the technical side of getting work done.
I find that engineers who don’t write tests often have a harder time breaking down their work, and learning how to do test-driven development (even if they don’t actually practice that on a daily basis) can help them get better at this skill.
They unite the team by emphasizing how this identity is special as compared to other teams. When they go too far, this identity is used to make the team feel superior to the rest of the company, and the team is more interested in its superiority than the company’s goals.
Because they believe they’re in the best group but they still find themselves bored, they don’t appreciate the growth they could find just by switching to a new team.
Empire building. Leaders who favor an us-versus-them style tend to be empire builders, seeking out opportunities to grow their teams and their mandates without concern for what is best for the overall organization. This often results in competition with other leaders for headcount and control of projects.
Even when you have been hired to fix a team, remember that the company has gotten this far because of some fundamental strengths. Before you try to change everything to fit your vision, take the time to understand the company’s strengths and culture, and think about how you’re going to create a team that works well with this culture, not against it. The trick is not to focus on what’s broken, but to identify existing strengths and cultivate them.
Durable teams are built on a shared purpose that comes from the company itself, and they align themselves with the company’s values (see “Applying Core Values” in Chapter 9 for more on this topic). They have a clear understanding of the company’s mission, and they see how their team fits into this mission.
One thing that managers have to keep in mind is that part of their job is to ferret out problems proactively.
This culminates in the most classic, clueless executive move of relying on office hours instead of meeting one-on-one and with teams directly, and wondering why the wonderful management staff isn’t managing to retain great talent or get things done.
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Skip-level meetings are one of the critical keys to successful management at levels of remove.
These meetings are most successful when you provide prompts about potential topics, and remind the person that the meeting is largely for his or her benefit.
For me, the skip-level lunches provided familiarity, which in turn generated more willingness for people to come to my office hours and cover more sensitive 1-1 topics there,
This small piece of expertise — learning how to hold managers accountable — will be one of your biggest learning opportunities as you work at this level.
You might think people pleasers create teams that feel safe to be vulnerable and fail, but in fact the opposite is true. These managers make it hard for the team to fail in a healthy way, because of the manager’s own fears of failure and possible rejection. An externally focused people pleaser shuts down honest conversation by evasion and, if necessary, emotional manipulation that rests on his status as the person that everyone likes so much.
First-time managers are tricky because if they truly don’t have the willingness to learn and aptitude to become solid managers, they’re a big problem. Making the wrong person a manager is a mistake, but keeping her in that position once you’ve realize she’s wrong for it is a critical error.
However, often we overvalue expertise in product areas and allow it to blind us to cultural and process fit with our companies and teams.
