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August 7 - September 4, 2022
Managers who care about you as a person, and who actively work to help you grow in your career. Managers who teach you important skills and give you valuable feedback. Managers who help you navigate difficult situations, who help you figure out what you need to learn. Managers who want you to take their job someday. And most importantly, managers who help you understand what is important to focus on, and enable you to have that focus.
1-1s serve two purposes. First, they create human connection between you and your manager.
Great managers notice when your normal energy level changes, and will hopefully care enough to ask you about it.
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.
trust, real trust, requires the ability and willingness to be vulnerable in front of each other.
The second purpose of a 1-1 is a regular opportunity for you to speak privately with your manager about whatever needs discussing.
Sometimes he will, but it is good for you to put a little thought into what you might actually want to discuss before your 1-1 meetings. It is hard to do this if your manager does not regularly meet with you, or constantly cancels or changes your 1-1s.
Come with an agenda of things you would like to discuss. Prepare for the time yourself.
verify the day before (or that morning, for an afternoon meeting) that you will be meeting and share with him anything you are interested in discussing so he knows you want to meet.
You do want to get this feedback, though, because the only thing worse than getting behavioral feedback is not getting it at all, or getting it only during your performance review.
Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something.
If you are giving a presentation, you can ask her to review the content and suggest changes. If you’ve written a design doc, she should be able to provide ideas of areas for improvement.
your manager should act as a resource to help you improve those things.
When it comes to your role at the company, your manager needs to be your number one ally.
good managers will also help you understand the value of the work you’re doing even when it is not fun or glamorous. Your manager should be the person who shows you the larger picture of how your work fits into the team’s goals, and helps you feel a sense of purpose in the day-to-day work.
It’s even more important as you become more senior that you feel comfortable driving your 1-1s and bringing topics for discussion or feedback to your manager,
your manager holds some responsibility for helping you find training and other resources for career growth.
job
Developing a sense of ownership and authority for your own experiences at work, and not relying on your manager to set the entire tone for your relationship, is an important step in owning your career and workplace happiness.
the onus of figuring out what you want to do, what you want to learn, and what will make you happy rests on your shoulders.
Use your manager to discover what’s possible where you are, but look to understand yourself in order to figure out where you want to go next.
Bring agendas to your 1-1s when you have things you need to talk about. When you want to work on projects, ask. Advocate for yourself. When your manager isn’t helpful, look for other places to get help. Seek out feedback, including constructive feedback on areas to improve. When that feedback comes to you, take it graciously,
When you are persistently unhappy, say something. When you are stuck, ask for help. When you want a raise, ask for it. When you want a promotion, find out what you need to do to get it.
asking is not usually a fun or comfortable experience. However, it’s the fastest way forward. If your manager is conscientious, he’ll appreciate your candor.
Your relationship with your manager is like any other close interpersonal relationship. The only person you can change is yourself.
Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.
When you have a problem, instead of demanding that your manager solve it for you, try asking her for advice on how she might approach the problem. Asking for advice is always a good way to show respect and trust.
Plenty of great engineers make ineffective managers because they don’t know or want to deal with the politics of leadership in their companies.
A strong engineer may make a great mentor-manager to someone early in his career, but a terrible advocate-manager for someone who is more senior.
For many mentors, the worst that can happen is that a) the mentee is a drain on their time and they get less coding work done, or b) they do such a poor job that someone whom the organization might otherwise want to hire/keep around has a bad experience and doesn’t join the organization,
these skills are listening, communicating what needs to happen, and adjusting to his responses.
Listening is the first and most basic skill of managing people. Listening is a precursor to empathy, which is one of the core skills of a quality manager.
people are not good at saying precisely what they mean in a way that others can exactly understand.
Be prepared to say anything complex a few times, in different ways. If you feel that you don’t understand something your mentee has asked you, repeat the question in a different way. Let him correct you. Use those whiteboards scattered around your office, if necessary, to draw diagrams. Spend the time that you need to spend to feel understood, and like you understand the mentee.
another management skill: communicating what needs to happen. If you expect him to do research on his own before asking you a question, tell him so!
Mentoring new hires is critical. Your job as a new hire mentor consists of onboarding, helping this person adjust to life in the company effectively, and building your and her network of contacts in the company.
A more subtle unspoken rule dictates approximately how long you are expected to struggle with something by yourself before asking someone else to help you.
Effective teams have good onboarding documents they provide to new hires.
Mentoring a new hire by helping her work through the documents, and having her modify those documents with any surprises she encounters during onboarding, provides a powerful message of commitment to her. It shows her that she has the power and obligation to learn, and to share what she’s learned for the benefit of your whole team.
Adopt the mindset that network building is a worthwhile investment of your time and energy.
This type of mentoring is usually not a formal relationship and may be an expected part of the job for senior engineers because it delivers so much value to the team.
There’s no point in being a mentor to a relative stranger if you can’t at least use that professional distance to offer him the kind of candid advice that he may not get from his manager or coworkers.
The alpha geek tries to create a culture of excellence, but ends up creating a culture of fear.
Alpha geeks make absolutely terrible managers, unless they can learn to let go of their identity as the smartest person in the room and most technical person on the team.
be very, very careful in giving your alpha geeks team management positions,
plan for it, and provide the mentor the time to do the job right.
Brilliant, introverted developers may not ever want to formally manage, but encouraging them to mentor 1-1 helps them develop stronger external perspectives, not to mention their own networks.
Mentoring provides a great opportunity to cultivate curiosity and see the world through fresh eyes. When faced with a mentee’s questions, you can start to observe what about your organization is not so obvious to a new person. You might find areas you thought you understood but cannot explain clearly.
Software development is a team sport in most companies, and teams have to communicate effectively to get anything done.
I was willing to pick up the pieces and do what needed to be done to make progress. I think, in the end, this pragmatic urgency was the deciding factor.
