The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems. Try not to make every 1-1 about how you need something, how something is wrong, or how you want something more. 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.

Effective teams have good onboarding documents they provide to new hires. Things like step-by-step guides to setting up their development environments, learning how tracking systems work, and familiarizing themselves with the tools they will need for the job are crucial for new hires. These documents should constantly evolve to meet the changes of the workplace itself. 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.

It’s also OK to say no to mentoring. Sometimes you can feel obligated to say yes to every person who asks you for help, but your time is valuable. Don’t do it unless you think it will be rewarding for you and the person you’re mentoring.

As a manager you help your team succeed by creating clear, focused, measurable goals.

Senior engineers can develop bad habits, and one of the worst is the tendency to lecture and debate with anyone who does not understand them or who disagrees with what they are saying. To work successfully with a newcomer or a more junior teammate, you must be able to listen and communicate in a way that person can understand, even if you have to try several times to get it right. Software development is a team sport in most companies, and teams have to communicate effectively to get anything done.

Your productivity is now less important than the productivity of the whole team. Often, this means that you pay the price of communication overhead. Instead of having every team member sit in a meeting, you represent the team, communicate their needs, and bring information from that meeting back to the team.

When you strip creative and talented people of their autonomy, they lose motivation very quickly.

Adopting a habit of positive recognition forces you to be on the lookout for things to praise, which in turn causes you to pay attention to what individuals are bringing to various projects. You don’t have to do this in public, but every week there should be at least one thing you can recognize about someone on your team. Even better, look for something to recognize weekly for everyone who reports to you.

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.

Don’t be a telephone between the engineers and the rest of the company, parroting messages back and forth and distracting people who are busy with the important tasks you’ve already committed to do. But you’re not a black hole, either. Try to get a teamwide process in place for talking about new features and customer complaints, and limit estimations that occur outside of this process.

but 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.

Analysis around incident management should include the question, “Is our current setup enabling my team to do what they do best every day?” Incident management, when it becomes merely reacting to incidents rather than working to reduce them, can turn into a task that diminishes your team’s ability to do what they do best.

An overemphasis on incident prevention can also reduce your team’s ability to do what they do best every day. Overfocusing on building systems that are defect-free, or pushing for error prevention by slowing down the development process, is often almost as bad as moving too fast and releasing unstable code.

First-team focused. Leaders who are strong team players understand that the people who report to them are not their first team. Instead, their first team is their peers across the company. This first-team focus helps them make decisions that consider the needs of the company as a whole before focusing on the needs of their team.

This is where going home comes in. Go home! And stop emailing people at all hours of the night and all hours of the weekend! Forcing yourself to disengage is essential for your mental health,

Some suggested prompts to provide the person you are holding the skip-level 1-1 with include: What do you like best/worst about the project you are working on? Who on your team has been doing really well recently? Do you have any feedback about your manager — what’s going well, what isn’t? What changes do you think we could make to the product? Are there any opportunities you think we might be missing? How do you think the organization is doing overall? Anything we could be doing better/more/less? Are there any areas of the business strategy you don’t understand? What’s keeping you from doing your best work right now? How happy (or not) are you working at the company? What could we do to make working at the company more fun?

Some things to ask for skip and maybe cross one on ones

Any manager you hire should role-play a few 1-1s as part of the interview process. One of the best ways to do this is by asking the people who would report to the new manager to interview her by asking her to help with problems they have right now, or have had in the recent past.

It took me a long time to realize that my job wasn’t to be the smartest person in the room. It wasn’t to be “right.” Rather, my role was to help the team make the best possible decisions and help them implement them in a sustainable and efficient way.

Finally, never underestimate how many times and how many ways something needs to be said before it sinks in.

If a team is being disbanded, feel free to point out both the accomplishments of the team up to this point and the changes that make this the right path forward, and emphasize that there are many new opportunities now for learning and growth. Being forthright with people will help them trust you more and make them more likely to tolerate the unhappy news well.

The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you have to be able to manage yourself if you want to be good at managing others. The more time you spend understanding yourself, the way you react, the things that inspire you, and the things that drive you crazy, the better off you will be.