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

by Camille Fournier

The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust.

Come with an agenda of things you would like to discuss. Prepare for the time yourself.

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,

If you aren’t a good note taker, you may need to become one. It doesn’t matter whether you choose to dive deep into technology, or become a manager — if you can’t communicate and listen to what other people are saying, your career growth from this point on will suffer.

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 and often sees things that are hard for the established team members to see. On the other hand, remember that people in their first 90 days lack the context that the overall team possesses, so take their observations with the requisite grain of salt, and definitely don’t encourage people in this period to criticize the established processes or systems in a way that makes the existing team feel attacked.

Regular 1-1s are like oil changes; if you skip them, plan to get stranded on the side of the highway at the worst possible time.

The downfall of the rambling 1-1 is that, if it’s left unchecked, it can turn into a complaining session or therapy. 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.

Start with positive feedback. It’s both easier and more fun to give positive feedback than it is to give corrective feedback. As a new manager, you don’t have to jump into the deep end of coaching first thing. Many people respond better to praise than they do to corrective feedback, and you can use kudos to guide them to better behavior by emphasizing the things they’ve done well. Positive feedback also makes your reports more likely to listen to you when you need to give them critical feedback.

Writing about areas for improvement is often a tricky part of the feedback. In the best case, there are a couple of clear themes that run through peer feedback, and that you have observed, to comment on. Here are some examples of themes that I have seen. There are people who: Struggle with saying no to distractions and end up helping with other projects instead of finishing their own Do good work but are hard for others to work with, tending to be overly critical or rude in meetings, code reviews, or other collaborative activities Struggle to break their work up into intermediate deliverables, and don’t balance planning and design with getting things done Work well with other engineers but do not work well with other departments or teams Struggle to follow the accepted best practices of the team, cut corners, or otherwise do sloppy work

A person who has never shown reasonable performance, and who has been with a company long enough for you to observe performance, probably doesn’t actually have potential, at least within that company. It doesn’t matter how good his school was, how articulate she is, how tall he is…if the employee has been with a company for a while with little to show for it, all that potential you are imagining is simply that — a figment of your imagination (or your biases).