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

by Camille Fournier

Shifting your mindset away from “one of the team” to “the person in charge,” especially if you came up through the team and grew the team yourself, is a challenge for many at this level.

Closing down the bar with your whole organization will tend to have bad consequences for everyone, so I strongly advise that you avoid doing that with any regularity. Socializing heavily with your team outside of working hours is a thing of the past.

Second, you need to detach because you need to learn how to lead effectively, and leading effectively requires people to take your words seriously.

There are other reasons you need to detach. You’re going to be part of hard decisions that will impact the whole business, and these decisions may cause you a great deal of stress.

He’s also good at keeping his cool. Instead of getting tense and angry, he gets curious when things don’t seem to be going well. His first instinct is to ask questions, and these questions often cause the team to come to their own realizations about what’s going wrong.

When you disagree with something, stop to ask why. Not every disagreement is an undermining of your authority.

Learn how to hold people accountable without making them bad.

you have a professional coach, either provided by work or paid for yourself? This is a good investment even if your job doesn’t pay for it. A coach can give you guidance and direct feedback, and unlike your friends, she’s paid to listen to you talk.

When the CEO or the leadership team comes to a decision that you don’t agree with, are you capable of leaving that disagreement behind and supporting the decision to the rest of the company?

When talking about structure with skeptics, I try to reframe the discussion. Instead of talking about structure, I talk about learning. Instead of talking about process, I talk about transparency.

You don’t need to find the perfect solution; you need to find something that will get you through to the next milestone, whether that milestone is the next release, the next growth spurt, the next funding round, or the next hire.

One of the best analogies I’ve heard for startup leadership comes from a friend, On Freud, who’s been in engineering management at several different startups. On describes the earliest startup as like driving a race car. You’re close to the ground, and you feel every move you make. You have control, you can turn quickly, you feel like things are moving fast. Of course, you’re also at risk of crashing at any moment, but you only take yourself down if you do. As you grow, you graduate to a commercial flight. You’re farther from the ground, and more people’s lives depend on you, so you need to consider your movements more carefully, but you still feel in control and can turn the plane relatively quickly. Finally, you graduate to a spaceship, where you can’t make quick moves and the course is set long in advance, but you’re capable of going very far and taking tons of people along for the ride.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

By putting everyone who is needed to make a project successful together in one group, you help the members of those teams focus on the project at hand, and you make the communication for the whole group much more effective.

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.

Learning to recognize the voice of your ego is one of the benefits of meditation, and when I wrote the first draft of this book it included a series of meditations at each level.

One other trick I use to get away from my ego is curiosity. I also have a daily habit of writing a page or two of free-flow thoughts every morning, to clear my mind and prepare for the day. I always end with the mantra “Get curious.”

Think about the other perspectives at play. Investigate your emotional reactions, and observe when those reactions make it hard to see clearly what’s going on around you, what needs to be said. Apply that curiosity to people. Apply it to process. Apply it to technology, and strategy, and business. Ask questions, and be willing to have your notions proven wrong. Stay curious, and good luck on your path!