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November 19, 2023 - March 17, 2024
Forcing yourself to be specific will steer you away from writing reviews based on underlying bias.
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 shows itself as working hard to go the extra mile, offering insightful suggestions on problems, and helping the team in areas that were previously neglected.
Don’t confuse “potential” as it might be described by a grade-school teacher with the type of potential you care about. You are not molding young minds; you’re asking employees to do work and help you grow a company.
The important thing for you to start doing now that you’re in management is to learn how the game is played at your company.
One of the basic rules of management is the rule of no surprises, particularly negative ones.
Using your managerial power to override technical decisions is usually a bad idea.
This is why so many precise time-management tips encourage reading and responding to email at specific times of
Hold people accountable to prepare in whatever way makes sense. Ask for agenda items up front. Any sort of standard meeting that
Your attendance at these meetings is partially to pay attention to the dynamics and morale of your team.
The best way to describe the feeling of management from here on out is plate spinning.
If the task is simple and frequent, find someone to whom you can hand it off. Examples of simple and frequent tasks might include running daily standups, writing up a summary of the teams’ progress each week, or conducting minor code reviews.
Tasks like project planning, systems design, or being the key person during an outage are the biggest opportunity you have to grow talent on your team while also making the team run better.
Are your teams learning how to operate independently, or are you keeping them dependent on you for critical functions?
Delegation is a process that starts slow but turns into the essential element for career growth. If you teams can’t operate well without you around, you’ll find it hard to be promoted.
The person who is usually chatty, happy, and engaged suddenly starts leaving early, coming in late, taking breaks to leave during the workday, staying quiet in
Help him create a clear project plan early and set expectations for how to adjust that plan when things change, so that it’s harder for him to hide a lack of progress. Also
Responding with positivity while still articulating the boundaries of reality will get you into the major leagues of senior leadership.
Making a policy helps your team know in advance the cost of getting to “yes.”
one tactic that you can use is appealing to time and budget.
You’ll be wrong sometimes, so when you discover that you were too quick to say no, apologize for making that mistake. You won’t have the luxury to carefully investigate and analyze every decision, so practice getting comfortable with the quick no (and the quick yes!) for low-risk, low-impact decisions.
How stable is the software being produced by the team?
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.
The trick is not to focus on what’s broken, but to identify existing strengths and cultivate them.
They care less about the source of an idea than its merit in achieving their goals.
I love Larry Wall’s idea that “laziness, impatience, and hubris” are virtues of engineers, as he articulated in Programming Perl.3 These virtues persist into leadership, and learning how to channel these traits into advantages is something I encourage all managers to do.
What you want to teach them is how to focus. To
value to the company in less total time.” If the team works 60 hours in a week to deliver something that otherwise would’ve taken a week and a half, they haven’t worked faster, they’ve just given
Laziness and impatience. We focus so we can go home, and we encourage going home because it forces us to constantly focus. This is how great teams scale.
How do you help with problems that you aren’t in the room to see, with unreliable witnesses?
but this is a place where you need to find your discomfort, chase it down, and sit with it unblinking for a while.
One thing that managers have to keep in mind is that part of their job is to ferret out problems proactively.
Except this basically never happens.
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. Each person should come prepared to focus on what he or she is interested in talking to you about.
Having people who manage up well in your organization is always a hard situation to detect and respond to. These individuals get to you first, so you hear their perspective before you hear anything else, and you’re predestined to think they’re in the right and to support their decisions. Skip-level meetings are a chance to hear the other side of the story, to get a reality check from the people on the ground.
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.
The answer to all of these questions is yes.
They’ve done the hard work of identifying the problems that are slowing down their teams, but you need to then help find the solutions
This is what making your job easier looks like — not hiding information, but bringing you clear problems before they turn into raging fires.
When you’re managing a people pleaser, one of the best things you can do is show the person that he’s exhibiting the behavior, and highlight the downsides.
Use skip-level meetings to help you detect areas where you need to support your new manager fully, and let her know that you’ll be holding skip-levels frequently as you help to guide her most effectively.
Managers who neglect the job are bad, but managers who take to the job with gusto because they believe it’s the key to realizing authority are sometimes even worse.
more about how he can have a larger impact on strategy and direction setting for his area.
The biggest difference between a management interview and an engineering interview is that managers can, theoretically, bullshit you more easily.
Importantly, a manager must also be able to debug teams. Ask the manager to describe a time when she ran a project that was behind schedule, and what she did in that scenario.
In his book High Output Management,1 Andy Grove talks about cultural values as one of the ways that people make decisions inside of highly complex, uncertain, or ambiguous circumstances where they value the group interest above their own.
Remember that you’re not expected to know everything just because you’re a manager. Use this to your advantage. Ask the person to teach you about the work she does.
A great debugger is relentless in his pursuit of the “why” for a bug.
What does this have to do with management? Managing teams is a series of complex black boxes interacting with other complex black boxes.
Now is the time to start doing some potentially destructive investigations. Sit in their meetings. Are they boring to you? Is the team bored?
