Nate Clark's Musings

Contrary to what I thought when I started working in professional software development, there’s significant evidence that managers are critically important to a well-functioning organization. Here’s a list of expectations I have for myself and managers that report to me which distills all of the literature I’ve read on the topic and incorporates learnings from all the mistakes I’ve personally made over the years. Would love to hear in the comments what you think of these and if there might be anything critical missing.

Managers are Expected to…

• Set the team culture. Studies on productivity have demonstrated that the most effective teams have a culture of “psychological safety.” That is, people need to know that their opinions and ideas are heard and valued, and that they will not be punished for mistakes. As a manager you are responsible for ensuring this happens on your team. Some ways to do this: Make sure everyone is contributing in meetings – explicitly call on people who aren’t actively participating. Show you are listening by paraphrasing what others said or commenting on questions or ideas. When people seem upset or flustered, talk it through with them. Curtail conversations that could be perceived as overly critical.

• Communicate across the company and relay information to the team. Every time an employee is added to the company, the amount of work we can accomplish increases ~linearly, but the number of point-to-point communication channels increases O(N^2). As organizations grow, it’s necessary to keep teams small and develop the appropriate subset of communication channels to keep everything from devolving into non-stop meeting-hell. A manager is the team’s communication link to the rest of the company. There are two parts to this responsibility:
  
  1. Tell your team about the company. It’s important for everyone to understand the larger objectives going on in the company to provide big-picture context. Context is critical A. for motivation – people generally want to make a difference and understanding how their work fits in company-wide priorities helps with that, and B. to help distribute decision making. When people understand the big picture, they can effectively self-prioritize, which prevents anyone from having to micro-manage. Understanding the big picture also facilitates innovation: I’ve always tried to abide by the adage “We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire them so they’ll tell us what to do.” It’s nigh impossible for people to generate great ideas without understanding the big picture.
  
  2. Tell the company about your team. Promulgating what your team has done increases the impact of the work helping drive utilization more places, prevents duplicate efforts, and spreads best-practices to other teams. As a manager, you are responsible for ensuring this happens via status updates, written documentation, teach-ins, or any other channel you deem appropriate.

• Ensure people are working toward a shared vision. Every team should have a shared vision for what they are working toward. Again, this helps empower people to self-prioritize. Occasionally priority adjustments will need to be made in consultation with the team and other stakeholders. Managers are expected to facilitate regular team-wide sync ups so that everyone knows what each other is working on and are pulling toward the shared vision. Similarly, managers should act as a touchpoint for external requests and ensure that the relevant requests bubble up for team discussion (and the irrelevant ones are not a distraction).
  
• Measure progress toward that vision. Andy Grove, former CEO at Intel, wrote the single best book on management I’ve ever read, and one of the key points he makes is to measure what matters. This serves at least two major purposes: 1. it will help communicate to the company about the progress your team is making, and 2. it will help alert you when something starts to go awry.

• Provide frequent feedback. Irregular or year-end feedback is ineffective. If someone does something well or poorly, make sure they know it as soon as possible. Keep feedback focused on the process, as in “X went poorly, what could we do better next time or what could we have done to prevent that?” instead of “you did X poorly”. There is evidence of a generational shift with regards to feedback, where younger employees want much more than previous generations, even though they don’t ask for it. You’re expected to meet that desire.

• Understand your team members’ career goals and help them achieve them. You should work to help your team members accomplish their goals. Make yourself available for one-on-ones to keep a bead on how they feel they are progressing. This is particularly important when the individual’s goals don’t align with the team’s. E.g., if your star developer wants to join another team or quit and become a mime you’re expected to do everything you can to help them. Caring about employees’ progress and working to help them goes miles in creating a culture of trust and that leads to the most productive teams.

• Develop ways to make the team better. Are we understaffed/overstaffed to achieve the goals? Is there some process we should adopt to improve productivity? What can we do to move faster? You are expected to work at improving team output.

• Work at becoming a better manager. Unlike an individual contributor, a manager is judged by the output of their team. Realize that you have a significant lever to impact the business through management activities. You should invest time in becoming a better manager, much like you would invest time in learning a new technology to become a more skilled developer.