Please, let's end this scourge by closing more tabs and not driving more traffic to these sites.
They hotly debate the virtues of deceptive dark patterns, and, man, are they assholes to boot. They also blow cash on retarded shit like juiceros, and bro-compare their juicero-type schlock and tchotchke collections unironically, and sometimes with transparent envy of one another. It's as bad as you might imagine.
After lunch, when they really get going, with their mind-blowingly vapid conversations, I have to blast my eardrums with tinnitus inducing audio, in order to quarantine my mind from their stunting world views.
When Douglas Adams imagined the Golgafrinchans, I have to believe that he was in the presence of the these sorts of people, when he dreamt up that little tidbit.
It is my ardent belief that the only way to divest society of such parasitic blooms of "humanity" really is to blast them into outer space, but in order to do so, we have to learn to be really careful about how we sanitize our telephones first.
Half of being a manager is managing other's behaviors to produce a great product. The other half is managing your own behaviors -- i.e. being consistent with your communications and consistent in your behaviors.
Both of those topics have been left out of this piece.
To your second point, one definition of leadership is "getting people to want to do what you want them to do." That's also a pretty reasonable definition, and the way to do that is by providing context.
I always ask 3 questions in my discussions:
What is the company's mission?
How is your team contributing to the mission?
How does the work you're doing today contribute to the mission?
If a leader, and everyone on their team, knows the answers to all three of those questions, at all times, then they will probably be very effective.
https://adamdrake.com/three-things-your-people-need-to-know....
ICs don't pay so much attention to the CEO of the company. An IC is CEO of themself. A manager is CEO of the team.
> needs to keep his folks productive in a way that's aligned with the company goals
How is that different from "Setting the culture" ?
No! you are doing it wrong. Research shows that it's hard to change others behavior.
The other half is managing your own behaviors -- i.e. being consistent with your communications and consistent in your behaviors.
While this is in your hand but you are subject to the same limitation as your team members.
Furthermore, managing people is not about making them agree with you but to use a framework of short-term incentives to align long-term goals.
I said, "managing behaviors", not "changing behaviors".
> Furthermore, managing people is not about making them agree with you but to use a framework of short-term incentives to align long-term goals.
Isn't that a part of managing behaviors? E.g. I pay my employees money, I tell them what to do, and then they do it. That seems to me I'm managing their behaviors.
I guess I don't understand why you're arguing with me on this, since you seem to agree with that point.
This part has not been left out. All of the content about establishing culture, vision, expectations, responsibilities, and so on, is a direct part of managing others' behaviors to produce a great product. What am I missing?
> The other half is managing your own behaviors -- i.e. being consistent with your communications and consistent in your behaviors.
The article talks about this too, especially the importance of communication, consistency, discipline, and process:
> [Communication] Communication may be the most important word in this guide. It is the key to making your team operate effectively. Failure to communicate is the #1 cause of people problems (...)
> [Consistency] If you are using metrics properly, you’ll be analyzing performance on a daily or weekly basis by consistently reviewing your metrics and measuring if objectives are being achieved. This typically happens in your weekly meetings and written updates. To help facilitate your planning, there are a couple of formal analysis activities to do:
> Quarterly Summary. Reflection is a healthy and beneficial process. At the end of every quarter, each functional leader should compile a summary of the objectives achieved. The summary should include metrics and descriptive analysis on where the team succeeded vs. struggled.
In a number of companies I worked at the number one reason people left was a conflict with their supervisor.
I think a much better introduction to management is the manager tools podcast. And after listening to about 10 or 20 episodes, you'll see how hard management really is, especially if you want to do it right.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/leadership.htm
Some of them are painfully obvious, but these are sometimes absent when they shouldn't be.
(I also suspect this is what Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr either draw from, or coincide with.)
http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm
The military are really very very good at man-management ...
It's fun to think of our businesses as just like a Seal team and try to glean lessons from stories of heroism, but the reality is if the military were in the business of making a profit, retaining employees, or pleasing customers, it would fail miserably.
The reality of the U.S military is far different than the impression that the leadership papers give you.
It is difficult to understand what Good looks like until you experience it first-hand.
Afterwards, Good is as obvious as water.
Unfortunately, Good requires infrastructure, both physical and cultural, that most organizations lack.
It is also exceedingly difficult to parachute into an organization and introduce Good, as that change threatens the balance of political power. People will strongly oppose Good because it means that their jobs will change, and change is -- very honestly speaking! -- scary as hell.
In each chapter one of the authors tells a first person account of leadership on the battlefield, then they go on to relate that to business leadership with specific examples from their business consultations. Very engaging, and I think the leadership lessons they teach spot-on.
https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/B...
Many people make the mistake of fetishizing military leadership, but I absolutely thing there is a lot to be learned by studying the techniques of the organizations that have been building leadership skills the longest.
I talked a bit about this https://adamdrake.com/command-and-control.html and some of the misunderstandings that companies have when it comes to leading people.
It's essentially Marine Corp leadership philosophy distilled fitted to business scenarios.
Given the differing dominant archetypal personality traits required for those distinct modalities, it's unlikely they'd be strongly expressed in a singular person, and there's some reason to think they may be necessarily orthogonal. As their motivational biases are likely to be largely unrelated to each other.
If you try to lead, you will create activity that needs to be facilitated. The person who understands the goal naturally has information about what help the workers need in achieving it.
For example, suppose your main goal has three major pieces to it. As a leader, you define the goal and the pieces, and you inspire people to work toward that goal. But this naturally raises practical questions like the relative priorities of each piece at any given time. Nailing down actual the priorities is facilitation because it helps people be most effective at working toward the goal. And who can best understand those priorities? The person who has the vision of the goal in the first place.
'Inspiration' should be added as a trigger for workplace swear-boxes.
People aren't in work to be inspired to work more. The vast majority just want to earn a wage with the minimum possible effort.
In my opinion a leader is someone who shows those people how to achieve the goals the company has set in the most personally-efficient manner. Like following a guide through the jungle, he knows the shortest path and how to avoid the dangers. It's not inspirational it's just rational.
You could appoint a manager in the same jungle but he would just assign resources. "Bob, you're the machete man. Mark, carry these bamboo poles.". The team would then proceed to wander around the jungle.
You can appoint a college graduate as a manager but leaders need both domain knowledge and soft-skills. The military knows this, which is why a green junior Lieutenant is paired with an experienced platoon sergeant.
At most organizations I've been in, we'd struggle if the person in charge of a team (whether the CEO or a functional leader of say Marketing) was unable to both navigate and facilitate.
Could you describe the differences in personality?
Management is inward facing, paying attention to the people you are responsible for, and knowing the right thing that's needed at the right time.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Leadership is building the boat, management is making sure the boat gets built, on time, on budget, with the proper permits and inspections, training and safety gear, along with bi-weekly status reports to customers.
Some people confuse one with the other, but to me they're distinct and this is a rough sketch of how I see them as different.
Likewise a good "manager" is probably motivated by community-building and completion. A good "leader" is probably motivated by the challenge and the path itself in addressing it.
Now, to the airport!
For people who are stepping into existing teams, I suggest writing ground rules.
Ground rules are clear explanations of team expectations. Ground rules can be simple, bottom up, and help improve teamwork:
https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ground_rules
I agree fully with the author about writing objectives.
Objectives can be sophisticated, top down, and help improve planning. I suggest knowing "Objectives and Key Results" (OKRs) as at Google and Intel:
https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/objectives_and_key_re...
This is not a place where anyone with a choice would want to work.
> * Each workday has a team standup meeting. We choose 9 a.m., because it sets the tone for the day.
> * The workday has core hours when we expect people to be together. We choose core hours 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in our team's main time zone, because these are typical business hours for typical offices.
> * Beyond the workday core hours, we expect people to do their own schedule
Can you try reloading the repo page and see if it makes better sense now? Thanks for the feedback!
To keep ground rules at front of mind, each teammate is responsible and self-directed.
* I have a teammate who likes to write the core rules on the whiteboard before each meeting, and point to them when he starts the meeting, and each time a participant needs reminding. This is amazingly effective with a good sense of humor.
* I have a teammate who uses chat private messages to coach people. This is especially effective for things like video calls when we want to try the team sign language ground rules.
* I have a teammate who does weekly one-on-one meetings with every direct report, and monthly one-on-one meetings with skip level reports, and discusses the ground rules along with OKRs (objectives and key results) and KPIs (key performance indicators).
I'm always open to learning new aspects, and also to trying new ways of working. Feedback is very welcome.
Also, very American. I just stopped being CEO of a SE Asian business, and this just doesn't apply globally. There are culture differences that make enormous differences in leadership styles and outcomes.
My favoured leadership style is servant leadership, that my job is to enable everyone else to do their jobs properly. That didn't work. I had to teach myself how to do authoritarian leadership, which I hate with a passion, but it's the only style that works.
The language barrier is a huge thing. I would give an instruction, something else would happen, and the reason would be "I didn't understand you". They wouldn't ask for clarification, because of the respect thing. After training myself for years to not send emails, I had to get used to sending lots of emails again, because if it was written in plain English it had more chance of being understood and followed.
There's a ton of other, more subtle, stuff. I've been comparing notes with other western leaders here and it's a shared experience. Except for the douche bosses who are naturally authoritarian - they love it here.
For assuming leadership of an existing team, I think it depends on the state of the team. Often the teams I have inherited needed a lot of work. There wasn't a defined culture or great communication processes, so I found a lot of it still applied.
In my last business, I needed to help re-build / re-calibrate several functional teams (including our leadership team), and a lot of this stuff definitely applied.
It's a great content marketing piece though, and at first glance, far outstrips the value of the tool they're marketing to - but this is still meant to drive people to a SaaS product.
Now, with a bit more experience, I spend more time listening to people and working out how I can help them with their specific need.
As a sidenote, I hate the euphemisms “release” and “let go”. You’re firing them. Pretending that you’re doing it for their sake doesn’t make it easier for them. So just cut the bullshit. You can be honest and compassionate.
In Spanish the term is "despedido". "despedir" is the action of saying good bye. The literal translation could be something like "good-bye'd".
I hate the "similar values" proposition, like that's something practical to align with the working members of teams. How about the same attitude and similar ability? Measuring that is not easy, but it's a heck of a lot easier than trying to measure "values".
I would just provide a quick caution against over-indexing on culture. There are two issues that can come up: implicit bias, and conflicting values.
Implicit bias exists when you're not explicitly biased against a (typically protected) population. You don't hate women or gays or people with disabilities, but your culture values things that make the environment uncomfortable for those populations. One common example that shows up in gender discrimination lawsuits is that women tend to get worse reviews for being too moody or angry or confrontational, whereas men presenting the same behavior get lauded for being decisive and direct. Even if you disagree with this, that won't stop it from becoming the subject of a lawsuit. The example given regarding Beth and Tom actually fits nicely with this issue, since discrimination claims are often that women are unfriendly. (you might consider switching the personas to avoid this perception)
Another common example that shows up is "would you have a beer with the candidate" type tests. I didn't see this in your guide, but I've heard this a lot over the years. People notoriously prefer having beers with people that are very similar to themselves. That's often not germane to the job requirements, and is an easy way for bias to sneak into your hiring process.
In the same vein, I once heard the founder of a well-known startup in the Bay Area give a talk about forming teams. He said, explicitly, that he looks for signs of anxiety among potential hires (like biting their nails, or too weak of a handshake, or how they talk) and won't hire someone who is overly anxious. If someone with diagnosed anxiety were to apply for that job, get rejected, and hear that talk, they'd have the good start of a lawsuit for disability discrimination. That founder was just talking about what he values in the company, but he's actually admitting to discrimination.
The second issue is conflicting values. The companies I've seen who preach their values the loudest have tended to be the ones which are least likely to exemplify their values in their behaviors. Imagine a company which has values of "integrity" and "we're a team." If an employee were to point out behavior that they don't think exemplifies integrity, will they instantly be met with accusations that they're not playing for the same team? I know of at least one company who painted "Be a team player" on their walls, but when they were acquired, their executive team took multi-million dollar parachutes while everyone in the company got paid around a penny per share. Is that consistent with being team players?
Sorry to be negative here. Things like "culture fit" and "corporate values" can be important, but they can also be yielded as weapons if they're being relied on to fix a fundamentally broken workplace. They're also things that I increasingly hear my employment lawyer friends talk about - so watch out. It seems like the right approach is to demonstrate what your culture is through your actions and not through explicit definition. Your product and team will also likely be more productive and build a better product if it's not a bunch of clones :)
The benefit of defining your values is not descriptive, but aspirational. Your values are not "here is how all of us will infallably behave at all times"; it's "here's how we want to be, even when it's hard, because we think it's right and because we need to rely on each other to keep ourselves honest about them."
Shitty people will still manipulate or ignore those values at their convenience, but if you're working with shitty people it'll never matter what systems or values or rules you have.
I disagree that lacking stated values creates a Wild West environment: if your office building doesn't allow dogs, then it's not a dog friendly environment even if someone brings their dog to work (i.e., bad or improper behavior will be rectified).
The example of a candidate or new hires is a good one. Having aspirational values feels like it could be misleading to the new or potential employee. What happens if they come in to an environment that has stated values of "radical transparency", but finds the realized values are "passive aggressiveness" and "backstabbing"?
I don't mean to come off so cynical, but I think as well intentioned as stated corporate values are, they can very quickly become traps or weapons. This is particularly true in silicon valley, where a growing number of people have figured out that hip values can be used to manipulate employees.
Working with a north-east US team can be wildly different than a Southeast US team, or a west coast US team. Let alone a Toronto CA team, vs Quebec, CA, or UK or Australia, or Germans, or Dutch or Poles, or Indians from New Delhi vs folks from Bangalore.
People work differently, and culture and communication is wildly different.
The other big issue I've seen is around scheduling meetings with inappropriate lead times. I've come in too many times on monday mornings at 9 AM to see angry emails about not attending a meeting at 8 AM, when the meeting invitation was sent 2AM.
_Peopleware_ by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is the best management resource I've encountered.
https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-De...
It also helped to keep careful track of things I really valued (and hated) about people I've worked for.
Just one example:
Depending on team size and culture it can concerning if your manager schedules a 1:1 meeting with you out of the blue and outside of your normal cadence. I had a manager that did this, on a Friday, with the meeting scheduled for Monday. Worrying about it would have bugged me over the weekend. Not a ton, but some. He followed the invite up with a Slack (team chat app) message explaining what the meeting was and what he wanted to talk about, turns out it was nothing to worry about. Him taking the time to clarify made a difference in my morale and it stuck with me.
Super small thing, but it matters.
https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Humans-Humorous-Software-Eng...
Ask HN: I just got my first team lead. What should I do?
89 points by endymi0n on Dec 30, 2011 | 50 commentsHmmm. Older than I remembered. But a few of the recommendations in it have stuck with me and it's been as helpful as anything I've read on the topic.
https://adamdrake.com/teammate-to-team-lead.html
There are quite a few things, some of them subtle, that really change once you're in a leadership role. The frequent example I see is that people don't realize that if they are in a leadership role, then there will be decisions they make which people on their team do not like. That's ok. It's not the job of the leader to win a popularity contest, but rather to try to do the best thing for the individual team members, the team, and the company itself. A lot of people have a tough time with the fact that others won't like their decisions, but that's a critical thing to digest for those who are going to be effective leaders.
>>> People are not stagnant; instead, they are constantly learning and evolving.
There's adifference between evolving naturally and evolving because you're pushed to do so by the company. I work with people who don't want to evolve. They seek a peaceful, comfortable environment. They do their job quite well, nothing more. I understand that.
Second, values... Should people be hired because of their skill or because of their values ? What if their political views conflic with your values ? Isn't it the moment when discrimination comes in ? Say you work for Google because you love the AI stuff, then Google starts selling weapons. Should they fire people who don't share those values anymore ?
Values apply pressure in both directions.
If you have a culture like Google, and you need to pivot a significant fraction of your business to building weapons, then you will — sooner or later — need to replace a lot of employees (and manage that process, deal with the resulting morale problems etc). That's really expensive, but it might be worth it (depending on the business).
If you're actually like Google though — in that your real business isn't building weapons — then you just drop the weapons project. Dropping it will make the rest of your business more effective, which is way more important than some experimental side-hustle with the military. Ideally, you'd see in-advance that those kinds of projects would clash with your values and cause problems, but we all make mistakes.
It's the book I started out with 15 years ago and I have suggested to many others.
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321934113/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_j-...
Sadly, I read Peopleware long before I ever became a manager, and it made me very attuned to being treated badly and being given ineffective tools or support (e.g. crappy open plan seating arrangements instead of private offices).
Peopleware will open your mind to the obviousness of productivity-first thinking and accomodating basic, inescapable human needs. Which can make you reflexively sad when you see how much of our industry steamrolls these ideas in favor of idiotic open plan disasters, hazing-focused interview barriers to entry, unrealistic mandates for Agile-style estimation and work tracking, etc.
I work for a small consulting firm focused on improving productivity and building innovation systems within small-medium sized businesses. And having strategic plans, vision, values is hugely important in building a focused innovation program. It's become routine in my engagements to spend significant time defining goals and values where the companies had none previously! This sort of exercise is valuable for firms at any stage and size in my opinion.
- Are you a boss of team X?
- No, I support team X.
Make sure all employees understand relationship types and know which there have with one another.
Are we colleagues, friends, etc?
This will lead to smooth interactions.
It's especially tough for people who are transitioning from being part of a team to leading that same team. I elaborate a bit here:
Wish I would've read it years ago... thanks for the share
Good management is really about good leadership - and that does have a point person to look to. they inspire and motivate everyone else on the team. This is a much more bottom up / equitable than most mainstream practices promote.
If you're going to work and are having the hardest time with people, you should question the team. Anyone expressing an inkling of toxic, negative, or unprofessional attitude needs to be removed. Some people go bad, but it's just them telling you they want to go. Be graceful, but fire them.
Whatever you do, don't try to fix attitude. Everyone is entitled to their attitude in America, and it's the wrong battle. Let them have it.
They are not, however, entitled to contaminate your work culture, which must be upheld as sacrosanct. And, if it's you, then you've already burnt out.
A lot of old school management involves whips and dangling carrots. Managers are supervisors, and workers are presumed to misbehave without supervision. They are motivated with rewards, and put in check with punishment. Workers hate managers, and managers hate their job which would not exist if the workers would just behave. Good workers question their environment, their pay, then leave.
In reality, most ambitious professionals will behave when they take ownership of their responsibilities and opportunities, and will seek to build trust with others that do also. When handed, responsibilities and opportunities can quickly turn into dreadful obligations, so people must want them, and they will when they are aligned with their professional ambitions.
Once you have a team of such individuals, a manager is relinquished from behavior management. This holds true even at the lowest paying jobs.
Having this as the premise of your corporate culture will allow you to focus on managing work, not workers. And will allow your workers to focus on their work, and not each other. Trust will also naturally build among those showing responsible behavior. All this without "managing people". All this without "a leader".
Everyone leads themselves towards a common goal, empowered by a common philosophy, from the comfort of a common, sacred, positive workplace.
This formula took me five years, and it wasn't just the hardest part of building my business. It was five years of not being able to build my business. Today, I can say without reservation:
People are the best part of building a business.
And I am grateful to everyone, including those whom I fired, for teaching me this lesson.
If you're into this sort of management style, here's our platform which aligns well with what's described in the article. It supports flexible one page plans for a concise way to document your strategy, functional accountability charts, priority and metrics tracking as well as a meeting space to set a consistent rhythm - also performance reviews to tie it all together.
That's kind of nice, but really this should be auto generated - we should be building systems that pop out "Bob closed two sales this week, and needs one more to hit quota" - this is just a sales funnel so it's not hard - it may get fuzzier with "alice wrote the monthly report or alice completed the redesign of the home page" are just formatted git comments ?
Also the best book I've read so far on management is the excellent High Output Management by Andy Grove. Still incredibly relevant.
"Culture" kind of wants to produce a "family", but a family is not what I'm looking for when I look for a job.
Might try again later on my desktop, if you promise to remove that at some point :)
I guess it's also spun around a new startup rather than fixing an already operating business.
If you like what you read here then look up Traction and Get A Grip.
We’ve reached the end of the Formula, covering everything from culture to process. You now understand the basics of leading a new team.
Management and leadership are acquired skills, and they take practice. This guide is a framework for you to build upon, make your own and be the best manager.
... and this is how I think of my staff:
Some people might be incredible salesmen, while others can bake cookies or build a computer with their eyes closed (that would be super impressive!)
Fuck off.