More thoughts about management.

I wrote this as my answer to an application question for a remote company a few years back. It’s a bit outdated, but I thought I’d share it anyway.

In a broad sense, to me management is about people and the things that stop them from achieving what’s important at an individual, team and company level.

It’s about understanding and helping solve the issues stopping a team from being in their A-game, which starts with the individuals and ends with the company as a whole. If a team has issues because people are distracted thinking about how bad their CI solution is, or someone is blocked every morning because they aren’t getting the information they need from another department, it’s a manager’s job to find out and help the team come to a solution. The best solutions come from the people closest to the work, but the responsibility of finding and facilitating the resolution of those issues is on the manager; sometimes that means just supporting the team on a decision they made, and sometimes it means solving it yourself in one way or another.

I believe one of the best things you can do as a manager is becoming skilled and comfortable at delegation and facilitation, and always pushing yourself to delegate larger and more important work to the people who demonstrate they can do it. It means you are comfortable looking from outside, coaching people to excel at their assignments, and being accountable for work that you had very little to do with in the day to day.

It’s about delegating authority, rather than only tasks.

You have to be comfortable saying no often and explaining your rationale as needed, but you also have to be able to check yourself and reevaluate If someone comes to you with a concern about a decision you made.

Understanding and communicating the value of what we’re doing so that others have the context to make smart decisions is one of the most high value things you can do as a manager. People deserve to understand why their work actually matters, and they produce much better work when they do.

An effective manager should be comfortable switching between coach and the person being coached, being able to put yourself in a position to ask questions to get to the root of a problem without letting your ego get in the way.

Being a decent manager can mean being aware that you have very little control and still owning up to whatever the team is achieving or not. It’s finding the time to be connected to the work that the team is doing and being able to facilitate decisions, but not letting yourself hide from problems in the comfort of coding. It’s also remembering that your work touches real people with real lives.