Effective management

My job as a leader is to help you be as successful or more successful in your career as I have been in mine. Your growth can happen in spite of a bad leader or because of a good one. I aim to be the latter.

Here is how I boil it down. I want to be good enough at my own job and fluent enough in the jobs of the people who report to me that I can spend my time deliberately and treat your time as the more valuable resource. Seniority makes my time look more expensive on paper, so I flip that on purpose. I multiply my time by investing it in helping you get better at using yours.

What you can expect from me

• I trust you to manage your own calendar (or status).
• I run 1:1s for you, not for me. I keep notes in a private doc shared with you. Anything that shows up in a performance review will already be in that doc. No surprises.
• I plan work as far ahead as I can. I use loose planning structures and add processes only when they add more value than the time they take.
• I encourage growth days. Take a full day or split it in half. Whatever fits how you learn.

What I expect from you

• Ask for help when you need it. Nobody on my team works alone.
• Use your judgment on what to escalate. I don’t need to approve or know about everything. The test I use: if you think I would be surprised to hear about it later, I should hear about it now.
• When you need PTO, decide for yourself to take a day, and let the team know. For anything longer than three days, give me a heads up, ideally two weeks out on the calendar.

Principles I lead by

• I focus on the team’s success over individual heroics. We define what success looks like together, and I don’t measure it with vanity metrics (numbers that look good in a report but don’t reflect real outcomes).
• I take new ideas seriously. Ideas should be fostered and evaluated then decided on. I treat endless debate as a failure mode in itself.
• We should only aim to be better than we were yesterday. I don’t let us compare ourselves to larger teams.
• I lead with trust. I only add process when trust is missing, or when the team has grown past what trust alone can hold.

Other good references (WIP)

• Lara Hogan, Set future performance reviews up for success now — on running 1:1s and shared notes so reviews contain no surprises.
• Dan McKinley’s talk Egoless Engineering