This is the owner's manual of sorts, or a "manager readme" for anyone who works directly for me. Honestly, you'd figure all of this out within your first month, but since there's so much other stuff being fired at you from all directions when you start (believe me, I remember my own experience), I hope this provides some necessary insight and overview.
I manage a team of software engineers in Seattle. We work with several teams in Seattle and in Europe - you'll eventually get to know all of those people, but start by getting to know the team members in your home office.
I'll schedule a 30 minute weekly 1:1. If that doesn't work for you let's make an adjustment. For example weekly might be "too frequent" for some, or 30 minutes might be "not enough time to get into a real conversation". My goal is to be flexible and find something that works for you.
Two person meetings are the easiest to adjust when trying to find "room in everyone's schedule for a larger meeting". That means occasionally we may need to move things around. Since we meet weekly, the occasional cancellation is less problematic. Please let me know if it's critical for us to meet.
1:1s are your time, so I typically start by asking if there's anything you want to discuss. As a manager, I'm here to help you. Typically in 1:1s, we talk about what kinds of work you'd like to be doing so that can find the ideal intersection between the team's needs and your personal goals. However,your day-to-day work will come from the feature team you work with - so our chats will be less about status of your work, and more about how the work is going, how I can be a sounding board for your ideas, and if there's anything I can do to guide you, coach you, or do anything else that will help you. A bit more on this is in the How I Manage section below.
As a manager, I am here to serve you and your needs. A big and important part of my job is helping you to be successful, so use me for that as much as you want.
The following 3 points sum up a large part of my management approach.
Your relationship with me as a manager is a mutually beneficial deal for both of us. Part of my job is ensuring that you feel like you're getting what you want out of the relationship. A phrase I often repeat is "my job is to find the intersection between what the team needs and what you want". Our goal is to add value to each other, and we will help each other be successful. I will help you grow in your career and help you become more valuable to the company while you make the company successful. Our alliance may take on several forms, and we should be clear with each other on how we help each other's success.
For more on an alliance as a manager/employee relationship, check out http://www.theallianceframework.com/ - Reid Hoffman from linkedin created the framework, and I've found a lot of value in using this as a framework to describe how I work with people in my organization.
It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
-Steve Jobs
My goal is to share our high-level priorities and contextual information, and then step back and let you make as many decisions as possible. Things will not always turn out exactly as I would expect, but will usually be okay.
Most frequently, when a decision needs to be revisted, it's because I could have done a better job sharing context and goals - so I try to start with the assumption that I missed sharing something.
In some cases, I'll ask for a "super-high-level version". The goal there is to catch any missing context before you spend a lot of energy.
Regardless of whether you work 10 feet from me or 10,000 kilometers, your success relies on your independence and autonomy. My role as a manager is to provide a framework you can work in (e.g. help define your role and mission), and then get out of your way. You are capable of working with others and figuring things out - I'm here for guidance, coaching, and to help otherwise as needed. If you have questions - or need advice - or just someone to bounce an idea off of, I'm always available. I will also step in and apply additional guidance from time to time. It doesn't mean you've made a mistake or you're doing something wrong - it just means that I spotted an opportunity where I think I can help you.
I use two different frameworks to think about employee growth. The first is from Max Landsberg - but I first read about it in Michael Lopp's fantastic book, Managing Humans (http://managinghumans.com/). It's a quadrant of skill and will. You may spend time in each of the parts of the quadrant from time to time, but my role as a manager / coach is to guide you towards high skill, high will work as much as possible. This is where you provide the most value and where your strengths and skills grow the fastest.
The other model I use is highly related. It's my own, so the name is in flux. For now, I'm calling it the ACM framework (Ambitious, Comfortable, Mundane). The idea is that if you look at the work you do over a week / sprint, some of that work is new, challenging, or ambitious, a big chunk of work is stuff that you're just really good at (comfortable work), and you may end up with some work that you're overqualified for, or is boring, but that just needs to get done (mundane).
We should work together to make sure you have enough ambitious work that you are challenged and growing, if you're not learning something new every week, that's something we should work on together. We also want to minimize your mundane work. Often, your mundane work may be someone else's ambitious work.
An exercise with this model is to simply list the work you do in a sprint (or in a 1-2 week period), and then classify it into the three categories. The list should have a balance of enough Ambitious work that you're not overwhelmed, and little or no Mundane work - with Comfortable work to fill the gap. If the balance is off, we should discuss, as there's likely a way to find balance by shifting work around, discovering new work, or stopping work on some items entirely.