The Manager's Path

# Chapter 1 - Management 101

One-on-One Meetings
- create human connection that provides a baseline to identify when things are bugging you, or outside concerns are impacting your life, changes in energy & attitude
- provide a regular opportunity to speak privately about whatever needs discussing, outside of status updates (beyond critical/strategic projects)
Feedback and Workplace Guidance
- behaviour feedback on an ongoing basis
- ideally: public if praise; private if criticism
- feedback immediately after the act trumps waiting for the appropriate forum
- review prior to presentations, feedback on drafts of written documents
- Ally for your role and career plan
- Identify and assign stretch projects
- Show value of work that might not be fun or glamorous - bigger picture
Training and Career Growth
- liaison between team member and company bureaucracy
- finds & possibly provides mentorship and training
- Understanding promotion and compensation

Think about what you want
- areas of interest
- what is your 2-5 year plan RIGHT NOW?
You are responsible for yourself
- bring agenda items to your 1:1
- ask for roles, tasks; advocate for your interests; seek out feedback (and separate receiving feedback from accepting it!)
Understand that managers will make mistakes and help when you can
- develop a strong interpersonal relationship over time
Choose Your Manager Wisely
- consider who your manager will be as part of career moves
- differentiate between strong engineers who make good early-career mentor-managers and later stage advocate-managers. What do you need?

The first act of people management is likely informal (then explicit) mentoring
mentoring allows someone to explore managing in a relatively low-risk environment
when mentoring temporary workers (like interns) it's more important that they love you and the company than you love them, as their experience will be widely shared
term-based project provides a measureable goal and anchoring vision for their experience
cycle of listening, communicating expected actions and adjusting based on responses
careful listening is a requirement to developing empathy, itself a core management skill
unspoken communication dwarfs spoken; listening is a full spectrum activity
new hire mentoring is a critical part of onboarding
allows you to view the company through a fresh perspective
jump-start connection with various human networks
mentors you be explicit in their expectations of their mentees
mentors have an opportunity to be more candid than official managers but still need to be professional
mentees should give some thought as to what they want from their mentor relationship
when managing a mentor define what you wish to achieve by creating these relationships
recognize the additional responsibility assigned to the mentor and accommodate accordingly
mentorship can be used to train and reward future managers on the team

Potential Roles:
- systems architect
- business analyst
- project planner
- software developer & team leader
take time to explain in a clear, non-threatening, non-condescending way
comparing technical and management tracks
envisioned ideal life of a Senior IC:
- deep thinking, hard technical problems
- autonomy in projects
- code-centric
- technical authority
- respected
reality:
- slower promotion
- less greenfield projects than anticipated
- new developers are too needy or too cocky
- manager is not supportive of all your ideas and viewpoints
- lots of meetings
- support of legacy projects and day-to-day process

Do people on the team prefer public or private praise?
What are their work motivators?
What are their work demotivators?
What are disliked manager behaviours?
Are you providing clear career goals and allowing investigation of unclear areas of interest?

TIP: Have new hires contribute to onboarding documentation

Use the team’s goals to understand which details you should explore
Gather information from the systems before involving team members
Adjust your focus depending on the stage of the project
Establish standards (ed: consistent expectations?) for code and systems
Open sharing of information, both good and bad, should be presented in a neutral to positive way

Team cohesion destroyers to identify and address:

Quadrant of Tasks:

Delegate simple and frequent tasks
Handle simple and infrequent tasks yourself
Use complex and infrequent tasks as training opportunities for leaders in training
Delegate complex and frequent tasks to develop the team

The role differences between a VP of Engineering and the CTO?

Two key areas of focus:

Process: