Managing Humans

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

A nice little book about management from an IT manager's perspective. It is easy to read. It contains a lot of nuggets from a long career and helpful perspectives.

🎨 Impressions

One thing that stuck with me is that "You are not a manager until your first layoff." Good advice, I liken it to Peopleware and The Managers Path as good books for an aspiring manager.

"Reorgs take forever" - True.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Another likely situation is that your manager doesn’t actually understand what you’re doing because he was never an engineer.

• I ask the same question in every interview I have: “Where do you need help?”

• My first piece of advice to all new managers is: “Schedule one-on-ones with direct reports, keep them on the same day and time, and never cancel them.”

• Pure delegators are slowly becoming irrelevant to their organizations. The folks who work for pure delegators don’t rely on them for their work because they know they can’t depend on them for action.

• The perception of unlimited money makes people stunningly stupid, by the way.

• Just like delegation, the act of navigating politics in an organization is slippery. The difference between a manager who knows what’s going on in an organization and one who is a purely politically driven slimeball is thin. But I would take either of those over some passive manager who lets the organization happen to him.

• Your manager is not a manager until he participated in a layoff. I mean it.

• What I remember is that the senior VP of applications walked around the building, gathered the product team up, and then told us the straight dope about the layoff … in the hallway. This is what the layoff is about, this is who is affected, and this is when it’s happening. I’d never interacted with Rob, the VP, in my life and, come to think of it, I never really interacted with him again. Still, I think fondly of the guy because during a time of stress, he illuminated. He didn’t obfuscate.

• Over the course of two years, the team and the company exploded to close to 200 employees. This is when I discovered that growing rapidly teaches you one thing well: how communication continually finds new and interesting ways to break down.

• Do you have a one-on-one? Do you have a team meeting? Do you have status reports? Can you say no to your boss? Can you explain the strategy of the company to a stranger? Can you explain the current state of business? Does the guy/gal in charge regularly stand up in front of everyone and tell you what he/she is thinking? Are you buying it? Do you know what you want to do next? Does your boss? Do you have time to be strategic? Are you actively killing the Grapevine?   Note While I’ll explain each point from the perspective of a leader or manager, these questions and their explanations apply equally to individuals.

• Think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would suggest one-on-ones are a bad idea, but the one-on-one is usually the first meeting that gets rescheduled when it hits the fan. I’m of the opinion that when it hits the fan, the last thing you want to do is reschedule one-on-one time with the folks who either are responsible for it hitting the fan or are the most qualified to figure out how to prevent future fan-hittage.

• I’ll talk about shortly, the Grapevine is a powerful beast, and a team meeting is a chance to kill messages it transmits. I have a standing agenda item for all team meetings that reads “gossip, rumors, and lies,” and when we hit that agenda item, it’s a chance for everyone on the team to figure out what is the truth and what is a lie.

• Bullshit. The presence of rigid, e-mail-based status reports comes down to control, a lack of imagination, and a lack of trust in the organization.

• Here’s the deal. I believe that leaders who think they’re infallible slowly go insane with power created by the lie that being wrong is a sign of weakness

• It’s a brutal exaggeration, but I think you should independently judge your company the same way that Wall Street does: your company is either growing or dying.

• Part of a healthy organization isn’t just that information is freely moving around; it’s what the folks receiving and retransmitting it are doing with it.

• There is absolutely no way you’re going to prevent folks from randomly talking to each other about every bright-and-shiny thing that’s going on in your company. In fact, you want to encourage it. One-on-ones and meetings are only going to get you so far. The thing you can change is the quality of the information that’s wandering around the company.

• Without active prevention, the Grapevine can be stronger than any individual. While you can’t kill the Grapevine, you can dubiously stare at it when it shows up on your doorstep and simply ask the person delivering it, “Do you actually believe this nonsense

• There are two useful types of meetings: alignment meetings and creation meetings. Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails.

• Creation meetings—diving into solving a hard problem—involve, well, more creativity. Each hard problem requires a unique solution, and finding that solution is where creation meetings can go bad.

• A meeting has two critical components: an agenda and a referee. Let’s start with the obvious—the agenda. The agenda answers the question everyone is wondering as they sit down: how do I get out of this meeting so I can actually work?

• The other component is the referee. I originally thought the owner was the critical component, and while an absent owner is certainly a meeting red flag, the lack of a referee is a guaranteed disaster.

• Referee’s job is to shape the meeting to meet the requirements of the agenda and the expectations of the participants.

• A referee’s job is to shape the meeting to meet the requirements of the agenda and the expectations of the participants.

• If they’re doing anything except listening, they aren’t listening. There are lots of exits from a meeting that look nothing like a door.

• Management is a total career restart. One of the first lessons a new manager discovers, either through trial and error or instruction, is that the approaches they used for building products aren’t going to work when it comes to people.

• The ability to listen to random stories and quickly tease out a flaw in the logic or the absence of a critical dependency is just one of the skills you need to develop as a manager.

• Your job in a one-on-one is to give the smallest voice a chance to be heard, and I start with a question: “How are you?”

• How Are You? It’s a softball opener. I recognize that, but I lead with a vanilla opener because this type of content-free question is vague enough that the recipient can’t help but put part of themselves into the answer, and it’s the answer where the one-on-one begins.

• You get exactly what you expect from the Update—it’s status. These are my projects and these are my people and this is how it’s going down. I believe most folks consider this type of one-on-one to be a success, and they’re wrong.

• If someone is going to freak out, it’s going to be on a Monday.

• It’s called the Fall because in an instant the normally predictable floor upon which you stand vanishes and you enter a mental free fall where you feel like throwing up because you no longer know which way is up.

• When communications are down, listen hard, repeat everything, and assume nothing.

• Agenda detection starts by first classifying the participants. There are two major types that you need to identify: players and pawns. The simple distinction between the two types is that players want something out of the meeting.

• The next step in agenda detection now kicks in as we look at the players. This is when you figure out each player’s position relative to the issue on the table. For whatever that issue is there are two subclasses of players: the pros and the cons.

• Meetings are always going to be inefficient because language is hard.

• Your job as a manager is to move the team forward without hurting morale.

• There are three distinct phases to the mandate: Decide, Deliver, and Deliver (Again). Since you are the ultimate decision maker regarding this particular matter, we’re going to call this a local mandate. These are opposite of foreign mandates, which we’ll talk about later.

• The creation of information is the act of creating context and foundation when there is none. Call it a rumor or gossip, but what it really is is a reaction to a failure to communicate. When I hear a fantastic piece of gossip, I’m listening for two things. First, what is actually being said, and second, what informational gap in knowledge is being filled by this fantastic fabrication.

• Back to the rock star who thinks she’s about to be fired. Given that I know there is no chance she’s about to be fired, what am I hearing? First, I’m hearing, “I don’t know where I stand in the organization.” It’s not that she actually thinks she’s going to be fired—she doesn’t understand her value. Second, I’m hearing, “Given that I don’t know my value, I’m going to make up a crazy consequence, which isn’t actually likely, but boy, will it get someone’s attention

• Perhaps the biggest loss of essential information is when managers rely on their brains as to-do lists.

• Had an engineer who faithfully kept a running diary of who our new customers were, and, after a few months, he knew more about our customer base than most of our sales folks.

• Now, the point of a performance review is not the review itself but the conversation that stems from it.

• The story is, “Did you know it’s a statistical fact that people with larger feet tend to be better spellers? [Insert awe.] It’s because people with bigger feet are older.”

• Fact #3: Process defines communication.

• Fact #5: You don’t have a company until you have a product.

• We’re addicted to quick fixes, top-ten lists, and four-hour work weeks, but the truth is that if it wasn’t hard, everyone would be doing it, and a hard thing is never done by reading a list or a book or an article about doing it. A hard thing is done by figuring out how to start.

• Ask dumb questions. Your first job when faced with ignorance is information acquisition, and, hopefully, there are folks out there who’ve already done some soaking. These folks have some facts, ideas, and opinions regarding whatever the problem might be, and you need to hear them all.

• My advice regarding flame-o-grams and hard decisions is the same. Sleep on it.

• A night’s rest is one of the best ways to calm and alter your perspective on a problem. Ever gone to bed at night when the sky is falling and awoken to a blissfully simple way to easily prop the sky up? How’d that happen?

• “Seemingly insignificant events that are intent on screwing you in an unlikely way.” These events are named after Ian Malcolm, as they are called Malcolm events.

• My normal approach when faced with an impossible task is analysis, because analysis gives you data, which in turn allows you to make a confident decision.

• Once you’ve kicked yourself out of stop, iterate becomes a little easier, but if you’re truly tackling an impossible task, the Critic simply isn’t going to shut up.

• Entropy Always Wins

• Hackers are allergic to process not because they don’t understand the value; they’re allergic to it because it violates their core values.

• These values are well documented in Zuckerberg’s letter: “Done is better than perfect,” “Code wins arguments,” and “Hacker culture is extremely open and meritocratic.”

• You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary “diving save.” Whether it’s HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee.

• They’ve quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, “I no longer believe in this company.” What’s worse is that what they were originally thinking was, “I’m bored.”

• Whether someone is bored or not, you always need to be able to answer two questions regarding each person on your team: 1. Where are they going? 2.  What are you currently doing to get them there?

• Part of your credibility as a leader is your public and repeated declaration that it’s your job to help your team succeed, but you have another task: you need to keep building stuff.

• Everyone on the team needs to interview every candidate.

• Interviewing is a team sport and failing to get everyone’s perspective regarding a candidate is not only a lost opportunity in terms of gathering some random piece of perspective, but it also sends an implied message to the team when Dave gets excused

• Your second bellwether is cultural. They’ve got two aspects of the candidate that they need to assess. First, cultural fit within the team, and second, cultural fit within the company.

• A strategic hire is someone who is going to push their agenda, their opinion. They are actively engaged in what they are doing, networking with others who do it, and they’ll tell anyone, at length, about how they’re going to do it. Strategic hires are going to piss people off because of the annoying intensity of their agenda.

• A tactical hire is a person who is filling a well-defined need. “We need a database guy.” Like strategics, tacticals know their stuff, but that’s all that they know. Also, they’re not that interested in pushing an agenda. They just want to get their work done in relative silence.

• Meetings are power struggles between those who want something and those who don’t want to give it to them. If you’re walking into a meeting and you need something, your first job is to identify this person. This person is the reason the meeting is happening, and if you don’t know who they are, you’re missing essential subtext. It’s actually pretty easy. Just wait for someone to say something controversial and see who everyone looks at.

• A useful meeting is not a speech; it’s a debate.

• Incrementalists drink a lot of coffee because of their addiction to motion. Getting lost in this addiction means that incrementalists never finish a thing. They have no concept of “done,” because done would mean no more motion and who wants to stop?

• Completionists drink a lot of coffee because of their addiction to thought. Unlike incrementalists, these completionists aren’t actually saying anything because they’re deeply considering the problem.

• Love this guy. Best manager ever. I still talk to him on a monthly basis because this guy taught me everything I know about what I do. He is my mentor. Mostly harmless. This guy doesn’t really challenge me, but then again, he’s not really slowing me down. I’m not learning much, but I don’t have to put up with much bullshit. Also, I’m not sure what he actually does, but he leaves me alone … so … whatever. Worst. Manager. Ever. This guy makes my life a living hell. I dread our weekly one-on-one. I prepare for an hour and we still end up talking about random useless crap.

• As an aside, let me stress how bad of a career move it is to not know who you are going to be working for when you arrive.

• Like it or not, your boss has as much effect on your career as you do, and they also effectively sign your paycheck every two weeks, and that means food.

• What you need to know about your manager is how much he cares about this growth and, more importantly whether he sees this as his growth opportunity or the team’s.

• Titled “1.0,” but its actual title should be, “1.0 spelled one point oh my god I’m never going to see my family again.” I’ll summarize: 1.0 is incredibly hard,

• Reorgs take forever.

• Reorganizations represent opportunity to those who are unhappy with the state of the current organization. As mentioned above, the moment stakeholders hear that there is a reorg brewing, they start working the grapevine to steer the course of the reorg in their favor.

• You’re resigning, you’ll be tempted to overcommit on deliverables because you’re leaving.

• If you’re resigning, you’ll be tempted to overcommit on deliverables because you’re leaving.