Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Category: team management

  • The Role of Manager

    I took part in a very interesting discussion today. We were talking about criteria we should use to appraise leaders and managers in the organization. The most surprising part, at least for me, was discussion about notion of line manager among disputants.

    It came out that we considered average functional manager as anything between pure-manager to person who does 90% of engineering work mixed with 10% of managerial tasks. That’s a variety of options, isn’t it? As you may guess I supported rather the former than the latter.

    Well, if I’m such an opponent of letting people do what they used to do before they were promoted to management, likely coding if we talk about software teams, what I think they should do all day long? In other words what is, or should be, the role of manager.

    Leader

    This vague term describes first and most important trait most managers should have and only few have. If I’m a team member I expect my manager will show leadership and charisma. I want to be ignited to follow his ideas. I need to be sure he knows why and where we are heading. I have to see him around when problems arise. I eager to be managed by someone I’d like to follow even if no one told me so. A good manager is also a good leader but these two are not the same. What a pity it isn’t common mixture.

    Coach

    Help newcomers with learning the organization. Help inexperienced with gaining experience. Help everyone with growing. Help those with problems with fixing them. Easy? No, not at all. First, you need to know who needs what. Then, you need to know how to reach people so your helping hand won’t be rejected. Finally, you need to work carefully and patiently sharing your knowledge in experience in a way which doesn’t frustrate or dishearten people. Repeat when finished.

    Shield

    As a line manager you have some senior management over your head. This is a bad news. Actually there’s usually a lot of crap flying over there and, because of the gravity, it’s going to land down on heads of your team. There will be blame games. There will be pointing fingers. It is your time. Be a shield. Take enough bullets on your chest for the team. You’ll earn respect. You’ll earn a bunch of loyal followers. And that’s how you earn your spurs.

    Advocate

    As a manager you’re also an advocate. Devil’s advocate to be precise. You have to present and defend different decisions made up there, in the place where only C-level execs are allowed. Sometimes these decisions you won’t like. But for your people you’re still the face of the company so don’t play the angry boy and act like a man. We don’t always do what we want. After all, they pay you for this, remember?

    Motivator

    Sometimes everyone needs a kick in the butt to get back to work at full speed. It would be quite a pleasant task but unfortunately kicking butts is used as a metaphor here. It’s all about motivation. And I have a bad news here, there’s no easy answer for a question what motivates people. You have to learn each of your people individually. Oh, forgot to mention, it takes quite a lot of time to learn what drives all these people.

    Adviser

    Yes, an adviser. Not a decision-maker. At least not unless you really have to make a decision by yourself. People will come to you asking different things. Well, they will if they think your opinion may add some value and you’re capable to understand what the hell they are talking about. Of course you can guess or shoot or use magic 8 ball but you better learn (oh no! more learning) what the problem really is and help your team to solve it. Note: it is different than solving it for them, even if you know the answer. If an association which comes to your mind is delegation I must praise your reasoning.

    Now if you are done with those and still have enough time to keep up your outstanding engineering skills, please do Mr. Anderson. Unfortunately chances are good it is enough to fill more than a full working day so you’d have to choose between focusing on your management or technical skills.

    And if you happen to spend two third of your day coding, well, I dare to say you aren’t a manager I’d like to work for. Your people would say the same, but you don’t talk with them so you don’t even know. After all there’s no time to chit chat, you have to code, right?

  • Performance Reviews Are Dead, Long Live Performance Reviews

    Recent NPR story about (lack of) value in performance reviews caused a stir. Esther Derby reminded her long-time hate relationship with performance appraisals pointing that not only employees but also a lot of managers hate them. What more reviews are tied to merit pay which is also evil.

    Well, I think it is oversimplification. We think performance review and we see corporate environment with multiple levels of management, constant fight for budgets, tough negotiations about rises and likely yearly appraisals which are so outdated that hardly bear any value for employers. If we discuss this kind of reviews, then agreed, they suck. They should be banned and people enforcing them should be forbidden to manage teams for at least 5 years.

    Now, tell me I’m lucky but I had probably just a couple of these crappy appraisals. And hopefully I have performed none of those by myself. By the way if I did it to you, feel free to kick my butt if spot me somewhere.

    Actually I tend to agree more with Scott Berkun who says that it is better not to do performance reviews at all if, and only if, they are done badly. It basically means most of the time we shouldn’t run performance appraisals but I boldly state I can to do better.

    So this is the time I should answer simple question: “How the hell do you do this damned thing?”

    Don’t make it all about money

    To some point I agree with Esther. If performance appraisal is reduced to a discussion about merit bonus or raise it is fruitless at best. Money-related negotiations always suck and this isn’t an exception. If you follow some formalized process you likely have to talk about money too, but then make it as short as possible. It is no fun for both of you so make it quick and move on to more pleasant parts of the ceremony.

    It is your goddamn duty to listen

    I am a chatty guy so this one I should tattoo this on my forehead to remind it to myself every morning when I look into the mirror. Performance review is one of the best occasions to listen what your team mate has to say. Let me guess, you, as a manager, don’t have a lot of one-on-ones with folks from your team. And even if you have, there are people down there who are always omitted. By accident of course. When you run performance reviews you suddenly have to meet every single one of them, so don’t miss this chance. Learn what they want to tell you. Let them talk. Listen. Not everyone will be open but at least give them opportunity to talk.

    Make it more a chit chat than a formal meeting

    One thing I learned during my early years as a manager is that when people are stressed they won’t tell you much. Yeah, that’s an epiphany, isn’t it? The most valuable things I learned about people, about teams and about me as a leader I heard during informal chit chat which I often turn my performance appraisals into. When we have the hard part (money-related) done we can talk more openly. Actually we may discuss your last holidays for an hour if you like. If nothing else I will know that you love hiking next time we meet in the kitchen. But we may also discuss situations when I screwed up as a boss or new technologies you’d like to learn.

    Let them set the rules

    You have different people in the team. There are those who don’t really care. Performance review is something you both have to get through but they don’t give a damn. The money doesn’t matter. Your opinion doesn’t matter. A discussion doesn’t matter either. What then? Don’t waste time of both of you. Say what you have to say and get back to work. But there are also people who want to talk. Let them talk. Listen. Learn. There are people who need a discussion about different things. Be a partner in this discussion. There are people who look for information. Share it. Besides the small part you have to go through, it’s not you who should write the agenda.

    Be open, be transparent

    If you are about to say a bit more than on weekly team meeting would there be a better chance than during one-on-one? If you are about to show your human face would there a better time? If you are about to discuss your motives standing behind tough decisions would you wait for another occasion? Yes, we managers are scared to shit when we share our secrets (or things we think are our secrets). But believe me; we should do it more often. As one of the best game strategies of all time says, if you play fair you will get the same in return. Be honest, be open and you will get exactly the same from your team. Isn’t that a fair deal?

    With these few simple rules I believe I’m able to run performance reviews which people don’t hate. Actually the last performance appraisal I’ve run I’ve started saying “As you already know no bonus money this time, so we can skip the formal part. Now, let’s talk.”

    I think it was pretty good appraisal. And yes, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot despite I know the guy pretty long time already.

  • Why I Prefer to Hire Women

    I have a news for you: IT industry is dominated by men.

    – Pawel, why don’t you tell us something we don’t know?

    There should be more women in the industry.

    Which part of “something we don’t know” you haven’t understood?

    Fine, you get the message. I just wonder why you don’t hire more women.

    I confess in my current team there is round number of women. Zero. I worked with a few teams like this. And every time one of my goals was to bring a few women to the team. Why? There are a few reasons. I will generalize here and I’m going to do it on purpose. After an hour or so of interview you can’t really say what kind of personality you deal with, so you have to go with your biases and prejudices anyway.

    • Women bring different soft skills to team talent pool. They’re usually more open and emotional than men. Do a simple test and recall your last retrospective or check the record from it. Can you see how different arguments were pointed by women than by men?
    • Women bring more culture. Pure-men groups tend to change into something like herd of hogs. Bringing a woman on board magically improves everyone’s manners and language. I mean hogs are nice but I wouldn’t like to work with them.
    • Women are more responsible. This may be one of my prejudices but I find women more responsible than men. I can hardly recall any woman who came to work having heavy hangover while I have no problems to name a long list on men who did.
    • Women are more accountable. It is connected with the previous point. Women tend to treat their duties very seriously. Even when it is something they didn’t personally commit to but rather something their boss expects from them their commitment is usually stronger. And I think here about these unrealistic expectations many poor managers set against their teams too.
    • After all, there aren’t many women in the industry so don’t make it even worse.

    Having said that, I’m not going to hire woman over man just because of sex. If there’s a significant difference between two candidates I will always choose a better one, however I understand “better” at the time. But at the same time every woman entering an interview with me has a small plus for free at the beginning. I guess I could put it as one of recruitment tips but changing your sex isn’t a great tip, is it?

    On the other hand I’ve seen enough prejudices working against women to throw my two cents. And I have a question for you: having two similar candidates which one would you choose?

  • Don’t Promote Best Engineers to Management Positions

    I remember one of first post ideas for this blog back then, 4 years ago. It was about choosing people to promote them to management roles. I’ve never published the post and I’m glad about that. A few years ago I didn’t know about hiring and promoting managers more than typical decision maker in IT companies now.

    I knew nothing.

    During these few years I’ve met a number of managers who should never be promoted to any position which touches leading people whatsoever. I mean they were great engineers once. But engineering, and software development isn’t an exception, and management are two different things. They don’t even rhyme with each other. So why the hell do we keep promoting our best engineers to management positions?

    Vast majority of best developers I’ve met were crappy candidates for managers. They were thinking in terms of code, not in terms of people. And a manager isn’t the go-to-guy when you have a technical problem. (The guy is called Google by the way.) A manager should work with people, not with code, architecture or build server. Yes, the transition is possible. Hey, if someone is willing to pay me real money for managing people it is some kind of proof. But the switch is painful and time consuming. And unfortunately most of the time it just doesn’t happen.

    We end up with a lot of people around who are still good-to-great engineers but crappy managers. And we let them lead. Then, when we need to promote someone even higher we have basically no good choice. And we end up with a bunch of managers-by-accident all over the organization. As a side effect you lose your best brains when it comes to engineering.

    Skills required to be technical leader and people manager are so different it is highly unlikely that your best engineer is also your best candidate for a manager. You can safely assume your engineers aren’t different. Why should they?

    If you want to offer your best engineer management position, rethink it. Twice. Is it possible you do it because it is exactly how things were done around for years? Is it possible you’re going to lose great developer and gain crappy manager instead? Is it possible to find a better candidate within the team or outside?

    If the answer is triple yes, and surprisingly often it is so, you’re doing wrong thing. I would even say that sometimes it’s better to let your great engineer go than to make him a manager. Of course if he is a crappy candidate for management position.

  • You Can Manage Your Boss

    I often hear this excuse: “I don’t have power to change this.” Hell, I use it by myself way too often. It is a convenient excuse. Since you aren’t in position to do something the easy way you take a step back and do nothing.

    And this is wrong.

    Let’s take a typical situation: your boss sucks. If I got 10 bucks every time I heard that someone’s boss sucks I would be crazy rich. But let’s face it, I have poor opinion about managers in general and I think most managers suck anyway so I’m going to agree willingly.

    So what do you do when your manager sucks? Wait, let me guess… You do nothing. Hey, you don’t have the power, do you? You just can’t change the situation so it’s better just to accept it, right?

    Wrong.

    People are simple beasts. We all have our goals, private agendas, drivers and motivators. We also have tools which helps us to achieve these goals. Some of us have power. (And yes, I’m lucky enough I have power long enough to get used to it.) Some of us have skills. And some of us have instinct or cleverness.

    It’s not always the guy with power who wins. Actually if that was so, most of companies would work perfectly well, since every reasonable rule would be enforced and widely accepted. But somehow we see organizations which are completely sick and filled with frustration even though their leaders have mouths full of wise advices.

    It’s just they’re losing the battle with those who don’t have power but are more knowledgeable and smart.

    The trick is, to some point, you can manage everyone around. It doesn’t matter if he is your subordinate, your colleague or your boss. You can. Yes, you can. Yes, you… If I know what is important for you, what drives you and how you act in different situations I can trick you or I can build incentives for you to act like I want. Even if I’m your subordinate.

    A couple of examples. Megan had a boss who was pretty much frustrated with surrounding situation. Things were going bad. But he, as a manager, was supposed to play devils’ advocate. Megan, who knew the boss for quite a long time, felt that frustration hidden behind the mask of official optimism and decided to break it talking with the boss privately. She could do nothing, since she had no power to change boss’ attitude and then a new cool business wouldn’t emerge when they both left the company to start it.

    John had a manager who loved bells and whistles. He knew most of project decisions were made basing on what the manager personally likes, not on reasonable business analysis. When recession came and every team looked for projects John brought a bunch of cool, but basically useless, ideas to the manager. John expected the manager would personally like a couple of them and he was right. The team got the budget for these projects. Business-wise projects were useless but John played his agenda and got what he wanted.

    We all base on a lot of assumptions. Especially managers. We just can’t know every fact so we do what our gut feelings say. And finally we are biased. This means we make our decisions basing on a set of arguments which is far from being complete or even reasonable. That’s why it is not the power which is the most important since almost every power bearer can be blinded easily.

    So don’t give me excuses you just can’t change anything since you have no power. At least try. Then try again. Unless you fail a couple of times I don’t believe you can’t do it.

  • We Know Nothing about Our Teams

    I am a chatty guy. Catch me while I’m not overworked and I will gladly jump into discussion. If you happen to be my colleague, it may be a discussion about our company. That’s perfectly fine for me.

    I believe in transparency so I won’t keep all information as they were top secret. This means I’m likely to tell you more than your manager. Not because I don’t know how to keep a secret but because vast majority of managers talk with their teams way too little.

    With this approach I usually know a lot of gossips told in companies I work for. Since I also happen to fulfill rather senior roles I have another perspective too. I know what is discussed on top management meetings.

    This is sort of schizophrenic experience for me because almost always I have two different pictures of the same thing. I see senior managers praising people who are disrespected by their teams. I see folks who get credited for the work they didn’t do. I see line workers being completely frustrated while their managers are saying these guys are highly motivated. I see managers completely surprised when people suddenly leave while almost everyone saw that coming for past half a year.

    I see it and I don’t get it. All these managers do very little, if anything, to learn a bit about their people but they claim they know everything. I may be wrong but I believe I do much more to learn about my team, yet I still consider I know nothing.

    If one of you guys is reading that, yes, I’m stressed that you might leave. I’m stressed when you get out of the room to pick the phone since definitely it is a headhunter who’s calling. I can’t sleep when you take a single day off since, and I know it for sure, you have an interview. OK, I might have exaggerated a bit. Anyway in terms of my knowledge about my team I know that I know nothing.

    And you know what? If you are a manager you are no better. Because generally speaking we know nothing about our teams. Even if we are friends with our subordinates our professional relationship is much of unknown. With strangers we usually work with it is much, much harder.

    Stop expecting you know oh so much about your people and at least try to talk with them. If you’re lucky you may find a couple of folks who actually are willing to talk with you. Remember though, if you ignore them once or twice they aren’t coming back to you.

    It looks like I have a pretty poor opinion about quality of people management in general. Well, I must admit I do. I would be a hypocrite if I deny it regarding my recent posts on subject:

  • Managers Are Clueless

    So you’re a manager. You even think you’re pretty damn good manager. Fine for me. Do you remember Pointy-Haired Boss? Yes, that clueless manager from Dilbert cartoon. You have this guy sitting in your head. So do I, by the way.

    Is that supposed to be insult? Well, not exactly. I really think every manager has this clueless version of himself in the back of his head which is used more often than we’d like to admit. You still don’t believe me. Do a simple exercise. Think about your team. Arrange members from the best to the worst. Easy?

    It wasn’t supposed to be easy. The trick is how you decided that one ‘average’ person is after all better than another ‘average’ person. Some guessing I guess. Why exactly you have chosen the best one? And what a couple of worst people have done to earn their place? Is it possible that you justify their position with some past event (success or failure) which was spectacular enough they earn the place in your mind? Is it possible you didn’t take into consideration recent history because you already are strongly biased?

    And now the best part, think how many things you haven’t taken into consideration. You haven’t thought about tons of important things and you were still able to say who is better and who is worse from others. And no, I don’t believe none of them are important. Isn’t that clueless?

    A Confession

    I worked with bunches of underpaid and overpaid folks. I saw work which was underrated or overrated just because of person who authored it or the person who judged or both. Many of decisions standing behind these situations were mine. I’m not proud of it.

    What I can say is I didn’t do it on purpose. I just lacked knowledge. Sometimes I wasn’t even conscious my knowledge was insufficient to make a right call. Sometimes I should try harder or think more. I was, and I am, a clueless manager. I try to fight it but that’s an uphill battle. I have my prejudices and preferences and I don’t claim I’m able to fully ignore them.

    The Bad News

    I’m not the only one. I’m tempted to say that every manager is so because the only ones who would be different must be heartless robots which aren’t great candidates for managers anyway.

    This means you as a manager, and your manager too and her manager and so on, are clueless to some point. Usually more than you’d like to admit. This mean there’s a chance your judgments aren’t fair or your work may be misjudged. And finally this means your subordinates can trick you along with your cluelessness to make you think better about them.

    Managers were, are and will be clueless. We may fight with it but we’re likely to fail. Most of us don’t even try anyway.

  • No Meeting Culture

    Meetings are boring. Most meetings are irrelevant. There are too many meetings we have to attend.

    A confession: during past half of year I organized exactly two meetings with engineers in my team. Both were mostly about organizational issues regarding whole company, not just my team.

    How did I do that?

    Let’s start with why meetings are organized. Most of the time meetings happen to enable communication between people. Why don’t people just go to meet each other at their desks? Well, because they sit in different places, have different things to do and, often, have little free slots in their calendars. Sometimes they need to prepare themselves to say something reasonable and invitation to the meeting gives them time for that.

    Basically all these reasons become non-existent when whole team sits in one place.

    You don’t have to busily gather people from different places because, surprise, surprise, everyone is there.

    You don’t have to wander what people do at the moment since, well, you just see it in a glimpse. You can make your call whether it’s a good time to interrupt them at the moment or you should wait for a quarter.

    You don’t feel urge to finish in planned time slot even when the discussion is great and you’re solving problems like crazy. Neither do you feel this funny feeling when everything was said but no one hurries back to work and you just spend your time on chit chat because a meeting room is reserved for another half an hour.

    You can even allow starting talking with folks on subjects they aren’t prepared to. You can because whenever they need to prepare they’ll tell it and a discussion will be restarted later. This is like instantly starting a meeting instead of sending invitations. Odds are everyone is ready and you don’t waste time. If they are not it works similarly to invitation with agenda but better since you start meeting as soon as everyone’s ready.

    You should still think how improve transparency and communication flow but, believe me, once you start talking about almost everything in front of your team, even though you’re talking with a person next desk, people will know way more than they would otherwise. It would work that way even if you reported all your workweek on 4-hour long weekly summary with your team, which would be a candidate for the top dumb management practice of a year by the way.

    And the best thing. With this approach you magically clear everyone’s calendar. Finding slot when everyone is free becomes the easiest thing under the sun because everyone basically stopped attending meetings.

    A cherry on the cake: finding free conference room doesn’t bother you anymore.

    Downsides?

    It won’t work for 50 people. As far as teams aren’t bigger than 10 people it should do well. Vast majority of teams fall in to this category. Sometimes you need to focus and you don’t care about architecture discussion happening over your desk. You can take a break or try to isolate yourself with headphones. Either way it is a cost, but on average it’s significantly lower than it would be if you switched for old-school meeting approach.

    This applies only to team-related meetings. If your people have a lot of cross-team meetings and spend long hours on company-wide roundups filled with jabber this doesn’t have to be huge improvement. But then you’re doomed anyway. One of my engineers attended a few meetings on coding standards beyond these two I organized.

    The approach works best for engineers. Project managers and business people will meet other people more often that once per quarter but it should be still an order of magnitude meetings less than it used to be.

    I wouldn’t get this kind of crazy idea but it happened so my whole team is collocated and it’s the best organizational thing which could happen. If you think it’s drastic, you’re wrong. Meetingless environment comes naturally. Maybe it so because this way you possibly are all time at the meeting, but at the same time you “meet” people only when it’s really needed.

    Try it. And tell me what happens.

  • Co-location Rules!

    A lot of interesting discussions today. During one of them we went through co-location and its influence of team productivity.

    I’m lucky enough to work with all my team in one room. I’m aware of all disadvantages of grouping people doing different things in one place but I’m still saying I’m lucky.

    • I know development requires focus. I know that grouping a bunch of people in one place generates some chit-chat which distracts people trying to focus on their tasks. I know occasional phone calls do the same. I accept the fact. Hey, have I just said I accept lower productivity of our developers? Bad, bad manager.

    • I know most people would consider a private office as a huge improvement from open-space. I wouldn’t offer that to my people even if I had a chance to make them this kind of offer. Ops, I’ve just admitted I wouldn’t make my people happier even if I could. How come?

    It just about trade-offs. While putting people together invites costly context switching because of distractions it also brings huge values in terms of team work.

    • Instant problem solving. It’s enough one person to ask another one about some issue to see insightful discussion emerging virtually instantly. You don’t need to think whether PM should join since he’s here and he joins as soon as subject appears interesting for him. Solving problems as you go is much more efficient.

    • Communication improvement. Communication issues are probably number one issue when it comes to visiting dead-ends, doing the same job twice or banging the wall hard with your head. When I think how much effort is wasted just because a couple of people didn’t talk with each other I believe every method which improves communication is worth considering and most of them are worth implementing. Co-locating people is one the most efficient choices here.

    • Reducing number of meetings. Many meetings aren’t even needed. However they’re scheduled because they’re considered as the easiest way of communication between more than two people from different rooms. Remove walls and you’ll automatically remove many meetings. People will have more time to do the real work.

    • Atmosphere building. Try to cheer up person who sit next to you. Tell a joke or something. Succeeded? Great. Now do the same with the person sitting on other floor. It takes walking and other tiring physical activities. It’s harder. You won’t do it so often.

    • Getting to know people. You’ll know better a person after sitting with her in one room for a month than after working in different locations for a year.

    And yes, I believe these compensate reduced productivity and happiness. Actually not only compensate but add more too. Net value is positive. That’s why co-location rules.

  • Technical Leadership and People Management

    The other day I had a discussion about leadership and management. When we came to an argument that there’s no chance to advance to a position where you can facilitate leadership and management skills in discussed organization several people (from present and from past) automatically came to my mind. They all have the same problem which they may overlook.

    They all are (or were) great engineers. People you’d love to have on your team. But at some point of their careers they started to think about having their own teams, managing their own people. Hey, that’s natural career path for great engineers, isn’t it?

    Well, actually it is not.

    Do a simple exercise. Think who you consider as a great engineer, no matter if he’s a star book author or your colleague no one outside your company knows about. Now what do they do to pay the rent? I guess they are (surprise, surprise) engineers, tech leads, freelancers, independent consultants or entrepreneurs. I guess there are none who would be called a manager in the first place, even when they happen to do some managerial work from time to time.

    Why? Because these two paths are mutually exclusive. You can’t keep your technical expertise on respected level in the meantime, between performance review of your team member and 3-hour status meeting with your manager. You either keep your hands busy with writing code or you get disconnected with other developers out there.

    On the other hand what makes you a great engineer usually makes you a poor manager at the same time. If you spend all day long coding, you don’t have enough time for people in your team. And they do need your attention. They do much more often than you’d think. If you’re going to be a decent manager big part of your time will be reserved on managerial tasks. There won’t be enough time left to keep on technical track. Sorry.

    That’s why all these people who I thought of have to (or had to) make a decision which way they are (were) going to choose. Technical leadership path means most of the time you won’t have people to manage but you may be respected as an architect, designer, senior engineer. If you’re lucky enough you can even get one of these fancy business cards with title of Chief Scientist or Chief Guru or maybe just a simple Co-Owner.

    Managerial path on the other hand will make you feel lame during basically every technical discussion out there but yes, you will have people to manage. If you’re lucky, and I mean lucky, not competent, you’ll become VP or something.

    You have to choose. Or you had to some time ago. What’s your choice? What do you regret about it?