Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Tag: team management

  • 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?

  • It’s the Transparency, Stupid!

    A boss came to a worker:
    – Would you come to work on weekend to rescue project?
    – And what would be the reward? – asked poor little worker.
    And there was no answer.

    Actually the unspoken answer was “I don’t really know” or “I don’t want to say” or “Don’t mess with me, kid.” Either way it was wrong.

    The worker’s question isn’t a very nice one – personally I prefer working with people who don’t ask for reward before job is done. On the other hand it isn’t unexpected either. As far as you’ve done some extra job and haven’t been rewarded in any way or your so called reward could be interpreted only as an insult you learn to ask before, not after. Every manager should be prepared to hear the question.

    Being prepared here means having an answer and having the one which actually says something specific. Let it be “You’ll get this and that amount of bonus money” or “You’ll have higher engagement rating during next performance review” or “I can do completely nothing for you because I’m a crappy manager but I still ask you to come.” It’s still better than nothing.

    A reason why these are better than those above is simple. They are transparent. You show how things look like. You don’t hide your magic algorithm which is a number of overtime hours multiplied by standard rate multiplied by secret factor of 1,25. This by the way becomes perfectly clear for everyone once they do the basic math. Basically if you as a manager hide something it’s either wrong or it shouldn’t be a concern of a team. Actually the former most of the time. Even when you don’t hide you suck being a manager while you’re trying to be transparent it’s better than trying to play kick-ass boss. Everyone would know you suck anyway but you’d avoid a label of hypocrite at least.

    If something is interesting for the team or a person in the team – say it. An algorithm you use to tell how much bonus money people are going to get? Say it. Rules you use to decide on a promotion? Well, say it. New facts about this huge project you’re trying to get? Guess what. Say it. Unexpected issues with company cash flow which will bring some inconveniences for the team? How about saying it? Be transparent. People will appreciate this even if they won’t say that out loud.

    Being transparent cuts off gossips, increase team’s trust to their manager and helps to spread information among the team. It is good. Do the opposite and you won’t keep your alleged secrets and you won’t control information (and gossip) flow in any way either. Not to mention you’ll be considered as a poor manager by your team. And well, they’ll probably be right this time.

  • A Company Which Didn’t Know How to Fire People

    There was a company, which was doing reasonably well. When times were good they were growing stronger. Some people were leaving, as it always happen, but more were coming on board. Since things were rolling fast no one really had time to stop and verify whether all new faces are doing fine.

    Some time passed. Newbies were no longer newbies – they were semi-experienced people or at least their seniority would indicate that. Reality was a bit different. Some new people appeared to be great hires but other were, well, pretty mediocre.

    Then stagnation period came. There were reasonable amount of work but not as much as it used to be yet somehow everyone looked still pretty busy. Incoming stream of new people were limited and the company mostly stuck with these who already were on board. World crisis increased employee retention.

    Then people started telling stories. A story about the guy who was sleeping at his desk during one third of his office hours. A story about lad who was in the office barely 6 hours a day even though he was paid for 8-hour workday. A story about lass who was spending all days long browsing the web. A story about colleague from another office who claims she’s completely overworked yet she was doing about one tenth of what other people did on similar positions. Morale nose-dived. Productivity started dropping. On a side note – no, these examples weren’t made up.

    Where’s the problem?

    The first symptom was not doing much with poor-performers. OK, they were trying to fix their approach but when coaching and setting rules didn’t work there was no another steps. Underperformers soon learned they didn’t have to change.

    A real problem was: the company wasn’t able to fire people.

    They stuck with every single employee no matter how they sucked. And yes, I know they should try coaching, training, finding new role first. To some point they did. But face it: it isn’t possible to have only perfect teams and only perfect employees. It just doesn’t work that way. Even companies which have very strict recruitment process find black sheep in their teams from time to time. And vast majority of companies aren’t very demanding when it comes to recruitment. Especially when time is good and they need all hands on deck and would take almost anyone who can help at least a bit.

    I understand lack of will to fire people. Firing people sucks. But it’s a part of manager’s job and from time to time it just has to be done. Cost of rejecting to do this is way higher than just poor performance of a couple of people. It spreads like a sickness. Yet somehow I still hear about companies accepting underperformers for some reason.

    Update: Since the post received pretty much buzz in my company a small disclaimer: this is true story but not about my current company, not even about any IT company. Yet still it’s about a firm I know pretty well. Anyway I used the example since the case is pretty general.

  • Is It Possible to Over-Communicate In Project?

    While explaining another thing which I thought was obvious for everyone in the team but appeared as not clearly communicated the question came back to me: is it possible to over-communicate in project? I dropped the question on Twitter and expected answers like “Hell no!” Or “Maybe it is possible but no one seen that yet.”

    Responses surprised me though. Author of Projects with People found problems of being too detailed for the audience or revealing facts too early. Well, what exactly does “too early” mean? When people already chatter on the subject at the water cooler is it too early? When managers finally become aware of chatter is it still too early? Do we have to wait until management is ready to communicate the fact (which is always too late)?

    Actually gossips are powerful and spread fast. The only way to cut them is bring official communication on the subject as soon as possible. Hopefully before gossiping is started. Which does mean early. Earlier than you’d think.

    Another thing is being too detailed. This can be considered as unnecessary or even clutter. Clutter is an issue raised by Danie Vermeulen. If something doesn’t bring added value it shouldn’t be communicated. If we kept this strict we could never post any technical message on project forum since there always would be someone who isn’t really interested which framework we’re going to use for dependency injection or how we prevent SQL injection and what the heck is the difference between these two. And how do you know what is a clutter for whom anyway.

    John Moore looks at the problem from different perspective – over-communication can be bad when it hurts morale. I must say I agree with the argument to some point. Some bad news isn’t necessarily related with people’s work (e.g. ongoing changes in business team on customer side) and can be due to change. Then keeping information for you may be a good idea. However if bad news is going to strike us either way the earlier means the better. One has to judge individually on each case.

    Although I don’t see easy way to deal with above issues they remain valid. Actually I can agree it is possible to over-communicate yet there’s no concrete border or clearly definable warning which yells “This email is too much! You’re over-communicating!” at you whenever you’re going to send unnecessary message.

    The best summary came from Lech who pointed that risk of over-communicating is lower than risk of under-communicating. I’d even say that much, much lower. How many projects with too extensive communication have you seen? One? Two? Personally I’ve seen none. On the other hand how many projects suffered because of insufficient communication? I’ve seen dozens of them.

    On general we still communicate too little. Yes, we can over-communicate from time to time but I accept the risk just for the sake of dealing a bit better with insufficient communication which is a real problem in our projects.

    How does it look like in your teams?

  • Great Performances in Failed Projects

    It’s always a difficult situation. The last project was late and I don’t mean a few days late. People did a very good job trying to rescue as much as they could but by the time you were in the half you knew they won’t make it on time. Then it comes to these difficult discussions.

    – The project was late.
    – But we couldn’t make it on time even though we were fully engaged. You know it.
    – You didn’t tell me that at the beginning. Then I suppose you thought we’d make it.
    – But it appeared to be different. We did everything by the book and it didn’t work.
    – The result is late. I can’t judge the effort with complete disconnection from the result.

    How to judge a project manager? Final effect was below expectations. Commitment on the other hand went way above expected level. Reasons for failure can be objectively justified. Or can’t they?

    Something went completely wrong. Maybe initial estimates were totally screwed, maybe it was unexpected issue which couldn’t be predicted, or maybe we didn’t have enough information about the way customer would act during implementation. Who should take responsibility?

    It is said that while success has many fathers failure is an orphan. There’s no easy answer, yet manager has to come with one.

    I tend to weigh more how people acted (their commitment and effort) than result (late delivery) but I treat them as interconnected measures. In other words great performer from failed project will get better feedback than underperformer from stunning-success-project. Here’s why:

    • I prefer to have committed team even when they don’t know yet how to deal well with the task. They’ll learn and outgrow average teams which already know how to do the job.

    • I wouldn’t like to encourage hyena-approach, when below-average performers try to join (already) successful projects. It harms team chemistry.

    • If there’s a failure I (as a manager) am responsible for it in the first place. If I did my job well me team would probably be closer to success.

    • Punishing for failure makes people play safe. Team will care more about keeping status quo than trying to improve things around.

    • Lack of appreciation for extraordinary commitment kills any future engagement. If I tried hard and no one saw it I won’t do that another time.

  • Difference between Managers and Leaders

    When talking about managers people often confuse two terms: a manager and a leader. The difference is pretty simple however.

    Management is a job while leadership is an attribute.

    You can be promoted to a manager role, but you can’t be promoted to be a leader. To become one you need to work your butt out showing your leadership in the battlefield. You have to inspire people, make them believe they can achieve a goal and motivate them to work harder. Or smarter. Whatever. That’s definitely not enough to tell them “go and get that and better be quick.”

    In normal situation managers, who aren’t leaders, usually end their work when they tell their teams what to do. Micromanagers go even further. They tell what and how exactly thing should be done. Anyway they’re barely a kind of task-dealers.

    Leaders not only point goals and give out tasks but also encourage people to show their own initiative and creativity. They take decisions when it’s needed and are always ready to face any problem team can encounter. You’d willfully follow the leader while you wouldn’t follow the manager if you didn’t have to. Not that you often have a choice.

    Good manager is always a good leader while poor manager is barely a white collar.

  • A Measure of Good Management

    One of measures of good management is a number of situations when people, not a manager, decide how to do things. When the manager allows people to make their decisions. Let them become accountable.

    I’d like to see technical design document, but you decide what should be in, what out and how the whole thing will look like. Hey, you guys will be working on that later, not me.

    We need formalized risk management in the project, but it’s you who decide how to run whole thing. You know a project team better. You know what will and what will not work.

    We have some emergency in server room in another city and it has to be dealt with. Find a way to fix the problem and to minimize impact on other tasks. I don’t have all the data to make the best choice.

    The more you hear those kinds the better manager you work with.

  • Money as a Motivator

    OK, the subject will be controversial. Money as a motivator. If you ask people what motivates them to work, they’d throw a bunch of different things much more often than they’d say about remuneration. Self-development options are evergreen here, but good atmosphere, top technologies, interesting products or well-organized processes are all mentioned more often than pure cash. By the way that’s one of my interview questions and, believe me, I hear “money” much, much less than I’d expect. Rob Walling presents quite a long list of different qualities which are valued more than money by developers. That’s first perspective.

    Another one is pointing money actually does no good in the area of motivating people. David Carr in his post about money as a motivator shows a list of examples where money doesn’t really affect positively people’s work or even harm their attitude and, as a result, effectiveness. That’s other perspective.

    Personally I strongly believe in non-monetary motivating techniques. “CEO’s handshake” followed by several words of praise can have much more impact than a payload of money. That’s another perspective.

    Having said all of that, ask people if they’re willing to change the job for a better one in almost every aspect they can imagine. Better atmosphere, cooler technology, more interesting products and wide range of possibilities to self-develop. The only worse thing would be money. Few would follow. And if you leave aside those who are starting their own businesses you end up almost empty-handed.

    Now, do another test – situation is the same but in the second job money is better, but e.g. atmosphere is worse. More candidates? What a surprise. Oh, is that really such a big surprise?

    OK, where’s my point then? There are a few of them actually:

    • Money alone doesn’t work very well when you want to add motivation over the standard effort.

    • Money is very often used wrong. If it is so the result are usually opposite than intended.

    • When used well, which is rather rare by the way, money can work as a motivator.

    • Non-monetary motivation techniques are essential but they don’t substitute remuneration – they supplement money.

    • Money is more important for people than they’d be willing to admit.

  • Team Management: Find Your Way

    As you probably know, my view on management is rather classic – nothing very far from whatever you can find in a respected canon. I’m against micromanagement, but I try to care about details which are important for people. I try hard to be honest with the team and praise them when they deserved. I believe good performance reviews are important. Just old-school, boring management techniques.

    I believe that’s the way the whole management thing should be done. However it fascinates me every time I read about Bill Gates’ style of management or One Google Management Way.

    Bill, the builder of the greatest company in nineties was considered as bully and the one above isn’t the only example. OK, you can find a lot of bullies in high management around, but somehow many people in Microsoft saw in there a way to improve people’s performance. Everyone had to be superbly prepared, ready to discuss every detail of their opinions and able to resist pressure. Bill’s charisma was essential in building company’s power and his attitude was an integral part of it. You can say it’s weird and it doesn’t work anywhere else, but with Microsoft results speak for themselves.

    When you take current decade and look for its symbol you probably see Google. And you see another strange approach to management. More than 50 people in teams, when 7 people are considered as the optimal group to manage. Famous 20% of time for pet projects. Extremely tough recruitment process with more than 7 meetings on average before hiring. Engineers as sacred cows. All of those, and many more, combined in one place create unique management culture, which is against anything you could learn during an MBA course. And it builds the success of the company.

    I’m impressed. But I’m not going to follow. There are of course some ideas I’d like to implement but, in both scenarios, model as a whole isn’t copyable. As Tom Evslin writes, a barely-graduated hire won’t be as smart as Bill Gates only when he’s as rude. Typical organization won’t achieve a stunning success only when they spend one day in a week for employees’ pet projects.

    I think that organizing a company in a way which allows people to like (just like, nothing more) their employer is tough enough to doom the management to failure in vast majority of cases.

  • My Micromanagement Experience

    I’ve already written about micromanagement in general. Thing I haven’t yet shared is my own experience with learning how to live without micromanagement.

    When I started having any impact on my colleagues (I wasn’t their formal boss, it was just an informal leader role) I also got some responsibility for a part of development process – it was planning and running functional testing against an application. Because people I worked with were all newbies I decided (surprise, surprise) that I’ll do the most responsible part leaving “my” team the rest. It looked so natural. Hey, who’s the most experienced person here? Who’s the hero?

    There were only five of us, including me, so it worked well that way – the final release was hard earned, but despite 3-week slip I still consider it as a success. I earned my very own team then. It soon grew up as we took over also responsibility for support. And then the model collapsed. I could no longer take every important issue on me. I could no longer check everyone’s work. I could no longer say how to do every tiny detail of our work. More people – more managerish work and less time for the rest. Bigger responsibility – more important tasks to control.

    I was lucky to have quite a good team then with several persons which had already earned my trust, so my lesson didn’t have a big impact on our general performance, but with other people I wouldn’t be so sure if I’d be there, where I am now.

    Later on, my boss asked me who’d be my successor as a manager. I didn’t know, but I told him I’d come with some plan on that. I thought about that: “Hey, I’m the one who know the job – the team is only executor of my will. How they’d know what to do without me?” The Red Light of Micromanagement would blink then if there were any. This was another lesson to learn – the team has to do all the tasks, even most important ones (maybe except of some managerial crappy things no one wants to deal with). “What-ifs” came to support the lesson. What if I went to holidays and something serious would happen? What if a car hit me? What if I changed the job? Oh, wrong example, who’d care than? What if I was promoted than? The answer was always: it would be a problem.

    I found a couple of people and delegate (what a nice word) important tasks to them. Not every single case was delegated, but at least every type of task. I found my successor too. And when I was promoted half a year later, my leaving was totally smooth.

    There’s another lesson I still learn. I work with project managers these days and I’m often tempted to say: do this and that. Act like this. Send the darn e-mail to the darn subcontractor with the darn escalation of the darn issue. To be honest I don’t always restrain the temptation (in other case it wouldn’t be the lesson I still learn). With experienced PMs it’s easier because I know they’ll discuss it with me if they have another idea. It’s harder with those who are still learning the job. I keep reminding myself, like a mantra: “let them decide, let them decide, let them decide, let them…” I know they’ll screw some tasks. However, that way their learning curve will be narrower and they’ll progress to a level when they’ll be tough partners in discussion. Especially when I’ll try to micromanage.

    I think the last thing is the most important one – let people learn. Even when you know they’ll fall, don’t take them through the obstacles on your own back. Let them fall and give them a hand then. Most of people learn on their own mistakes, only some very smart ones learn on others’ mistakes. I prefer to have first two project done with some issues and another ten done well (without my help) than to have first to project done well and another ten facing serious issues, because I can no longer make decisions and PM hasn’t had a chance to learn how to do it himself.