Link: https://commoncog.com/g/starter-manager/
This is a short digital books targeted at first-time managers in a startup environment.
The book is about 3 hours to read and should have enough content to take 6 - 8 Months to implement.
What is the Managers Job?
“the manager’s job is to increase the output of the team.”
Everything you do should be for that single purpose.
Why does Management get such a bad rep?
- Most activities a manager performs over the course of the day do not have any direct business impact.
- It therefor is hard for people to understand why a manager should exist in the first place
- Managers cannot evaluate their value merely on the activities they’re doing, they need a different model for evaluating their impact: Managerial Leverage
Managerial Leverage
- Managers activities are good or bad measured on how they influenced the output of their team
- Example: Engineer needs spec to start project. If you have the spec ready thats good. If not, thats bad. If you rushed it and it is ready but wrong, that’s really bad.
The Manager’s Job as Your North Star
- First: If a manager’s job is to increase team output, every technique should be evaluated by how it helps to achieve that goal
- When learning a new technique, answer these questions:
- How has it helped to author improve team output?
- How may I adapt it?
- Once applied, how will I measure success?
- Measuring success can be objective (“Metric X increased”) of subjective (“Ask the team”)
- When learning a new technique, answer these questions:
- Second: Change the way you look a your growth
- Your management career is an optimization problem
- Every week, take time to reflect wether you increased or decreased the teams output this week
How to Delegate Without Micro-Management
- Delegation is hard to learn for new managers as they usually were high-performing individual contributors
- Because of that, it often happens that a manager gets involved in a task that they had delegated because the feel they could do it better themselves
Managerial Meddling
- This is bad behavior:
- It removes autonomy from subordinates
- It teaches subordinates to not take initiative, making the manager the bottleneck of the team
- Delegation can only happen in a situation where both people share a common understanding of how to accomplish the job to be done
- technical knowledge (how to code)
- institutional knowledge (acceptable standards)
- If this shared knowledge is not present, it’s the managers job to make this happen
- Managers need to train
Selfishness and the Two Hats
- The “selfish manager”: You are allowed to keep some tasks to yourself
- In startups, managers often have to wear two hats: IC and Manager
- To prevent meddling, it is helpful to ask yourself which hat you are wearing right now
Check the output
- Checking is not meddling, it’s a managers responsibility to check the output
- Delegating without checking is abnegation
- After delegating a task, you are responsible for its completion and checking is the only way to ensure that