15 December 2022

Since around 2012, I've been hanging up my keyboard (as an architect, developer, and individual contributor) to take on more management roles. I've learned quite a few things along the way, both first-hand, from observation up close, and from seeing at a distance, and I thought it a good idea to start sharing.

• "Management Lessons for Developers"
• "Hire the Fired"
• "Happy People Still Do Quit"
• "Maybe is Selfish"
• "The Value of Failure"
• "When interviews fail"
• "There is no such thing as 'best practices'"
• "The power of teams"
• "An Engineering Manager Challenge"

I've found a few principles to be true across my various managerial positions. Some of these I've shamelessly borrowed/leveraged/stolen from other places I've worked or from people I've worked with/for, but some are all me. (You can probably figure out which ones are which if you really want to.) Rocket Mortgage had a bunch of these that they called "Isms", and I like the shorthand way of referring to them like that, so these are my "Isms":

• "There's No Such Thing as 'Best Practice'"; or, "Context Matters"
• "Credibility is Currency"
• "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors"
• "Actions Speak Louder than Words"
• "Some Decisions are Bets"
• "Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast" (Peter Drucker's famous maxim still holds, almost a century later)
• "Culture Cannot be Managed, Only Exhibited" (I think Drucker knew this intuitively, and didn't realize some people would think culture meant "posters in the break room")
• "No Battle Plan Survives First Contact (With the Enemy)"
• "Never Mistake Activity for Progress"
• "Eat Your Own Dog Food" (Microsoft, I think, coined this phrase back when they would force internal employees to use pre-release copies of Windows in order to get some real-world experience with it before it hit the streets)
• "We'll Figure It Out"
• "Numbers And Money Follow; They Do Not Lead" (This one I very deliberately swipe from Rocket Mortgage; it's such a refreshing take, and coming from bankers, to boot!)
• "Simplicity is Genius... and Difficult" (Rocket understood the first part, but commonly missed the second part)
• "Practice Makes Perfect" (You get more success out of twenty fast experiments/iterations than one large swipe at perfection)

I also find a few management antipatterns to which too many companies fall victim:

• "We need a unanimous consensus to move on"
• "You can be many things here... except wrong"

... and there's a few "manager antipatterns":

• "The Absentee Manager": "What manager?"
• "The Bomb Manager": "We need to toss it all and start over."
• "The C-Buddy Manager": "Hey all, this is my buddy Tony, and he's going to be taking over the team as a favor to me."
• "The Flagpole Manager": "I don't want to make any sort of decision, ever, so I'm going to pass this up the flagpole"
• "The Funnel Manager": "Wait until you hear what my boss told me today!"
• "The Hammer Manager": "I only know how to use a hammer, so I'm going to hammer away with it"
• "The Headless Chicken Manager": "OMG OMG OMG I don't know what to do OMG OMG OMG"
• "The Laissez-Faire Manager": "I'm going to be the opposite of a micromanager, and leave them totally alone"
• "The Lateral-Move Manager": "Let's take a manager from one group and move them to run a team in a totally different area of the company"
• "The Perfectionist Manager": "Hey, it's MY team, so the work isn't done until I think it's perfect."
• "The Smartest-Engineer Manager": "Let's promote the smartest engineer on the team to manager"
• "The Sphinx Manager": "Riddle me this...."
• "The Tech-Lead Manager": "Let's just have a developer be a manager and a developer at the same time"

The full collection of "management" tags has a few more posts.

Tags: management  

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