Engineering Manager

Managers should support six to eight engineers. This gives them enough time for
active coaching, coordinating, and furthering their team’s mission.

Tech Leads Managers supporting fewer than four engineers tend to function as
TLMs, taking on a share of design and implementation work.

To create a new team, grow an existing team to eight to ten, and then bud into two
teams of four or five.
Four states of the team:

A team is falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than it was the week
before. Typically, people are working extremely hard but not making much progress,
morale is low, and your users are vocally dissatisfied. In this scenario we should add
more people to the team. Provide tactical support by setting expectations with
users, beating the drum around the easy wins you can find, and injecting optimism.

A team is treading water if they’re able to get their critical work done, but are not
able to start paying down technical debt or begin major new projects. In this
scenario we should reduce the scope of work and give team some time to pick up.

For team to innovate you need to add slack in their time. In this case, it’s to
maintain enough slack in your team’s schedule that the team can build quality into
their work, operate continuously in innovation, and avoid backtracking.
I believe that sustained productivity comes from high-performing teams, and that
disassembling a high-performing team leads to a significant loss of productivity, even if the
members are fully retained. In this worldview, high-performing teams are sacred, and I’m
quite hesitant to disassemble them.
Teams take a long time to gel. When a group has been working together for a few years,
they understand each other and know how to set each other up for success in a truly
remarkable way. Shifting individuals across teams can reset the clock on gelling, especially
for teams in the early stages of gelling, and when there are significant differences in team
culture.
The lesson is that you have to account for re-gelling costs after periods of change, not that
you should never change them.
1
That is why we should do hiring on the team which has lot of technical debt rather the one
which is running smoothly with lot innovations.
We should absolutely can concentrate that growth, such that your teams alternate between
periods of rapid hiring and periods of consolidation and gelling.
Your team’s success and recognition depend significantly on your relationship with your
management chain. It’s common for excellent work to go unnoticed because it was never shared
upward.
You can’t scale your impact or engage your team if you don’t give them enough room to do things
differently than you would. Many organizations become bottlenecked on approvals, which is a sure
proxy for lack of trust.
The issue, of course, is that if your reports don’t tell you how they’re really feeling, you can’t help
them.
Great leaders know their strengths and weaknesses, and what gets them into trouble. They understand what
happens to themselves under pressure and stress, and they realize the impact they have on others.
They should be good at communicating ‘WHY’
Without good managers, employees are less likely to be effectively trained, get their work done, and execute
their plan of action.
Managers have to be tactical, taking a short-range view and focusing on processes, functions, and jobs.
2
A manager’s job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together through
influencing purpose, people, and process. It is about the



People(Are the members of your team set up to succeed? Do they have the right skills? Are
they motivated to do great work? We must understand the strength and weakness of the team.
make good decisions about who should do what (including hiring and firing when necessary),
and coach individuals to do their best),
Process,( important processes to master include running effective meetings, future proofing
against past mistakes, planning for tomorrow, and nurturing a healthy culture.)
Purpose (what team is trying to accomplish and why your work matter, team knows what
success looks like and cares about achieving it).
“That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of
collaboration.”
Hackman’s research describes five conditions that increase a team’s odds of success:




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having a real team (one with clear boundaries and stable membership),
a compelling direction,
an enabling structure,
a supportive organizational context,
and expert coaching.
3
Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will
only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as
high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.
You can be someone’s manager, but if that person does not trust or respect you, you will have
limited ability to influence him.
One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for
each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece
of information to do their job.
4
You’re a full-time engineering manager, you’re the tech leader of the people, and you’re also a
project manager.
Recognition for hard work, valuable skills, helpful advice, or good values can be hugely
motivating if it feels genuine and specific. There is one quality that sets truly great
managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then
capitalize on it.
A good project manager is one who elegantly and deftly handles information. They know what
structured meetings need to exist to gather information; they artfully understand how to gather
additional essential information in the hallways; and they instinctively manage to move that
gathered information to the right people and the right teams at the right time.
Good CEOs know that they should double down on the projects that are working and put more
people, resources, and attention on those rather than get every single project to the point of “not
failing.”
A good project manager owns the execution of the machine that makes sure everything is
getting done. It’s no more or less important than any other role, but it’s essential to starting
a project, understanding the health of that project, and deciding when you’re done.
5
Good project managers have a unique insight into the health of the project because it’s
their job to have visibility into the entire machine.
A good project manager’s job is to decrease chaos by increasing clarity. They should not use
information to control rather than to illuminate.
As a lead, you have three jobs— people, process, and product —and you get to choose how to invest
in each of those roles. You should be best at product followed by process, and, finally, by people.
Questions to ask to the team in which you are replacing another manager.
In some situation, the best policy is to be honest with your own manager about what’s
working for you and what isn’t, and to understand his expectations for your ramp up. A new
manager on my team once confided in me that he’d had more difficulties connecting with
his peers than he expected, and as a result he wasn’t able to influence decision-making.
What gets in the way of good work?


The first is that people don’t know how-to do-good work.
Like person might not have right skills. As the manager, you can do one of two things
here: help your report learn those skills or hire somebody else with the skills you
need.
The second is that they know how, but they aren’t motivated.
Like One possible answer is that he doesn’t have a clear picture of what great work
looks like. Another possibility is that the role doesn’t speak to his aspirations; he can,
but he’d rather be doing something else. Or perhaps he thinks nothing will change if
he puts in more effort—there will be no rewards if things improve, and no penalties
if they don’t, so why bother?
Accelerate Employee Engagement
6
Employee engagement is not about happiness and satisfaction, though being engaged will
lead to happy and satisfied employees. It is when employees have a deep personal
relationship to the company and their fellow employees.
It is when an employee goes beyond their own personal gain for the sake of the
organization. It means doing tasks, working toward goals, and going the extra mile because
they want to, not simply because they have to.
There are key accelerators to employee engagement: Purpose, Clarity, Development,
Recognition, and Leadership.
People want opportunities to grow, learn, and develop. We all want advice, feedback,
mentorship, and advocacy.
People and teams want to be recognized for their accomplishments, achievements, goals,
and milestones, and for their impact and contributions. They want to be recognized
financially (raises, bonuses, stock, equity, and rewards), through advancement and
promotions, and through increased roles and responsibilities.
Does your feedback have the intent and impact of being in the spirit of helping that person?
Are your comments going to help your team be successful and reach their potential?
Feedback should be provided on a regular basis, as close to real-time as possible.
The best thing you can do when receiving feedback is to listen. Don’t judge, react, respond,
or get defensive. If you need to ask clarifying questions, then do so.
Separate the “what” from the “who.” If the feedback is on-target and the advice is wise, it
shouldn’t matter who delivers it.
Engineering Manager advice to be near technical
One of the biggest challenges of managing at scale is finding the right balance between going deep
on a problem and stepping back and trusting others to take care of it.
7
Managers job is to hold people accountable to their performance. It’s giving them goals and
objectives. It’s giving them feedback on their performance. That’s the management part of the job.
It’s the day-to-day guidance and supervision of your people.
The leadership part of your job is about establishing a vision, outlining a strategy, and inspiring,
motivating, coaching, and developing people.
When you start advancing, if you continue to be too hands-on with the day-to-day, you are risking
failure. Understand what success is at the level you are at! You have to be more strategic and
externally focused, relationship focused with subordinates, peers, and boss.
8
The simple fact is that well-defined roles in software development are fading. Stay flexible,
remember what it means to be an engineer, and don’t stop developing.
To prevent these screw-ups, the more organized members of the team create process. Their goal is
to provide structure around the work we do and to eliminate guessing. the goal of a healthy process
is to define structure so that order is maintained and predictability is increased.
In order to become more effective as a leader, you need to shift your focus from telling to asking, to
facilitating dialogue.
One of the most effective ways of demonstrating your expertise and knowledge is by asking the right
questions. You show your competence, your strategic capability, your knowledge, and your vision not
by telling, but by demonstrating it through asking questions.
It’s important to cultivate strong working relationships across the enterprise.
The more you grow, the more things you have, and the more you need people whose job is simply
to coordinate the increasingly interdependent building activities. These people, called managers,
don’t create product. They create process.
Done is better than perfect.
Different companies use the names differently, but for this article,
project = ship the product,
product = ship the right product, and
program = ship many interrelated products, usually at the same time.
The ownership means that a person is responsible for all decisions for the thing. They are
accountable.
Leadership Dichotomy
A good leader builds powerful, strong relationships with his or her subordinates. But while that
leader would do anything for those team members, the leader must recognize there is a job to do.
And that job might put the very people the leader cares so much about at risk.
If his relationships are too close and he can’t detach from his emotions, he might not be able to
make tough choices that involve risk to his men.
The fact that you care about your people more than anything—but at the same time you have to
lead them. And as a leader, you might have to make decisions that hurt individuals on your team.
But you also have to make decisions that will allow you to continue the mission for the greater good
of everyone on the team.
Fine Balance of Delegation
9
At higher levels of management, the job starts to converge regardless of background. Success
becomes more and more about mastering a few key skills: hiring exceptional leaders, building selfreliant teams, establishing a clear vision, and communicating well.
The manager should be clear when to pitch in and when to take a step backward and entrust others.
If you dive in too much, and you’re the micromanager. You ask your reports to run every decision by
you. You’re constantly checking in with people, asking for status updates and diving in to the
minutiae of tasks. When people become accustomed to being told what to do, they begin to await
direction. Initiative fades and eventually dies. Creativity and bold thought and action soon die as
well. The team becomes a bunch of simple and thoughtless automatons, following orders without
understanding, moving forward only when told to do so. A team like that will never achieve
greatness.
With this approach even if you get results, your style is stifling. Talented people leave because they
can’t stand working for you. They don’t feel that you give them trust or breathing room to operate.
And they’re not learning because they don’t get a chance to solve problems on their own.
At the other extreme, if you step back too much (hands-off leadership), you’re the absentee
manager. Some of your reports appreciate the independence, but most wish they had more support.
When things get rocky, your team feels like the Wild West, a place with no rules because there’s no
sheriff in town.
The hands-off leader with a laissez-faire attitude is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Such a
leader fails to provide specific direction—in some cases almost no clear direction whatsoever.
Your hands are pristine because you rarely roll up your sleeves and get into the nitty-gritty. You
don’t make hard calls or proactively push things forward. Over time, you lose credibility as a leader
because … well, you don’t do much. And your reports aren’t learning because you’re not coaching or
challenging them. People whisper that maybe you aren’t really there at all—you’re simply overhead.
Children’s need love and support, but like all kids, I craved independence. I wanted the freedom to
deal with my own issues my way.
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In fact, the most talented employees aren’t looking for special treatment or “easy” projects. They
want to be challenged. There is no greater sign of trust than handing your report an intricately
tangled knot that you believe she can pull apart, even if you’re not sure how.
Constantly talking about the purpose with your reports makes it more vivid in everyone’s minds.
When the vision is clear, the right actions tend to follow.
Pay attention to your own actions—the little things you say and do—as well as what behaviors you
are rewarding or discouraging. All of it works together to tell the story of what you care about and
how you believe a great team should work together.
Beginning Your First Week

Get to know the organization chart

With time, you’ll be able to form your own independent view of your team. You’ll know how
they are performing, the direction of their work in the future, and the individuals themselves.

Your manager’s observations. Your manager will be interested in your performance, which
fundamentally is your team’s performance.

Setup one to one with the team to know things like:
1. You’ll want them to describe what the team is responsible for and what they are
currently working on.
2. The opinion about what they like about the team and what is going well compared to
what they currently find most challenging and needs improving.

Question to team:
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In your initial meeting with your staff, there’s a technique to make breaking the ice easy: just
ask open-ended questions that allow them to do most of the talking, and let the information
that you want to discover to come to the surface naturally.
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?”
A one-on-one is not a project meeting. A one-on-one is not status report. A one-on-one is an
opportunity to learn something new amidst the grind of daily business.
A productive one-on-one is one where we talk strategically about how we do stuff, but more
importantly, how we might do this stuff better.
As a manager You should be easily approachable to the people.
As my team grew, my capacity to spend long, focused blocks on a single topic began to shrink.
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Your report should have a clear sense at all times of what your expectations are and where he
stands.
If you think he is the epitome of awesome, tell him. If you don’t think he is operating at the level
you’d like to see, he should know that, too, and precisely why you feel that way.
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how
you made them feel,
But at the end of the day, you are only one individual with a limited amount of time. You can’t do
everything, so you must prioritize. What are the most important topics for you to pay attention to,
and where are you going to draw the line? Perfectionism is not an option. It took me a long time to
get comfortable operating in a world where I had to pick and choose what mattered the most, and
not let the sheer number of possibilities overwhelm me.
At higher levels of management, the job starts to converge regardless of background. Success
becomes more and more about mastering a few key skills: hiring exceptional leaders, building selfreliant teams, establishing a clear vision, and communicating well.
13
Your primary job during the Disaster is to defuse, and you start defusing by contributing absolutely
nothing. If you’re a logical, reasonable management type, you’ll be tempted to ask clarifying
questions—to try to shape the problem. Don’t. Be quiet. Let the emotion pass.
As with the Vent, success comes with traversing the emotional explosion. There will, hopefully, be a
point when the majority of the emotion has passed, and the aggrieved will be willing to having a
rational discussion. Unlike with the Vent, the discussion won’t be about the core issue. It will start
with the Disaster, with understanding the intense emotion surrounding the topic.
End your initial meeting by thanking them for their time and letting them know that you’ve
noted everything down. Repeat any actions you’re going to take back to them for
confirmation.
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Work of programmers and architects is deep and takes time to achieve productivity.

One-to-one meetings are one of the most important regular activities that you’ll perform as a
manager. Make then reoccurring as regular cadence is important.
Also request your own manage to set on-to-one with you also. As a manager myself, I actively enjoy
when my staff proactively seek my time and guidance. From your manager asks below questions like
specially if he is older in that organization the you:
Rule of thumb: When the debate is no longer productive, it’s time to decide. Remember that for
every person on the team who has a strong opinion regarding the decision, there are probably four
other coworkers who just want someone to make a decision so that they can get back to work.
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Make an action List:

Items to talk about with your team: Any issues as a result of poor communication downward
are good topics of conversation.

Items to talk about with your manager: Issues that are a result of poor communication
upward should be discussed with your manager. For example, why is it that you and your
team can see that they are clearly understaffed, but your manager can’t? Is the manager
unaware that they are struggling? If so, how is their performance being measured and why is
this slipping under the radar? You also can discuss false beliefs to get another opinion on the
matter.
It is important to capture and organize the information:
Be present and visible, get involved in day-to-day discussions, and contribute technically if you have
the time and inclination.
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A manager’s communication should never be driven by increasing their social capital. It should be
informative, useful, and actionable.
As a manager you represent yourself, your team, and your company as a whole. Be a role model for
those around you.
Trust is a cornerstone of leadership.
It’s about gaining and giving respect. It’s building credibility. It’s finding common ground. It’s
recognizing that trust, respect, and relationships are bidirectional: you trusting your people, and
your people trusting you.
Show sincere interest in someone as a person, not just their role, tasks, and responsibilities.
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The #1 thing great communicators have in common is a heightened sense of situational and
contextual awareness.
The best communicators are great listeners and are astute in their observations.
The message is not about the messenger. It is about meeting the needs and expectations of those
with whom you’re communicating.
Develop a command over your subject matter. If you don’t possess subject matter expertise, few
people will give you the time of day.
The “fake it until you make it” days have long since passed, and “fast and slick” sounds too good to
be true. Although the delivery of your message is important, the content of your message is what
truly matters.
Email or text is effective for stating facts and providing information and updates. When email or text
is used to debate, provide opinions and feedback, or to try to influence or persuade, bad things
happen.
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Many leaders try to influence and persuade during a meeting or a presentation, in front of an audience or their
bosses, or attempt to introduce a new concept, or push back on someone’s idea. Trying to influence and
persuade at the moment is not the best tactic.
The way the Capitol Hill effect applies to business is that you never show up to debate or vote and surprise
people with what you’re trying to influence them to do. You’ve got to get behind the scenes and understand
what they’re thinking, what they want to do, what they’re interested in, and how they react to your thoughts.
To be successful, do your real work ahead of time, behind the scenes. Learn if they need time to process and
kick the tires, or if they are comfortable with being direct. Develop relationships, know how people are likely
to react, and plan for that. Influence and persuade people as individuals rather than as a group. Test theories,
plant seeds, and identify likely initial reactions.
Increase your ability to understand people’s positions, reactions, and views, and vet them behind the scenes
instead of putting all your cards on the table in one all important moment.
There are two core tactics that are most closely associated with gaining commitment from others:
1. Rational Persuasion involves the use of explanations, logical arguments, and factual evidence to
explain why a request or proposal will benefit the organization or help to achieve a vital task
objective. The key to using rational persuasion is the ability to convert features into benefits as seen
by the person you are influencing.
2. Inspirational Appeals involves an emotional or value-based appeal, in contrast to the logical
arguments used in rational persuasion. While rational persuasion appeals to the “head,”
inspirational appeals focus on “the heart.”
Delivering Feedback
Being able to deliver effective constructive criticism is a surefire way of making your staff improve
and seek your counsel as a leader.
The best way to make your feedback heard is to make the listener feel safe, and to show that you’re
saying it because you care about her and want her to succeed.
For a leader, giving feedback—both when things are going well and when they aren’t—is
one of the most fundamental aspects of the job.
The feedback inspired you to change your behavior, which resulted in your life getting better.
Set Clear Expectations at the Beginning, the feedback process should begin before any work does.
During this phase, make sure you address the following:
 What a great job looks like for your report, compared to a mediocre or bad job
 What advice you have to help your report get started on the right foot
 Common pitfalls your report should avoid
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Give Task-Specific Feedback as Frequently as You Can. This is the easiest type of feedback to give
because it’s focused on the what rather than the who, so it feels less personal.
Task-specific feedback is most effective when the action performed is still fresh in your report’s
memory, so share it as soon as you can. As the name “task-specific” implies, you provide this kind of
feedback about something that someone did after the fact.
Share Behavioral Feedback Thoughtfully and Regularly. These feedbacks reflect on your report’s
unique strengths or areas of development as shown in his patterns of behavior.
Behavioral feedback is useful because it provides a level of personalization and depth that is missing
from task-specific feedback. By connecting the dots across multiple examples, you can help people
understand how their unique interests, personalities, and habits affect their ability to have impact.
Behavioral feedback helps people understand the reality of how others see them, which may be
different than how they see themselves. It can feel difficult to talk about because it is so personal—a
friend of mine likens it to “therapy sessions”—but at its best, you help your reports walk away with a
deeper understanding of themselves and how they can be more effective.
Collect 360-Degree Feedback for Maximum Objectivity
send a short email to a handful of his or her closest collaborators asking:
a) What is X doing especially well that X should do more of?, and
b) What should X change or stop doing?
When you do have critical feedback to share, approach it with a sense of curiosity and an honest
desire to understand your report’s perspective. One simple way to do this is to state your point directly
and then follow up with, “Does this feedback resonate with you? Why or why not?” Most of the time
when I ask this question, the answer is yes, and now the person has both acknowledged and reflected
on the feedback, so it’s more likely to stick. If the answer is no, that’s fine as well—now we can
discuss why that is, and what would make the feedback more useful.
The second is to summarize via email what was discussed. Writing can clarify the points being made
as well as be reread and referenced in the future.
One suggestion that might help you with your next presentation is using the rule of threes—no more
than three goals, three sections, and three bullets per slide.
Giving Critical Feedback
The best way to give critical feedback is to deliver it directly and dispassionately. Plainly say what
you perceive the issue to be, what made you feel that way, and how you’d like to work together to
resolve the concern.
Both number three (I’m concerned about the quality of work that I’ve been seeing from you recently)
and four (Your last few deliverables weren’t comprehensive enough to hit the mark) accomplish that,
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Delegation




Simply put, delegation is the transfer of responsibility for a task from yourself to a direct
report.
While delegating the work to the team, ensure to provide mentorship and support to the team.
Once the work is delegated ensure to follow through on it and you are aware of the quality of
the work done and do regular checks.
The key to good delegation is understanding the difference between accountability and
responsibility. Delegation is giving responsibility of a task to somebody else, while
maintaining accountability for it.
It’s important to remember each task is delegated individually. This means different tasks should be
delegated in different ways.
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A critical task may shift the amount of delegation that you do to the left because of the nature
of the work. For instance, if the production environment has been broken by the latest deploy,
you may check in more regularly with your senior engineer that is fixing it than you would
for the same bug fix on the development environment.

You should maintain accountability over outputs, not the process or approach.
Working with Your Manager
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To rate the team leads
Questions:



How you measure the performance of a manger and what traits you look for ?
How to measure the team performance? Is it simply through the output of their team, or is it
through team happiness, retention, or all of these things?
It shows that you’re interested in career progression and growing outside of the confines of
your role.
Try to make a summary of the weeks work based on:
One to One
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

There should be focused one to one with your team members. They allow you to engage with
your staff at personal level.
The topics can be very diverse and the meetings should be regular in a cadence.
You want to be able to have candid and transparent conversations, since that’s the valuable
and interesting content, so ensure that it’s able to happen.
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
There should be a rolling agenda (that contains agenda/meeting notes from multiple meetings
on one, continuous document.) to your one-to-ones in a shared document with the team
member. A private document is a great way of recording what is discussed within your one-to
ones and capturing actions that either you or your staff have to do.
Always give direct and honest feedback.
There’s a useful exercise that you can both follow that allows both parties to openly talk about what
they expect from one another and then outline their wants and needs from the relationship. This
exercise is called contracting,
When preparing for your first one-to-one, explain that you’re going to do a short exercise to
understand how best you can support your direct report as their manager.
Questions can be like:
1.
Which Areas Would You Like the Most Support With?
2. How Would You Like to Receive Feedback and Support?
3. What Could Be a Challenge of Us Working Together?
If you are assigned a challenging project and If you frequently drop in and ask for an update or give
unsolicited feedback, you risk making your report feel disempowered. He’ll be constantly checking
over his shoulder, paranoid that you’re just around the corner.
At the beginning of the project, let your report know how you’re planning to be involved. Be explicit
that you’d like to review the work twice a week and talk through the most important problems
together. Tell him which decisions you expect to make, and which he should make.
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Agenda of one -to-one can also be:
Remember on below:

One to one is their Meeting, Not Yours
Try and get your direct reports to do 70% of the talking. If you feel like solving their problem for
them, don’t. Ask another question and let them arrive at the conclusion themselves.
Throughout the one-to-one, it’s useful to jot down notes and assign actions in the shared document.
Review the actions at the end of the meeting.
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Remember: You Are Not a Therapist
Your seniors seem capable and knowledgeable, and your more junior staff are talented and looking
for opportunities to contribute and to grow.
You’d learned how Ben and Tara thrive in uncertainty, whereas Amy and Paulo crave stability. Each
of them wants to grow and work on new and challenging problems. How are you going to ensure that
each of your staff are being exposed to the right type of adversity in a way that allows them to enjoy
their job as much as they can and do a meaningful work(Work that uses your talents and skills to your
maximum potential.)
What Motivates People?


to ensure that our staff are challenged, happy, and motivated
money, which they will see as a catalyst for a better life.
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An infinite amount of money will not make you happier, but an infinite amount of creative activities
and ability to master new skills will.
The creativity and autonomy of that work outweighs the lower income.
The Zone of Proximal Development
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The zone of proximal development defines the area in which a person cannot progress without the
presence of another person with a higher skill set to assist them.
However, once the person has understood and completed the task, they are able to take on tasks of
even higher difficulty, pushing their zone of proximal development toward harder and harder tasks.
By applying what you’ve learned about delegation and the zone of proximal development, you can
delegate tasks in such a way that encourages collaboration, teaching, and learning, all the while
improving the skills of your staff.
You can apply the zone of proximal development at a task level in a number of ways. For example,
try delegating a challenging programming task to a less-experienced member of your team, but pair
them with somebody more senior. This improves the programming skill of the junior and the
mentoring skill of the senior.
Individuals with type of approach to work:
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Performance Reviews
Performance reviews are an essential part of your toolkit as a manager to ensure that your staff are
supported, given opportunities to talk in depth about their careers, and to continually set goals.
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Reflection
Question: How do you feel in your role right now? Has that changed for the
better or worse since your last review?
Development
Question: Is there anything that could have gone better during the period?
What skills do you think that you need to develop?
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The Future
Question: Consider your future at the company. Where are you aiming to go?
What would you ideally like to accomplish or work on? Or are you happy where
you are now?
Support
Question: What sort of support do you need in order to get to where you want
to go in future?
Thing to do on the day of review
Inform people of their pay raises at another time and let them know that this is going to be the case.
Don’t let money distract you from a focused conversation around performance.
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People Hiring
What the study found is that in interdependent team sports, an increase in talent increases
performance to a point, after which further increases in talent become detrimental as the coordination
within the team suffers.
There are many parallels to overstaffing a team with seniors. For example, seniors may be used to
pointing in a particular direction and then having the rest of the team align and support them in getting
there. Too many strong opinions may cause conflict and disarray rather than getting there twice as
fast. Additionally, a good balance of senior staff with those that are less experienced gives plenty of
mentoring opportunity for the senior, which in turn improves the whole team in an interconnected,
interdependent manner.
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A Job Description Template



What your company is doing and why it’s interesting and important.
What the role is within the company that they could be doing, and what kind of work that
entails.
What you’re looking for in them in terms of their background, skills, experience, and
interpersonal traits.
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People leave for many legitimate good reasons
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New opportunities. Sometimes there’s no room for an employee to be promoted any higher in your department, so
instead they’re going to find that role elsewhere, or they wish to join a company where there’s more room for that role
to be created.
Family Reasons.
Compensation. Sometimes your staff are in the right industry at the right time and get offered a life-changing
compensation package elsewhere: the sort of package that could mean they could retire ten years earlier or that their
partner could quit their job.
When somebody hands in their notice to you in order to depart for good reasons, your main aim should be to make
their exit as amicable as possible.
Bad Reasons for Leaving
Most of reasons on this are tied to a lack of open and honest communication from both parties.
Compensation. Your direct report was unhappy with their end of year pay raise, yet they felt that they
were unable to talk about it openly with you.
Issues with coworkers. Your direct report simply couldn’t stand one of the people on their team, and
every day over the last six months has been immensely frustrating for them.
Career progression. Your direct report handed in their notice because they’ve been offered a role at
another company that’s a significant level up on the career ladder. They cite that there were no
opportunities for promotion in the department.
Lack of challenge or new experiences. Your direct report has become exceptionally bored of writing
code for the API and would love to increase their skill on your data ingest architecture instead. They
didn’t feel like they could ask to change teams, as they felt that they were employed for the role that
they are currently doing.
You should never fight to keep staff if you cannot actually provide the conditions under which they
can become happier than they already are. You’ll just defer their departure.
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Excellent managers are well connected, and being well connected carries a myriad of benefits.
You can build rapport with staff in other departments who can become influential stakeholders in
your future projects.
You can increase your profile in the company, which gives you a better chance of being considered
for new opportunities that can grow your career.
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You’ll begin to realize that part of your job as a manager is to shield your team from input that is too
messy, disruptive, and emotional when it would be detrimental to them doing their work well.
This requires a good amount of emotional intelligence, judgment, and support. When a difficult or
uncertain time requires a change in direction of your team, you want to be able to communicate this in
a calm and reasoned way that results in those that report to you understanding the issue and being
ready to work on change, rather than wanting to flip desks and set the whole place on fire.
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Communicating
Now it’s time to deliver the news to your own people. You may want to reframe the message before
passing it on.
The number of reasons that you may hear as to why your team isn’t “working hard enough.”
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Engineers are also self-motivated. It’s likely they’re not doing this particular job because they have
to. They’re doing this job because they want to. What exactly motivates them can vary greatly from
person to person: some enjoy optimizations to make things faster, some enjoy building customerfacing features, some just love problem solving.
True leadership to increase throughput comes through fostering purpose and passion in your
team.
When your engineers are clear on their purpose in the organization and how they can move the dial
for the company, they’ll intrinsically perform better.
When they are passionate about their work, they’ll do a better job because they intrinsically enjoy
doing it.
It requires emotional intelligence, understanding how they work and what motivates them, and the
ability to build the trust and rapport with them so that they want to join you on this journey. It’s a
long-term play, not a short-term play.
Autonomy: People has desire to be self-directed. We should create the conditions within your
team to allow them to choose their own path while still working toward the collective goal?
We can give them more choice over the way in which they solve problems and the tools they
use.
Mastery: The opportunity to learn new things and provision of mentorship.
Purpose: We want to contribute to something greater than ourselves. Are the projects that
your team is responsible for clearly defined in terms of their purpose within the wider world.
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Surface the real difference that the team are making from within the work that they’re doing
so that they operate with a connection to why they’re making the world a better place.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect:
A cognitive bias of illusory superiority in people of lower ability. In many social and
intellectual domains, people tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities. This may
lead to
 Poor decisions by junior engineers
 Rash decisions by senior staff
Impostor Syndrome:
A concept where high-achieving individuals are unable to internalize their achievements and
fear being exposed as a fake or fraud. It’s possible that high-achieving individuals may not
give an outward
appearance that is congruent with how good they actually are. This may lead to


Overly shy junior engineers
Overly cautious senior staff
Whereas those on Mount Stupid may be overly confident and brash because of their lack of
knowledge about their own inabilities, those who have impostor syndrome may be overly
unconfident and shy because they believe their own success is due to something other than
their intelligence and hard work. This gives the impression to others that they may not know
what they are doing, creating a nasty clash with the outspoken and confident people on
Mount Stupid.
Knowledge work cannot be easily split into discrete tasks: there’s always communication
involved. You can’t chop a programming project into two without increasing the amount of
communication required to get it done. So even if your team, department, or company has
gotten bigger than it was before, you can’t expect a linear return on investment for the
number of people added.
As a manager, it’s important for you to make sure that your teams are developing software in
the most pragmatic way possible and that requirements, progress, and achievements are
transparent to the rest of the business.
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Your engagement point is to have your team work with your product owner to break the
product or feature into epics and stories that each deliver tangible added value to your
application. Then, from there, work together to prioritize it.
Encourage categorization of features into must, should, could, and won’t. Work labeled as
“must” absolutely needs to happen. Anything with the “should” label is important, but you
could probably get away without it for the initial milestone or deadline.
After labeling the features and ranking them in order of prioritization, work with your
product owner and team to decide where the milestones are. Should the team aim for all of
the musts along with a handful of shoulds for the first release? Which should-haves could be
part of the second release? Deciding these up front can save a lot of future stress and panic by
giving you buffers to work with. Knowing which parts of the scope can be dropped in case of
delays and technical issues gives a safety net for when things go awry.
Task parallelism: How much of the work in the scope is sequential, and how much can be
done in parallel? Two separate services can be developed independently, but iterations of the
same service or component cannot.
Technical difficulty: Is this looking like a business-as-usual increment of functionality in
your existing application, or is this a new innovative piece of architecture? This drives
decisions about which of your staff might be required to work on it, or at least offer their time
to oversee it.
As a manager, information is your currency. The more you know, the better the decisions are
that you can make. But not all information is good. Information can be gossip, rumor, or
malicious lies. The longer that you spend in this role, the more that you’ll be exposed to.
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Politics in the workplace are always going to happen. You shouldn’t choose to not engage
with them, because if you don’t, then you’ll find that your career suffers as a result,
especially as you spend more time in management.
Getting politics right builds your authority, influence, and ability to get things done, opening
up further doors in your managerial career.
Identifying this up front allows you to navigate sensibly through the political landscape and
gives you the best chance of knowing who to go to to build consensus on particular issues,
and who to approach differently or even avoid.
Who makes decisions in your organization?
Who is influential?
Who are the close groups of individuals that think similarly, and who are the rival factions?
Once you’re done, set yourself a challenge to introduce yourself to them and begin building
some connections. Remember that to have influence and to make an impact, you’ll need to
win hearts and minds.
As companies grow in size, projects and initiatives move forward through collective effort
rather than just the force of will of an individual. When working, you’ll need to understand
that consensus—at least as much as you can get—is important.
Build consensus by making others feel like they always have the opportunity to contribute to
what you are suggesting rather than it appearing to be a mandate. It will unlock the ability to
make wider-reaching decisions.
Appearances and interactions are important. You need to be yourself in a consistent manner
to ensure that you’re able to engage well with others and represent your teams correctly and
respectfully. Don’t pretend to be somebody you’re not. Don’t act a part to attempt to impress.
Just be you. That’s more than enough. You’re great.

Your network of peers is important as it allows you to be more broadly informed
about how the wider business feels about your own initiatives and priorities.
During times of stress, the urge to take back control and begin meddling and micromanaging
is there. But you shouldn’t succumb to it. It’s easy to yearn for absolute control, but it will eat
you alive. You work through others. That’s your job. It’s what effective managers do.
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Guilds are a straightforward yet powerful technique for preventing silos. A guild is a group
of people who work on different teams but share a common interest or skill set.
Guilds concern themselves with the following matters:
• Discussion and progression of best practice across an interest or discipline.
• Information sharing across multiple teams.
• Improving the visibility of that interest or discipline within the company.
Human beings love to share with each other. We enjoy uploading our photographs to social
media so that others can see them and comment on them. Young toddlers consistently point
at objects and call out what they think it is to get your attention. We also enjoy movies,
books, and theater, which are a more formal way of sharing a story or information.
Architecture Decision Record
As you progress on your own projects and reach a decision point—a design choice, whether
that be stylistic, framework-related, or a choice on how to build some infrastructure—you can
capture that choice in an ADR.
ADR should capture:
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Who’s Responsible for That?
A common issue is around ownership: sometimes important things can be missed because
they have no clear owner, such as a service going into production with no monitoring.
Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI). Typically assigned to whole projects, a DRI would be the
person with whom the buck stopped.
There will be clear DRIs for quality (for example, your QA) and for storage decisions (for
example, your back-end engineer). Each DRI doesn’t necessarily have to be the person doing
the work in question to achieve that initiative, but they are responsible for championing that
cause and interacting with whoever they need to move it forward. It can be an empowering
role.
DRIs are a stripped-back version of a traditional responsibility assignment matrix (RACI),
They say that a given accountability lies with this exact person, and they have whatever freedom they
need to ensure it’s upheld.
Individual Contributor Track
ICs are the ones that get the products made, the features shipped, and the architectures
implemented.
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As your ICs progress in seniority, you would expect them to be working on more complex, openended, and self-directed problems, involved in higher-stakes projects, and having a wider reach by
mentoring others and advising other teams.
Management Track
We measure the output of a manager, which is the output of their team combined with the output
of the others that the manager influences.
Generally speaking, however, the most surefire way of a manager increasing their output is for their
team to get bigger.
Teams become too large, and the amount of time that’s needed to spend with each individual
becomes prohibitive. A rule of thumb is that a manager should have at maximum around seven
direct reports.
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They may have explicit accountability for a functional area (for example, a collection of
infrastructure teams). Alternatively, an experienced manager could be hired into an organization to
manage a division, consisting of many teams.
Creating a Progression Framework, help your staff talk to you about where they feel they currently
are in their career and what skills they would like to work on. Set expectations of where they might
go if they continue to perform well at the company.
Frameworks should act as a compass which gives direction not a GPS (a specific route to follow
whether you like it or not).
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Likewise, it may be beneficial to outline some ballpark estimates of the percentage of time ICs spend
between writing and reviewing code and reviewing designs and architectural approaches
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https://www.progression.fyi/
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer
Trident Career Model
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The Management Track
In this track, people spend a majority of their time (70-80%) on management activities. This
still includes leading people, supporting people, managing structures & processes and
organising. People in this track must still have some background in the topic they are
managing.
They manage the surrounding system & structure to ensure people closest to the work have
the best context and information to make better decisions. They provide enough support,
time and/or budget to enable others to do what they do best.
Technical Leadership Track
In this track, people spend a majority of their time (70-80%) leading people on a technical
topic. People in this track must have relevant hands-on technical skills and experience.
They should have good but not necessarily the best skills in the team they are leading.





Establishing a Technical Vision
Managing technical risks
Clarifying/uncovering technical requirements
Ensuring non-technical stakeholders understand technical constraints, trade-offs or
important decisions
Growing technical knowledge and cultivating knowledge sharing in and across teams
Tech Lead, Principal Engineer, Software Architect
True Individual Contributor (IC) Track
In this track, people spend a majority of they time (70-80%) focused on “Executing/Doing”.
This track still requires people to have excellent communication and collaboration skills.
People in this track have impact through the deep/detailed knowledge or skills they offer.
DB Specialist, Performing Tuning Specialist, Domain Specialist.
People move on all the time to seek new opportunity, higher salary, novel challenges, and varied
locations.
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This means that we need to keep two things in mind at any given time with respect to our careers:
• The current plan, which is usually defined in a period of a year.
• The long-term vision, which we’re always moving toward.
Few Questions to ask to yourself.

How do you feel about your current job? What do you enjoy the most? What do you wish
you could change?

How do your skills currently map to the most innovative work happening in industry, and are
you traveling in that direction? Do you want to be?

Do you ever experience days in which you’re happy to jump out of bed and head into work?
If so, what drives that?
Creating Your Skills Backlog
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The good news is that both the stable eras and the transitions are great opportunities for growing
yourself. Transitions are opportunities to raise the floor by building competency in new skills, and in
stable periods you can raise the ceiling by developing mastery in the skills that the new era values.
As the cycle repeats, your elevated floor will allow you to weather most transitions, and you’ll thrive
in most eras by leveraging your expanding masteries.
Growth only comes from change, and that is something you can influence.
Many employees rely entirely on their manager to come up with a step-by-step path to high
performance. That only works when designation momentum is taking you in a direction you’re
happy with. If it’s not, you need to be the active participant in your success.
Propose a set of clear goals to your manager, and iterate together toward an explicit agreement on
the expectations to hit the designation you’re aiming for. The goals need to be ambitious enough
that your manager can successfully pitch the difficulty to their peers during calibration.
Designation momentum occurs for individuals, but it also happens for teams and organizations. For
teams in this position, setting clear goals is a good start, but it’s also necessary to align with your
peers and leadership about why your work is important. It’s your work as a leader to explain why
your work is important in terms that the organization understands and appreciates.
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Level drift. Because level expansion is typically driven more by the need for career progression than
by the introduction of objectively distinct accomplishment, levels added at the top create downward
pressure on existing levels. Expectations at a given level decrease over time.
The career ladder is the foundation of a successful performance management system, and it’s not
possible for a role to be valued or evaluated coherently without a thoughtful career ladder.
Sometimes folks rush ahead to hire before writing the ladder, but the work required to design an
effective interview loop is roughly equivalent to writing a career ladder, so I’ve found that skipping
this step is an act of false economy.
Transformations are about creating an environment in which innovation can flourish to create new,
differentiated offerings and bring them to market at the right time.
The second element of success, team cohesion, comes from allowing the capabilities being
developed (the Bounded Contexts) and the relevant team members to evolve over time, until the
right combination of people and offering emerges.
The third element, technical excellence, is rooted in a deep respect for the technical complexity of
software.
The formula for success is: highly skilled people, deep thinking, and constant experimentation.
Highly successful people seemed to get there by breaking through limitations of how their jobs were
defined—by conceiving and doing extra things above and around their job descriptions.
Being a manager is a great job (I mean it), but it’s your ability to construct an insightful opinion
about a person in seconds that will help make you a phenomenal manager.
Your manager is your face to the rest of the organization. Right this second, someone you don’t
know is saying something great about you because you took five minutes to pitch your boss on your
work.
A manager’s job is to transform his glaring deficiency into a strength by finding the best person to fill
it and trusting him to do the job.
Conflict Resolution
As a manager, it's your job to identify this common ground to help these colleagues resolve
differences. Try starting at the fact of what happened and moving down, like so:
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
Separate the “what” from the “why”

Discussing a conflict with your direct reports is tricky. You need to be open, listen, and ask
smart questions to get to the core issue.
Try a sequence like: What happened?, Why did it happen?, What circumstances enabled the
why?, and Is this an isolated problem or a pervasive one?
The most important thing is to give your employees space to share their perspective and their
concerns without putting words into their mouths or placing blame. This should be the basis
for opening your discussion up to help your employees see their conflicts clearly and identify
solutions together.
Although there will be conflicts that you can solve with a compromise that makes everyone
more or less happy, there will also be situations where you cannot please all parties. In these
cases, you need to use your understanding of your team, your goals, and your superiors to
come up with the solution that has the most benefit, even if it comes at a cost.



1. Clarify what is the source of conflict
The first step in resolving conflict is clarifying its source. Defining the cause of the
conflict will enable you to understand how the issue came to grow in the first place.
Additionally, you will be able to get both parties to consent to what the
disagreement is
2. Find a safe and private place to talk
To have a constructive conversation, you need to find an environment that is safe for
you to talk to. And while at this place, ensure that each party gets enough time to air
out their views regarding the matter.
3. Listen actively and let everyone have their say
Give each party equal time to express their thoughts and concerns without
favouring the other. Embrace a positive and assertive approach while in the
meeting. If necessary, set ground rules.
4.
Investigate the situation
After listening to the concerns of both parties, take time, and investigate the case. Do not
prejudge or come up with a final verdict on the basis of what you have. Dig deeper and
find out more about the happenings, involved parties, the issues, and how people are
feeling. Have an individual and confident conversation with those involved and listen in a
keen manner to ensure you comprehend their viewpoints.
When managing conflict processes, you need to have a common objective, which is
resolving the issue and ensuring it does not resurface.
So, after investigating the situation and determine ways through which you can resolve
the issue, both parties need to develop a conclusion on the best solution for the problem.
And to agree on the best, you need to identify the solutions which each party can live
with. Find common ground. Afterward, determine the responsibilities each party has in
resolving the conflict.
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What does it take to manage conflict effectively?
 For one, conflict needs to be acknowledged. When conflict is brought to the surface,
problems can be addressed, and people can take action to resolve issues.
 Another key to managing conflict is clarifying the source of the conflict.
 Mostly there 4 issues which results in conflict in work environment:
1. Differences of Facts which are easy to resolve as they are concrete. They
can be checked, compared, and tested, and this provides a basis for
discussion and the exchange of information.
2. Different Method to achieve a goal however, shared goals mean that a
logical, rational way of choosing among alternative approaches is
possible—it’s just a matter of convincing everyone that a particular
method will achieve the goals at hand.
3. Different Goals where people have different objectives and may
support different courses of action. Occasionally, when differing goals
exist, a third person may be needed to determine which goal (or
combination of goals) is most appropriate.
4. Different values they are often not able to be resolved. People’s beliefs
tend to become inflexible over time and are often based on emotion
rather than reason. Finding common ground and separating those that
are not solvable from those that are, frequently moves such conflicts
toward productive action.
People disagree with each other all the times but not all disagreements leads to conflicts.
Disagreements might be useful for a team to learn and grow. As long as the disagreements are
impersonal based on facts and not on personal likes and dislikes it is fine to have them.
Disagreements should be stick to the current question/issue at hand not on any past grievances or
unrelated cases and people should not try to pull each other down.
Conflicts should be solved by the people who were involved. Conflicts generally
started on misunderstanding or misinterpretations.
To resolve conflicts we should first directly talk to the people involved and come
up with the common understating of the situation. If the conflict is purely related
to the work let the team try to resolve it internally but if goes personal then
outside help is required.
During conflict resolutions we should strive towards a consensus(option with
lowest resistance) rather than a compromise. The consensus can be built
iteratively and let the team work other to come up with the best solution.
Avoiding acknowledging the conflict and assuming to will go away on its own is
first natural reaction but if conflicts are brought up to the surface and everybody
involved start to acknowledgment the presence of conflict the it is easy to fix it.
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There’s a hierarchy that defines what you need to build in order to ship 1.0
Steps to take during the disaster



Try to understand absolutely everything you need to know about the current state of the
disaster—you are developing a mental model. Ideally, I want to be able to draw a complete
picture for everyone about whatever the hell is currently happening.
Every single person who has any relevant knowledge about the situation is now going to
parade through the War Room, and you’re going to capture and triangulate all of their
knowledge.
The initial goal during this step is information acquisition, not action. Each time you take
action with incomplete data, you risk stoking rather than extinguishing the disaster fire.
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
Having a solution where all the implications of the solution are not understood is not a fix.
You must take the time to explore all the implications—and in my experience this takes
longer than it takes to come up with your plan.
People Quit
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.”
More importantly, boredom is not initially catastrophic. Boredom shows up quietly and appears to
pose no immediate threat. This makes it both easy to address and easy to ignore.
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There’s no shit work when the work is all yours; there’s just work you like to do and work you have
to do.
We all get shit work, but it’s the responsibility of the guy or gal in charge to dole this work out fairly
and consistently. That means they’re constantly aware of and communicating with the person who is
currently taking one for them, and they know how long they’ve been taking it and when they’re
going to be done.
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A nerd is motivated to understand how a thing works—how it fits together. They prefer consistency.
For a team members 3 things which are important are
 space,
 compensation and
 tittles
Skill vs. Will Plus Epiphanies
One axis is skill—
 how much skill does the employee have to do his job?
 Is he qualified? Overqualified? How long has he been doing it?
 When is the last time you know he learned something new? How quickly does he handle tasks
compared to his peers?
other axis is will—
 Does she like her job?
 Is she viewed as energetic by her team? When is the last time she generated a great idea that
blew your mind?
 Is she talking in meetings or listening? Is she ever talking? Is she always talking?
The best idea generation comes from understanding that we need both time to think alone (because
our brains are most creative when we’re by ourselves) and time to engage with others (because
hearing different perspectives creates sparks that lead to even better ideas).
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Hiring Process
There is projection roll forecast plan which happens half yearly. In this Hiring Manager needs to
forecast how many people needed and raise a requisition in MyHR system by generating the PIDs
with the help of HR recruiting partner
The requisition should contain the PID + Job Description + Role Level + Location.
These are assigned to a particular Cost Center in Financial tool like Apollo Tool in Maersk.
Another exercise is to figure out which patterns or keywords you should look for in a résumé.
An interview can only hope to simulate how well a candidate does on a smaller problem in a fraction
of the time.
“The hiring process typically has three elements: the résumé, the interview, and the reference check,”
Having multiple interviewers can reduce bias and catch subtle red flags that any one person might
have missed. When debriefing, however, each person should independently record their rationale and
their final “hire” or “no hire” decision before hearing other interviewers’ thoughts to ensure that the
discussion doesn’t lead to groupthink.
As a manager, one of the smartest ways to multiply your team’s impact is to hire the best people and
empower them to do more and more until you stretch the limits of their capabilities.
You can’t create great outcomes without consistently attracting talented people and ensuring that they
can also hire well.
Planning:
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A good strategy understands the crux of the problem it’s trying to solve. It focuses a team’s unique
strengths, resources, and energy on what matters the most in achieving its goals.
The plan that is smartest for your team is the one that acknowledges your relative strengths and
weaknesses.
Effort doesn’t count; results are what matter.
The most brilliant plans in the world won’t help you succeed if you can’t bring them to life. Executing
well means that you pick a reasonable direction, move quickly to learn what works and what
doesn’t, and make adjustments to get to your desired outcome. Speed matters—a fast runner can
take a few wrong turns and still beat a slow runner who knows the shortest path.
Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish
you had.8 If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.
Every task has a who and a by when. Owners set and reliably deliver on commitments.
Managing Upwards
Managing up is about consciously and deliberatively developing and maintaining effective
relationships with supervisors, bosses, and other people above you in the chain of command.
Establishing strong, productive working relationships is the single most effective way to accelerate
success in any organization.
Managing up is about adapting and building relationships. It is about learning what is important to
your boss and making sure you give it to him or her – even when you think what they want is
ridiculous (which it may very well be).
When you begin to feel a trigger—you’ll know when it’s coming on— pause. Take a breath. Take a
break. Go for a walk outside. It’s the proverbial count to ten. In other words, don’t send that email,
don’t respond, and don’t open your mouth. Take a breath and smile. Ah yes, I said smile, maybe
even a small laugh. There is nothing better to diffuse yourself, an escalation, or a conflict than a
sincere smile or laugh.
Managing triggers is a critical component of being effective.
Avoid becoming a volcano by managing your triggers and try to deal with other people in healthy
ways before you explode. Don’t let things build up over time; address your issue or frustration when
it happens.
Even if you’re right, clinging to your need to prove it may undermine your leadership. Think again
about intent versus impact. Sometimes being right is irrelevant. Recall the expression, “you may win
the battle but lose the war.” There may be times when proving you’re right costs more in the long
run, in terms of damaging your relationships and the effectiveness of your team.
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Better to sacrifice the small win of the moment than lose the victory of future success.
Modification and change are very, very hard. It’s a process. It takes incremental steps, practice, and time.
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A great team trust each other and has shared goals, clear roles, transparent processes for solving
problems and making decisions, and the ability to deal with conflicts constructively.
Remote Working
While co-located teams often benefit most from an in-person manager, remote teams need a manager
who provides clearly defined direction and removes all ambiguity from the process. When a team works
together in the same office, you can have loose job descriptions, possibly even with two people sharing
elements of the same role. With remote teams, managers need to define roles and responsibilities—
starting with their own. They also need a strong process by which to clarify and track commitments,
progress, and deliverables.
Remote employees need a healthy dose of trust—even when they are doing things their way. It’s
important to set and communicate clear expectations about how you’ll judge their work
performance and any practices, guidelines, or updates you, as a manager, need to see.
When implementing a remote workforce, focus on over-communication, boundaries, and protocols
of how to work together, and establishing relationships and trust.
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