One of the working relationships we need to define is ours. The following is a user guide for me and how I work. I hope for this to accelerate our ability to work together effectively.
I believe managers work for their direct reports. I will work for you by:
- Providing context around your work
- Hiring, retaining, and developing talented individuals on the team (e.g. you)
I’m here to help and support you and to advocate for you and the team with the rest of the company. If I do something that feels more like telling you how to do your job than setting context, you'd be doing me a huge favor if you let me know about it, as soon as possible.
Do amazing work. This is the expectation. Let me know if there is something preventing you from accomplishing this.
Disagree with me. The best solutions come from a healthy level of debate. We need to be able to separate our ideas from our egos. I’ll challenge your ideas with the goal of coming to the best possible solution and I hope you’ll challenge mine.
Tell me when I mess up. This is very important. I don’t always know when this happens. I need to know or I’ll do it again.
Communicate. Are you missing some context? Let me know and I’ll fill you in or go find out.
Refer your friends. We’re growing the team and you know who you want to work with. Let's bring them onboard.
People over Process. I believe in putting people over process and changing process to accommodate our needs and goals. I’ve worked and launched successful products with and without Agile. At the end of the day, this is what I care about:
- I value transparency about what’s happened and what’s going to happen
- I value speed, including proactive efforts that keep us moving quickly (e.g. writing tests, refactoring legacy code, and pairing to improve our code quality)
- I value learning and know that training up on a tech stack isn’t always be the fastest route to launching a product.
- I value your time and don’t want you to do any process that is neither beneficial to you nor required by company policy
Leadership comes from everywhere. I don’t believe managers have a monopoly on leadership, and I work hard to build opportunities in our teams for non-managers to effectively lead.
I’m big on work/life balance. Unless there’s an emergency, I don’t expect to communicate with you outside of regular work hours. I respond to emails or slack during off-hours but under no circumstances do I expect you to, unless it’s urgent.
Your career is yours. You know best how you’d like to grow and in what areas. I can provide feedback and an outside perspective.
I’ll do my best to provide growth and learning opportunities, it’ll be up to you to seize them. Let’s work together on this.
At the end of the day, it is your career. You set your goals. You set your priorities. Let me know how I can help you achieve them.
I want to provide you with slightly more challenging work than you feel capable. I strongly believe in the Growth Mindset. It is fine to not understand a particular task. I can help by providing context. It is not okay to believe that you will never be able to understand it.
I love feedback. It’s critical to my success here. I promise to give you regular feedback and I’ll often suggest that you provide direct feedback to someone. Three dimensions are required for people to continue to give you feedback:
- High Safety (i.e. no fear of retaliation)
- Low Effort (i.e. no rebuttals)
- High Benefit (i.e. positive results)
Let me know if I don't do well on any of these three dimensions.
I’m going to ask you for feedback in 1:1s regularly. I won’t stop doing this no matter how many times you say you have no feedback for me.
I believe 1<>1s are for you. Length, frequency, format, and content is up to you. What would you like to talk about? What’s going well? What’s bugging you? These don’t need to be status updates unless you really want to talk about project status. I’d like to start with high frequency and figure out if/how to taper back from there.
Sometimes my availability looks scary, but I’m here for you! Very few of the things I do are more important than spending time talking with you if you want to talk with me. Feel free to try to catch me ad-hoc via Slack or in person, or put time on my calendar to talk whenever you want.
I’m a believer in the Maker Schedule. I will work to create blocks of uninterrupted work time in your schedule and ask you to do the same. I default to only inviting people to meetings that are absolutely necessary. If you want to come to a meeting and I didn’t invite you, just ask!
I bias toward transparency and candor. You can ask anything. Most of the time, I'll answer. I'm committed to never lying to you