Summary

Middle-level and people managers play a crucial role in companies, but they also model many corporate dysfunctions. It’s time for people managers to get back in service of the people they lead. Here are a few things to consider as we ready ourselves for a fresh start in 2024.

• Make information transparent and free your time as a result.

• Make spending time with your people, your number one priority. Work backwards from that principle.

• Create systems that eliminate busy work. This’ll buy you back time for valuable activities.

• Bat for your people when slogans like “customer obsession” get weaponised. Stand on the right side of the argument, even if you know you’ll lose.

• Make inclusion a primary concern. Find ways to give everyone on your team, a voice.

• Lead by example. Remember, people will model the way you act and behave!

In recent weeks and months, I’ve had a few conversations where I noticed that people have a dim view of managers. This is unsurprising for a couple of reasons. For one, it’s fashionable to hate on managers - Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss makes this easy. But that apart, 2023 has been a year of employees versus their management. Be it layoffs or return-to-office (RTO) diktats, line managers have fronted many unpopular decisions that have affected employees. Let’s be fair; many of these decisions are often above the average manager’s pay grade. When managers are aloof, and have little to contribute to hands-on work though, executing these decisions only rakes up the sentiment against them.

Yet, I believe that effective people managers are essential to any organisation. It’s a truism that people don’t quit companies, they leave their managers. The converse is true as well. People often stick with their managers, even when they don’t like their employers. If you care about retaining people, then you can’t ignore effective people management.

2024 is right around the corner. It’ll be a fool’s errand to predict what the economy will be like, but there are signs of some funding returning to tech with rate cuts in the offing. Either way, boom cycles follow bust cycles. If there’s a boom anywhere on the horizon, it’ll increase the demand for tech talent. You know how that story goes. So next year is a good time to pull up our people management socks and be the managers people hope for us to be. In today’s post, I want to share a few behaviours of effective people managers. Experienced bosses will find a lot of what I write familiar. If so, share it with a peer who you think may benefit from this perspective. Ok, let’s get right into it.

Make information transparent

Someone recently told me that managers derive power from holding on to information and handing it out in drip feeds. They observed that much of this drip feed happens in meetings that could have been emails instead. That characterisation may be unkind, but it’s certainly not uncommon. The behaviour, however, may not come from malintent. Managers are often the first port of call for external stakeholders, so it’s natural for them to encounter some information before the team. The key to effective management is what you do next.

You can turn on the drip feed as I explained earlier or employ structured transparency. Your job, as a manager, is not just to relay information and orders. The effective managers I've worked for, kept unwanted pressures at bay while making information visible to everyone. The best way to make information visible in a team is not through ephemeral conversations in meetings but through structured documentation. This structured documentation should sit on your team’s handbook. Don’t hoard information - free it.  

If you don’t have a team handbook already, consider setting one up today. Many documentation platforms afford you the functionality to surface “What’s new”. If not, you can use your IM channels to surface this new information. Guess what, by writing things up, you’ll also free yourself up, for more important tasks than conveying information.

Free up your time for people

It’s a recurrent trope to say that being an engineer takes years of training, but it takes little to be an engineer’s boss. It's an unfair perspective, I agree, but it stems from the fact that managers don’t spend enough time with their people. One-on-one meetings are the strongest way to build interpersonal relationships between managers and direct reports. Yet, it’s common to see managers excusing themselves from such meetings in the name of more important matters. Even when these one-on-ones happen, managers often come unprepared. There’s little continuity between conversations and managers end up being guilty of not completing the tasks they promised to do.

The narrative is similar when helping employees at work. When tech leads don’t pair with their developers, product managers don’t coach with their analysts and designers and program managers don’t problem-solve with their scrum masters, disengagement is inevitable.

Now, managers do have packed calendars that prevent them from spending time with their people. But let’s not normalise this dysfunction. If people report to you, then nothing matters more than supporting them. Time at work is finite - so give one-on-ones and pairing time, the highest priority. Everything else can happen in the time that remains. This means that you must also push back on unreasonable demands on your time. It’ll also mean that you must create systems that help you scale. 

Think in systems

Too often, managers spend their time in busy work - work that consumes your time but has little value in and of itself. Status update meetings, approvals, gate checks, collecting and relaying tasks; such activities take away crucial hours from a manager’s calendar without creating significant value. Tackling these demands on our time, requires a systems-focus, over a transactions-focus. The table below explains the difference. 

When you see yourself doing a task repeatedly, think about ways to systemise them. Here are a few examples.

• If you notice yourself relaying tasks from customers and clients to your team and spending too much time prioritising them, consider implementing a ticketing system that accepts work with a reasonable level of detail and a priority indicator. Once the work is on a central platform, you and your team can agree on a queuing mechanism that makes ETAs transparent to your stakeholders.

• Before you spend a lot of time onboarding people, document your onboarding knowledge. Create an onboarding checklist that new team members can work through, so they can contribute to the team as soon as possible. 

• Instead of being the person who remembers all decisions the team has ever made, implement a system of decision records, so anyone can examine the rationale behind any decision.

• Do you spend a lot of time creating reports? How about using the inbuilt features on tools like Jira, BitBucket and Confluence to automate your reports? If your tools don’t all come from the same vendor, can you use services like Zapier to automate some of your drudge work?

I’m certain that if you zoom out from your daily transactions and reflect on them a bit, you’ll be able to think about systems that either simplify or even eliminate the busy work. Oh, and don’t be shy to ask for help. Someone on your team may have the skills to implement these systems. Not only will this give you a chance to work with them, but it’ll also give them a chance to walk a mile in your shoes. 

“Unweaponise” corporate slogans

We pave the road to hell with good intentions. When companies write their value statements and slogans, they have an idealistic view of their world. It’s not before long that realism catches up and idealism becomes the casualty. What was earlier a motivating statement, can become an anti-people weapon. 

Take “customer obsession” as an example. I understand why this is an alluring value. After all, here’s what Gandhi himself said about the importance of a customer. 

“​​A customer is the most important visitor to our premises. He is not dependent on us, we are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work, he is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business, he is part of it.”

But what happens when a customer has unreasonable expectations? What if a business sets unachievable goals to serve its customers? This is when death marches, long work hours, and unsustainable work conditions ensue. You needn’t even search for an example of such a situation. Amazon is amongst the most famous of companies that pride themselves on “customer obsession”. It’s no secret that Amazon’s warehouse employees endure subhuman work conditions to satisfy this said obsession. 

Unempathetic leadership can turn every admirable sentiment into a weapon - call it “customer obsession”, “passion for excellence”, “measurable impact” or what have you. Our job as people managers is to bat for people, even if it’s a hard thing to do. Frameworks like XP advocate for sustainable pace and luminaries like Martin Fowler have written about people being pre-eminent differentiators in tech. Use this literature to build your arguments. Even if you don’t win the argument, you’ll have done your job.

“Not all battles are fought for victory – some are fought to tell the world that someone was there on the battlefield.” - Ravish Kumar

Level the playing field

The more diverse your team, the more important is your role in including everyone. In group settings, the Captain America phenomenon can undermine diversity. This is when the most extroverted, the most experienced, the most fluent English speakers and the most senior people overpower the views of others. This can be inadvertent, but it’s also common on teams that aren’t intentional about inclusivity. 

When you lead a team, then it’s your responsibility to ensure that everyone has a voice. There are many ways to do this, but I argue that the most effective way is to slow things down and go async-first. Writing levels the playing field across veterans and newbies, introverts and extroverts, and native and non-native English speakers. Slowing down isn’t a bug in this case. It’s a feature!

You may have other ideas to make the most of your diverse team. The key is to preserve individual judgement and limit primacy biases and the bandwagon effect. Choose a method that appeals to you but don’t forget that inclusion is your responsibility. 

Set the right examples

All this brings me to my last suggestion. Be mindful of how much your behaviour influences that of your people. Specifically, be aware of how your actions can pressure people into behaving a certain way. If you’ve built a sufficiently diverse team, there will be competent people, for whom the job is, well… only a job. And that’s ok. If someone’s job makes their life outside work more enjoyable, it doesn’t somehow make them a less noble employee.

When managers behave as if work matters more than anything else, it forces people to support that worldview, even if it's at odds with their life situations. So if a manager comes into work over the weekend, their direct reports end up doing so as well. Look, if work occupies centre stage in your life, that’s fine. But be clear that everyone needn’t follow your lead. Make as little noise as possible about your out-of-hours work. Avoid sending messages and emails outside what people know as your work hours. These little acts of empathy can go a long way, in creating a safe, team environment.

Setting the right example extends even to desirable behaviours. To encourage people to document their work, you must be a prolific writer first. If you want your team to practise inclusion, you must be a visible champion for inclusion. You can’t light a thousand lamps if you don’t light your lamp first, can you?

Through the rigmarole of daily work, we can sometimes accumulate poor work habits that are hard to shake off. It takes some reflection and commitment to swap these old habits with new, productive ones. The end of the year and the beginning of a new year mark an opportunity for reflection and fresh starts. In her book, How to Change, Katy Milkman says that a fresh start is an ideal place to pursue change. The world of work surely needs better people-managers. How about we reflect on how we’ve acted in these management roles and be better next year? How about we become the managers that people look forward to working with? That, dear readers, could be our tiny contribution to a better workplace.