#114 - 28 May 2022
The Manager's Handbook; What teammates owe each other; When everything's important
Managing Teams
The Manager’s Handbook - Alex MacCaw, Clearbit
This is a really solid, free handbook for new managers or people thinking of becoming managers. Some things I particularly like about it:
It covers likely failure modes right from the beginning
Lots of emphasis on hiring
It covers managing yourself early on - your behaviour and your mindset are the only things you really have any control over, and I think this is under-addressed in other resources
There’s a distinction implicitly made between the behaviours you need managing individuals (one-on-ones, coaching, feedback) and managing teams (working as a team, conflict resolution).
I don’t love everything about it - it includes things I’d not, and doesn’t include things I would - but it was made for a particular company’s culture, not mine. It’s a thoughtful and solid resource to have to hand for pointing people to, building on for your own organization, or to read (it’s always good to revisit the basics).
How to Respond When an Employee Quits - Rebecca Zucker, HBR
This is one of the situations where you see how far a new manager has come on the “managing yourself” skills. It feels like a disaster, even a betrayal, the first time a team member quits. It isn’t either, of course — it’s good and healthy or people to move on, and is an opportunity for the team as well.
The only correct initial response when a team member tells you they’re quitting is something along the lines of “I’m sorry to hear that, but congratulations!”. As Zucker points out, that isn’t easy, but it’s necessary. First because you may work with that person in the future, or have opportunities to have their friends and colleagues join your team. Second because it allows you to productively move to other important parts of the conversations, like asking for what you and the team needs before they go, and possibly learning about things you could improve retention.
As we’ve said before, a team is a group of people that hold each other accountable. But for that to be possible and effective, there have to be shared expectations. In What New Teammates Owe To One Another, the team from Nobl has a suggested onboarding document that new team members are walked through of team expectations. (Obviously this has to be hashed out with existing team members first!)
When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done - Roman Kudryashov
Kudryashov walks us through a case study of getting a team unstuck:
The last company I worked for was a mid-stage startup with growing pains. What had started out as a nimble organization able to create impressive software now felt stuck. Everything was high priority, nothing ever seemed to get completed, morale was low, and it was starting to coalesce into a learned helplessness where the only solution seemed to be resignation…
You, gentle reader, and other long-time RCTers won’t be surprised at the core elements of the solution — ruthless prioritization and reduction of work in progress, activities dropped entirely, one project being worked on at a time, and a clear definition of done. But knowing the solution is is the easy part. Kurdyashov’s article spends a lot of time on the (hard! time-consuming!) other part: getting to the point where the solution is possible.
Like any big change management effort, the key factors that lead to success include driving a consensus that there is a problem, and that to address it some very big things are going to have to change. (Unfortunately, it’s too easy for people who should know better to fall into the sentiment of “I want things to get better, but I don’t want to change anything.”) Some parts of the problem of too-big projects or everythings-top-priority can come from elsewhere in the organization, and then those are people who have to be part of the consensus.
And of course there has to be contininual followup. The natural state of work is not clear focussed work on widely-agreed-upon priorities. Instead, if organizations are left to themselves, entropy will build up and teams will find themselves in the same situation again. But as Kudryashov describes, it’s worth all this hard, deliberate, on-going work:
It took roughly six months to make this transition and another three months to continue refining the process, but we were in a good place. Projects were unblocked. We delivered two major time-sensitive contracts… on time, and with historically low defect rates. Morale was up across multiple teams, which reflected in better satisfaction scores on employee surveys and more importantly on a radically reduced turnover rate (we went from a 50% turnover rate per quarter to something like 4% quarterly turnover, including zero turnover one month).
Random
This is pretty cool - at shell.duckdb.org you can do analytic queries any supported parquet or CSV file on GitHub or elsewhere on the web entirely on your browser. Webasm + embedded DBs for the win.
Relatedly, an interview about and architecture of Datasette, the sqlite-based query-a-dataset tool.
Imagining an alternate history based on SAGE, the (military) Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, where team collaborative computing advanced further before the personal computer was born. It really is remarkable how some very sophisticated early approaches to using computers for collaborating on projects from the 50s-early 70s just vanished from memory.
IBM’s 1957 Fortran compiler implemented order-of-operations with only parenthesis and basically a sed script and wow that doesn’t look like it should work at all.
Continue to love all these query-data-files-in-place-with-SQL tools - here’s sneller, for fast(!) SQL over JSON.
Good overview of colour schemes for figures from the team at Northwestern.
In a take that will infuriate most, the case for using tabs in some places and spaces in others.
That’s it…
And that’s it for another week. Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share about the newsletter or management. Just email me or reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox.
If you’ve just had or are having a long weekend, I hope you enjoy(ed) it! Either way, good luck in the coming week with your team,
Jonathan