Conversations Managers Should Have to Develop Their People
firstround.com
firstround.com
Wow, don't do this. Getting to know your team is extremely important. But, this is a pretty gross pseudo-psychological way to go about it. Also people should be aware some cultures will react extremely negatively to being asked a question like this.
American's tend to have a canned response, what I call an 'origin myth' e.g. "I'm a doctor because as child my relative had (disease X) ... then later ...". They dispense these quite readily at parties and interviews. Try it out.
Ask a European why they do what they do and you'll likely get a glazed expression as they consider nature vs nurture, the class system & the deeply invasive nature of the question itself.
But the worse would be a truthful answer. As a manager, I know some of my people well enough to know what kind of painful shit that would dredge up. It's impossible, and even downright undesirable to have a relationship with all your team members in which it is okay to discuss such things.
As a private person who tried to maintain some level of segmentation between personal life and my career, the group over-sharing made me very uncomfortable. And it was a pretty huge expense in terms of time away from the office, payroll, and of course the tens of thousands of dollars for the retreat center and management/leadership coaches.
It also made me long for the management team I had come from where there was still the devotion to helping employees achieve personal and career goals, but without all of the group therapy. But the projects my old team worked on were not quite as cool or impactful as my new team. I used to windsurf, and one of the things the windsurfers would say is "don't leave wind to find wind", or in other words, there are real risks that come with leaving the good in search of the perfect.
> "Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life." Then probe with more questions when they talk about pivots in their lives... Look for the patterns over the course of your people's lives that give you strong signal and just write them down.
The goal is to look for the things that motivate people to change their behavior, not how they mythologize their origin.
My current manager recently gave me a front end project. I started learning a lot of Angular and started working on it. She recently came to me and said don't learn too much about it.
I have learned that career progression is your own battle and managers are in general a hindrance to that.
sometimes you manager is actually trying to help you, sure it's not purely altruistic but is anything? you own the burden of responsibility for achieving your dreams, your manager is merely a facilitator that can sometimes help you achieve that. when you delegate your future, it's your fault.
"I want to learn more about forecasting models". Understand that your manager has many contradicting tensions and they are trying to balance them all. Is this delivering business value or aligned with company goals? It's ok if not, but expect other things to keep being prioritised over it. How many growth opportunities did you find that were denied, or did you not find any?
Take responsibility for yourself.
My last statement basically said just that. I am taking responsibility for my own growth rather than rely on management. My manager even asking me these questions is really a silly exercise so when reviews come around we can say that managers are interested in our career growth. The reality is that there are tasks and projects to get done and those with business value, rather than personal growth value, get prioritized. Discussing where I want to go is a fruitless exercise.
In my experience, it's neither silly nor fruitless, but you can't expect solid results either, your interests are not the only factor at play.
As a manager, I'm genuinely interested in my team's personal growth, but that needs to be balanced with business needs. I'll always try to match business needs with each team member's personal interests and not just skills, because that'll render a much more motivated (thus productive) work environment, but sometimes it's just not possible, and uninteresting work will just have to be dealt with to keep the paychecks coming until something more interesting shows up.
Where that work environment is misrepresented by a manager, that isn't balance. It's a manager costing the company money.
They need to take responsibility for that. Doing so will probably require a difficult conversation with their manager.
The entire system is ill, seriously ill. The entire hierarchichal model is failing, as is evident by the state of the world and the state in most large, publically traded corporations.
Eventually all people are gone. Would be good to know when, so you can plan ahead.
The manager will have to choose between losing you within the company, or have you work for a competitor. In some companies, he/she may also have to deal with your reasons for leaving.
There are definitely managers out there who lie to their directs and don't care, but there's a lot of us that do care and simply don't have the weight to throw behind giving you what you need. All I can ask is that you try to be understanding of our situation and give us the benefit of the doubt before condemning us.
I don't know why you think they're a hindrance. If you find no managers ever work out for you maybe managers aren't the problem.
That said, it's still up to the employee to drive a lot of it. Nobody cares as much about your career as you.
So, expect to have to do the leg work. If your manager won't help find you projects you need for development, then you should go find them. Learn about cool projects being done in other groups, find out if they need help, then go to your manager to say "As a part of my development, I'd like to do X. Jim's department is doing X and would like me to help. I can make it fit with my current responsibilities. Is that OK?"
I noticed there were a lot of issues in the code and said much of it had to be rewritten since it would not scale. She didn't like what I said and then told me not to focus too much on Angular and just learn enough to maintain the existing application and she would hire another contractor to do the work.
I should add that she threatened me when she said to stop working on Angular. Whereas 2 months earlier she threatened my job if I didn't learn it.
I've been completely unable to find this article subsequently. Can anyone point me at it?
Somebody give this guy an award!
When my directs came to me wondering about a promotion, my response was always to figure out immediate increases in scope that we could implement. I told everyone that if they wanted a promotion, they should make my job in arguing for a promotion as easy as possible. I loved coming away from calibration meetings with multiple promotions since that let me throw most of my comp increases to non-promotions.
Which does mean that promotion conversations are THE career conversations you need to have.
There's a lot more to career talks than just the immediate next step. There's also figuring out whether your current career trajectory is the one you really want. Performance review time is an excellent time to discuss taking the immediate next step, but it's a terrible time for the broader perspective meeting. That should be separate, but should still definitely happen.
Just let me do my job. I want to get back to programming.
I do find it interesting that one of the quotes in the article is "They discover that in three to five years, a bunch of people are going to leave because they're concerned about career growth and development. Panic ensues". Uh what? Three to five years is a pretty good stretch these days in SV. If you really wanted to keep people longer than that, you would have a completely different business and reward structure.
The rest of it boils down to "get to know your co-workers", I guess? It doesn't really seem that revolutionary. If you want to spend more than 5 years working with them, I think that should happen naturally not as part of some kind of corporate management mandated dream sharing time.
This caught my attention too. It is not clear if these improvements were sustained over an extended period of time. Also, what about other metrics? For e.g. did attrition rate change? Did people write better quality software? What was the effect on innovation?
Indeed, career discussions are important. Even more important are the following, which are more about here and now, than the future:
1. Is the work challenging enough?
2. Am I learning on the job?
3. Do my contributions matter?
4. Do I have healthy relationships in the team and with management?
5. Am I concerned about my pay?
6. Do I have a work life balance?
If the above are sorted out, then sure, go ahead and ensure that my future also looks bright.
Turnover is bad because to get any kind of decent raise, you either need to quit or threaten to quit. This is true at most companies.
I have been observing them for years. The current school of thought is basically a rat race where the managers only manage their own self interest, and they do not stick around in any one position longer than two to four years (team leads tend to be an exception to this behavioral pattern). By the time the damage their decisions have caused takes effect, they are already either at a different position in the hierarchy, or if the strategy was particularly harmful to the company, they have jumped ship.
On desktop, it first appears as you are about half way down the page as a small banner at the bottom of the screen, as you scroll more then takes up half the page, and finally covers the whole page (with a close button to dismiss - which sets a cookie and stops it appearing again).
It's not in your face when you load the page which is nice, but it's still a popup - these things must work though, so I can't see them going away anytime soon.
i don't run adblock, because i think people should be paid for their work. They made their choice, an chose to punish an honest user.
so, bozo bit flipped. firstround talks about being forthright, being aware of subordinate's needs while actually being fairly conniving. The article may have some value, but the source is pretty vile.
At this point, i think anything with a popup is at best a secondary source, they don't really understand what they're saying and are simply parroting someone who really understands the issue. their words can be helpful, but it's pretty clear anyone that manipulative would simply steal the words from someone smart.
I'm sure there exist people that are supremely manipulative, and also very insightful. In my limited experience, the manipulative people are pretty boring, once i catch on to their game. This specific tactic, you've enjoyed the time we've spent together so far, so you should give me something, is more or less the standard line for popups and street performers. I sort of respect street performers for making the move, they're clearly desperate, and need all the help they can get.
A website, on the other hand, if they are desperate, their advice is likely very bad. If they are not desperate, they're simply interested in sucking up any attention you might be willing to give them. in person, i would consider that pretty fucking toxic.
I can't see this website being in any way helpful. Any truth they spread can't be anything more than a hook for later manipulation.
So, yeah, i think it's pretty disgusting.
edit
clarification - i wouldn't be nearly as critical of a purely technical article. you can be a not very nice person and know how to deploy microservices. This case, telling me how to treat people while treating me poorly has the problem of words not aligning with actions.
Especially the "No thanks, I don’t want to learn more." button to dismiss it. Pretty condescending in my opinion.
On mobile that popped up immediately. I did click on through and read the article despite that, but my interest in coming back to that site is diminished by the sense of arrogance displayed in that pop up.
Every member of my team is an individual, and they all deserve an individual approach. Also, I find this particular approach rather condescending, and assuming the employee in question needs handholding and psychotherapy.
For those of you in either of these scenarios, recognize it and learn from it. Believe it or not, so much can be learned from good managers, but even more can be learned from bad managers.
- there is a difference between a coaching relationship and a manager-managed relationship. Even as a manager how do you reconcile in your head the need to judge the employee with the knowledge you gained inappropriately? Know my girlfriend is working in a company that is relocating - will you invest into me?
- disclosure - to a degree - can be helpful. But pushing for it from a position of power is wrong. Disclosure starts with oneself.
- Information is power. There is usually limited upside for the employee but significant downside. Treat carefully
As an employee you sell yourself to your manager. Ever seen a company selling a product opening the shop and showing how the gory mess became a sausage? Most keep the sausage secrets secret for a reason. Sausages still may be tasty but please don't think too hard what all went in to make me 8-)
I think it has a much better approach for management.
Well worth reading.
He was a manager of line workers (people who climb telephone poles, etc) at Ma Bell back before the Baby Bell era. He may not have invented the idea that management is a service job, but he wrote about it eloquently.
Greenleaf gets used in some questionable contexts. He has lots of fans in right-wing theological schools, for example, where student preacher wannabees are fed the myth that they are "servant leaders." Those folks can deceive themselves into thinking they're humble and become blinded to their own arrogance. The same is true of everybody. But the misuse of Greenleaf's work doesn't mean it's bad work.
I believe the context of a management consultant saying, "get to know your employees" and then beaming back up to his starship is also questionable. This stuff is not magic. It's hard work and long term work for the manager. It takes a lifetime of practice to get it right. That means people who do this are going to get it wrong, a lot.
Military academies have year-long courses in ways of leadership, where officer wannabees get to read about and practice doing these sorts of things. So they get to make a few of their lifetime quota of mistakes in a controlled environment. We programmers don't get that kind of training.
In business, "willingness to make mistakes" is usually a trope advanced by an egotistical senior executive. It's usually not real at the level of line manager where these "powerful conversations" make sense. All this is especially true in the Silicon Valley style youth culture.
Lots of comments here have said, "I don't want my manager psychoanalyzing me" or something like that. They're right on. If a manager in a management-by-objective company gets a monkey on his back to ask every staffer "tell me about your childhood," lots can go wrong. First of all it's forced and fake. Second, what if staff members tell you the truth when you ask that? Are you ready for that? Probably not.
So what can a manager actually do?
It's all about attitude. A manager who often asks, "how can I help you?" and then accepts both "leave me alone so I can get my work done" and "send me to a conference on some-new-thing" as answers, is a manager with a good attitude.
A manager with such an attitude can ask, "why?" when somebody discloses hopes and dreams, learn something about the staff member, and become a partner in helping that staff member get closer to those hopes and dreams.
So, here's MY listicle for managers: One step to developing your people: Habitually and often, ask "how can I help you?" and accept the answers you get.