Comment by ta1234567890 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta1234567890 | Hacker News Reader

> I had to read it a few times to ensure I wasn’t misunderstanding: the majority of my team thought I didn’t show care for them?!

> I started writing a “How to work with Julie” guide for my team

What?!

So your team tells you they don't feel cared for by you and your reaction is to write a guide for them on how to work with you? Talk about not getting the message.

I do think it's very important to have good communication, introspection and awareness of others as well as the way they work. But writing a guide about yourself and expecting others to follow it is not the best way to achieve that.

Maybe do write the guide, but keep it to yourself then use it as a way to get to know yourself better and see how you can improve your way of working with others.

In terms of building rapport in a safe environment, my preferred approach is to have standup-style meetings in which everyone in the team gets a turn to speak and they have an opportunity and space to open up and be vulnerable. This is usually lead by a manager that shows vulnerability first as a way to let the rest feel more at ease with sharing. You can do these weekly and they can last 15-30min. Over time they are very powerful and help tremendously in improving the way people treat each other, as well as detecting potential issues.

Edit: PS: Innerspace has some amazing free workshops about team building, communication at work and related topics/practices, mostly targeted towards startup founders. Highly recommend them - https://www.helloinnerspace.org

> So your team tells you they don't feel cared for by you and your reaction is to write a guide for them on how to work with you? Talk about not getting the message.

I found that resolved quite well under "Things I do that may annoy you." She knows she doesn't seem caring and explains why.

This is why I dislike the "Manager README" trend.

They start with good intentions (informing the team about what's expected of them and how to work efficiently with the team) but they usually devolve into justifying the manager's bad behaviors and telling the team to deal with it.

In practice, most manager READMEs I've seen have been more aspirational than realistic. That is, managers describing themselves in the best possible way, or describing the type of manager they want to be.

I think it's much better to write an "Employee how-to manual" that describes what's expected of the employees, how employees can accomplish things, and so on. Delivering information to the employees from a purely manager-centric document sends a message that the manager is the star of the show and the employees are just the supporting cast who need to deal with the manager's quirks.

> the employees are just the supporting cast who need to deal with the manager's quirks.

But that is also the default mode. It is not the best way of doing things, but most employees do have to deal with managerial quirks.

If I will be having to deal with those quirks anyway, then the guide is helpful. Otherwise I am learning via trial and error. Sure, ideally the quirks would be fixed, but that is not a likely event.

> If I will be having to deal with those quirks anyway, then the guide is helpful

That assumes that the guide is frank and truthful. Unfortunately this is, in my experience, rarely the case. There is strong incentive to use this as a PR exercise (or "aspirational" to put it mildly) given that it is being published and visible to many people, especially above you.

So you are going to have to try to match reality against that document anyway.

I think you skipped a few beats here. Julie explains, first, that even though she cared, her reports didn’t always believe that she was showing care.

Then she goes on to explain that it’s easy for people to miscommunicate, even when they have all the right intentions. She tries to avoid these misses by understanding, for each of her reports, what made that person feel cared for.

Then she explains that this can help in the reverse, too: creating a “how to work with me” guide helps reduce the miscommunication from above. She didn’t “immediately react” to her team’s feedback by creating the guide, but built up to this over time.

But it sounds like in these vulnerable standups the manager is not allowed to introspect aloud on their own personality and ways of working, because they should properly “keep that to themselves“?

Seems like you might be mixing my opinion about the guide vs the dynamic of the standup.

Getting to know people, as well as getting to know yourself and how you behave/work with those people in particular, is a process, it is not something static that you can just put in a document and expect others to read, understand and act accordingly.

In the standups the manager could very well share anything they want, they just can't expect everyone else to know it ahead of time and to just adapt to him/her.

Relationships are two way streets, there's tug and pull, there's adaptation, there's context, there are events and situations, there is change and growth, none of these are properly captured in a document that just one person writes at one point in time.

I just don’t know why you would think the process consists entirely of this guide. The process starts with this guide. Again you say the manager can share whatever they want, but when this manager shares what they want, you reject it. Is it that you just don’t think this should be written down, but should be vocal?

From the comment you replied to:

> In the standups the manager could very well share anything they want, they just can't expect everyone else to know it ahead of time and to just adapt to him/her.

They can share what they want, they just can't expect others to blindly accept it and conform to it.

Sorry, still not following...is there somewhere in the OP where she says she expects anyone to blindly accept and conform? In fact, she says “mine has been a living document over the years, honed through continual feedback”.

And what does “ahead of time” mean? Ahead of what time? If she says some of this at a standup why is it somehow not as oppressive as if she sent it in an email? What’s the difference?

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