Comment by AugustoCAS | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AugustoCAS | Hacker News Reader

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Being an awesome manager is not about delegating, it's a about

* Creating the right environment for teams to do their best (See book Leading Teams below).

* Being skillful at challenging pre-conceptions.

* Coaching people and teams to work in the most effective way.

* Communicate, communicate, communicate.

* Hiring people who are smarter than you.

* And, a difficult one, having honest 1-to-1 with people when they are not delivering to know what is going on in their lives and, in the worst case, to help them go (aka fire/made redundant).

My favourites resources are:

* Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet

* The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

* Leading Teams by Richard Hackman

* The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

I'm not a manager (I don't like managing people), but I've been working for ~13 years coaching engineer managers, tech leads and engineers. You have to let the baby go so the people you hired (which should be smarter than you!) can do their job. Obviously if you see something that is wrong, by all means raise it, but be careful that it's not one of your own pre-conceptions!

Forgive my ignorance, but how can you possibly coach managers/leaders about leading people when you're neither a manger or even like managing people!?

That's like a nun trying to be a sex therapist.

It's a good question!

Coaching is about helping people find their own answers. One needs to know about a topic when giving specific advice / guidance.

Having said that, for me building technology has 2 challenges: people and technology. Initially in my career I focused on the technical aspects of it (clean code, good design & architecture, etc) and later found the people challenge is a lot harder than the tech. I learn by researching topics so I read quite a lot about teams, management and lean. Then I pieced together what good and bad managers did and how that related to what I had read.

From my experience most managers (and product managers, engineers, etc) perform their work in the same way they learned from other people while doing their job and rarely do any research or go to the source to learn how to be good at what they do. They might be sent to a 2-5 days course on how to manage, but that's it. The knowledge they have is often from 2nd+ hand, and very diluted. If you fancy doing an experiment, grab a couple of managers and ask them what mix of managerial theory or practice they follow. Ask for names of authors and thought leaders. Ask for any book they have read in the last 6 months about good management. There's a big chance you won't get anything or something very fluffy. What I found is that one doesn't need to know a lot in order to make an impact, and going to the sources helps a lot.

About a nun being a sex therapist, I do know a few Buddhist monks and nuns who joke about how much relationship advice they are asked when they never had a romantic relationship or when they weren't very successful at them before being ordained.

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