/managing-humans-digest

Managing Humans by Michael Loop - Digest

  • You want to work with your team, you want to learn from them, I want them to trust me.
  • Pure delegators are slowly becoming irrelevant to their organisations.

The Update, the Vent, and the Disaster (one-on-ones)

Assume they have something to teach you.

Basics:

  • hold regular one-on-one
  • always do it
  • give at least 30 minutes

Three types of ono-on-ones

  1. The Update

    These typically start as status updates, but that is wrong. A one-on-one is not a status report. Start listening twice as hard for a nugget of something that we can discuss, investigate, and explore.

  2. The Vent

    When the Vent begins, you might confuse this for a conversation. It's not. It's a mental release valve, and your job is to listen for as long as it takes. Don't problem solve. Don't redirect. Don't comfort. Yet. Your employee is doing mental house cleaning, and interrupting this cleaning is missing the point.

  3. The Disaster

    If a Vent feels like a speech, a Disaster feels like an attack. Your primary job during the Disaster is to defuse, and you start defusing by contributing absolutely nothing. Be quiet and let the emotion pass. Success comes with traversing the emotional explosion.

    A Disaster is the end result of poor management.

The Monday Freakout

Strategies for dealing with the unexpected.

  • Don't participate in the Freakout
  • Give the Freak the benefit of the doubt
  • Hammer the Freak with questions
  • Get the Freaks to solve their own problems

It's still a management failure.

It's great that your freak has chosen to freak out. The alternative is that they're no saying a thing and have decided to leave the company. It's a good sign that he's not leaving because he clearly, loudly cares.

Dissecting the Mandate

Understanding when and how to insist on strategy

Your job as a manager is to move the team forward without hurting morale.

Three phases:

  1. Decide When the team is so polarised that they start confusing the emotion with the decision and when the debate is no longer productive, it's time to make a decision. Collaborative management style to rescue because I know that the more brains and more time the team spends staring at an idea, the stronger the idea becomes. It means our output is of higher quality because we've taken the time to consider what the hell we're doing.
  2. Deliver The goal is to explain to the team that a decision has been made. Further debate is not necessary. The team has got to leave the room knowing the decision has been made.
  3. Deliver (again) Better name might be damage control. Delivering (again) is taking the time to individually express your reasoning to the concerned parties - both the winners and the losers.

An Engineering Mindset

Advice for maintaining an engineering mindset:

  1. Use the development environment to build the product
  2. Be able to draw a detailed architectural diagram describing your product on any whiteboard at any time
  3. Own a feature
  4. Write Unit tests

Stay flexible, remember what it means to be an engineer, and don't stop developing.