I aspire to be the best manager I can be. I’ll often fall short of my goal, but through continuous practice I will get closer. This post will gather my research on being a great manager, enumerate some of my learnings, and inspire me to be my best. Few things make me prouder then this public feedback on LinkedIn from people who worked with me over several years. I’m also writing a manager guidebook, which goes into much more depth on management.
- Igor’s book of manager
- How will I measure my success?
- How will I behave to be successful?
- Igors Super Powers
Igor’s book of manager
Management is a very broad topic. So I’m creating “Igor’s book of manager”:
There’s a lot of duplication between this post and the manager book and content is slowly migrating to the book as I decide what shoud be in what post
How will I measure my success?
Acting is easy, but results are hard. Here are the results I measure.
Coach, empower, build inclusive and supportive culture
- Employee surveys (MS poll, Amazon connections, Amazon tech survey, Amazon Forte)
- Employee referrals and public feedback (from LinkedIn)
- Employee career velocity relative to median (you can ask me the ratio in person).
Productive and results-oriented
- Trains run on time and frequently.
- Ruthless prioritization (Shipping is a feature)
- Define and deliver business priorities.
Great partner to other teams and non-tech partners
- Biz functions understands team and tech constraints
- My team understand constraints and needs of partner teams and biz functions.
- Team not blocked on other teams or biz functions.
How will I behave to be successful?
As I tell my teams, the what lags the how, here’s my how.
Being a great coach
- The team members are my most important customer, and will be treated as such.
- Coaching is critical to being a great manager - an excellent primer is The 7 coaching questions.
- When we remember work, we think about our peak moments.
- Human Meetings
- Building intra-team cohesion
- Encouraging team to eat lunch together
- Encouraging team to share their out side of work passions.
- Building team ownership over individual ownership.
- Team wide appreciation
- Weekly linked in posts celebrating the team
- Cook the team breakfast
- Individual specific recognition
- Continuous on the spot recognition.
- [Pending] Hand written notes
- Self-service management through fortune cookies.
Communicating clearly
- Keeping everyone informed and proud
- Monthly newsletters
- Draw pictures/pen casts
Hiring
- Public posts on career, management and life Work Life Balance and Job Hunting.
- Weekly linked in posts celebrating the team
- Memorable job descriptions
- Magic tricks during interviews and informationals
Working across teams
- Ease at which my team can collaborate across the larger organization.
- Leadership card experience
- Team wide engagement through clustering exercises.
Staying technical
This is answered directly in Igor’s book of management
Hack-a-thons
- I finally hosted a hack-a-thon for my parent team. Here is my advice for folks setting this up.
Some behaviors I’m just starting, these include
- Team music videos
- Engineering peak moments
Establishing Process, Project Lifecycle, and Artifacts
Some teams have these things well defined and running smoothly, other teams (seems to be most) need help building out these mechanisims
- Design Meetings
- Weekly Engineer Review (Status Reports)
- Design Meetings
- Weekly Leadership team Meetings
- Weekly Operations/Engineering Excellence Review
-
Bi-Weekly Team Meetings
-
Agile Ceremonies: - The standard - Standups/Backlog Grooming/Sprint Planning/Retro
- Project LifeCycle Documents/Meetings
- Requirements Review - Design (p)review - Test Plan Review - Operations/Launch Review/Pre-Morten - Bug Bash
Igors Super Powers
What is Igor’s Management Philosopy
For some reason this is a frequent question I get asked by people deciding if they should join the team. It’s super vague, so I need to think through where I’d like to answer.
First a disclaimer, Managers are professional story tellers, they lie (often by accident), look with your own eyes, ask others on the team.
Philosophy is probably two things
- What/How of the team
- What/How is the managers contribution.
What/How - What is the ideal team culture.
What/How - What is the managers part in that.
Why do people think Igor is a good coach?
Someone once asked me why I’m a good coach, took me a while, here’s what I came up with.
- I believe you can’t be efficient with people, you can only be effective. And it always pays off.
- People are not ‘resources’, they are 3 dimensional humans, with lives outside work, emotions(like pride), and mind monsters.
- I actively study and practice coaching, effective decision making and grand mother mind (e.g. non judgement )
- I’ve read and digested slews of self help books which while often mocked, are filled with great models.