Becoming a better manager

Sometimes the responsibility that you hold comes with a serving of just sit back and shut the fuck up. Are we on a good path right now? Great. Don't mess with it. Don't tinker it. Keep your hands off. That's responsibility.

Now, this is one of the ways we've essentially institutionalized at 37signals with our way of working, which is something we call Shape Up. It's a software development methodology. You can read about it at Basecamp.com/ShapeUp. Its central thesis is that we work in six-week cycles. At the beginning of a cycle, we'll determine what we should work on. Once we start working on that cycle, we will work on the things we said we were going to work on and then we will otherwise sit on our damn hands. All the good, great ideas we're going to come up with, they're not going to just flow into the work right away. They have to wait until it's time to decide again. That level of tying your hand behind your backs in some ways, not being able to react on every gut instinct of urgency when you get a new idea of you hear a new idea, is a way to fuse responsibility with a reservedness. That responsibility doesn't mean just being hyperactive all the time, that these things actually go hand-in-hand. The best thing, and I still struggle with this from time to time, the best thing you can do for your team that you're responsible for is to leave them the hell alone.

If you have a graph and you have time along the X axis, and then you have uncertainty, it's literally a cone over time. And it goes down; your uncertainty decreases as you know more. And it's not a smooth line. Life isn't smooth, there's bumps and troughs. And so I framed that concept. I've sort of expanded on that as well, as how you approach planning, if you inverse that coin, and how you approach risk.

So if you invert it for planning, the less certain you are, you don't plan in that much detail, so the planning horizon. Where you know more, you're planning details, so that's your daily plans, that's your sprint plans. And that's actually where your team should operate autonomously. Where you've got to help them is getting to that vision where it's a little bit more uncertain and you're collaborating with them along the way.

And then you collaborate with each other. ‘Okay, how do we get more certainty? What does the data show us?’ Or, ‘How much runway do we have left? How safe are we to operate in this situation?’ And you put metrics behind that. And actually most of the time, you're just helping them frame that, and then they can make that decision themselves. Or you're giving them information that maybe in their world, in their silo, they don't see. But actually if you give them the information they need, they can make those decisions as well.

One of the biggest challenges I had was when I moved from having scratching my maker itch to scratching my manager itch, because as a maker, your itch gets scratched very easily because at the end of the day, you can look back and go, oh, I built something. And then when you move into manager mode, scratching that itch, you don't get the dopamine hit on a day to day basis, for the most part. The impact of what you do is seen six months down the track or a year down the track when you have spent time coaching somebody or mentoring them about how to do something or setting up the building blocks in place for that to hit. So a lot of that scratching the itch is, ‘I need to keep them looking at that bigger picture because I'm thinking 12 plus months out.’

There's a place I interviewed with a while ago, where they were very, very, very focused on how do you crack the whip? How do you make sure you're getting the most out of people? And they ask questions about how do you get a team to work more than 50 hours a week and all this? And I was like, ‘This is not healthy. That's not my job as a supportive manager and leader. [My job is] to get the best out of people by supporting them and helping them, and you get more delivery out than with that kind of push.

I remember we used to have, when I was a consultant, informal one-on-ones very frequently with your manager and with people that you're managing as well and your team members. And when you come to those one-on-ones the one rule is you can't talk about the project, you're not allowed to talk about the project. You're not allowed to talk about work. It's really about, "Hey, how are you doing?" Human to human level? "How are you doing? How's things going? How's life? Are you getting on okay? Is there anything I can do to support you better? How am I working with you? How are we communicating with each other?"