Camille Fournier
There are, however, other options. Managers who care about you as a person, and who actively work to help you grow in your career. Managers who teach you important skills and give you valuable feedback. Managers who help you navigate difficult situations, who help you figure out what you need to learn. Managers who want you to take their job someday. And most importantly, managers who help you understand what is important to focus on, and enable you to have that focus. (Location 157)
The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust. And trust, real trust, requires the ability and willingness to be vulnerable in front of each other. (Location 174)
Feedback and Workplace Guidance The second thing to expect from your manager is feedback. I’m not just talking about performance reviews, although that is part of it. (Location 192)
A great manager will notice some of the little things you’re doing well in your day-to-day, and recognize you for them. (Location 198)
Ideally, the feedback you get from your manager will be somewhat public if it’s praise, and private if it’s criticism. (Location 200)
Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something. (Location 201)
When it comes to your role at the company, your manager needs to be your number one ally. If you’re at a company with a career ladder, sitting down with your manager and asking her what areas you need to focus on to get promoted is usually a good idea if you are actively seeking a promotion. (Location 210)
Beyond assigning stretch projects, though, good managers will also help you understand the value of the work you’re doing even when it is not fun or glamorous. Your manager should be the person who shows you the larger picture of how your work fits into the team’s goals, and helps you feel a sense of purpose in the day-to-day work. The most mundane work can turn into a source of pride when you understand how it contributes to the overall success of the company. (Location 216)
As you become more senior, the amount of personal feedback you get, both good and bad, is likely to decrease. You are operating at a higher level, and your manager is operating at a very high level. (Location 219)
Training and Career Growth As the main liaison between you and the bureaucracy of the company, your manager holds some responsibility for helping you find training and other resources for career growth. This may be helping you find a conference to attend or a class to take, helping you get a book you need, or pointing you to an expert somewhere else in the company who can help you learn something. (Location 224)
For companies that do promotion via committee, your manager will guide you through the process of preparing your promotion packet — the set of materials that the committee will review. (Location 236)
In whatever way promotions happen, your manager should have an idea of whether you are qualified to be promoted. When you are interested in being promoted, it’s very important to ask your manager for specific areas to focus on in order to get that promotion. Managers usually cannot guarantee promotions, but good managers know what the system is looking for and can help you build those achievements and skills. Again, this only goes so far. (Location 239)
My specific advice would be to seek out a workplace where you can get mentorship and training in the aspects of doing the job (Location 252)
Developing a sense of ownership and authority for your own experiences at work, and not relying on your manager to set the entire tone for your relationship, is an important step in owning your career and workplace happiness. (Location 272)
Your manager can point out opportunities for growth. She can show you projects. She can provide feedback on your areas of learning and development. But she cannot read your mind, and she cannot tell you what will make you happy. (Location 275)
I hit uncertainty again after climbing the technical ladder only to feel somewhat powerless at a big company. (Location 281)
As you go through various stages of your career, you’ll start to realize how much uncertainty there is in the world. It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected. (Location 283)
Give Your Manager a Break This is a job. Your manager will be stressed out sometimes. She’ll be imperfect. She will say dumb things, or do things that feel unfair or harmful to you. She’ll give you work that you don’t want to do, and get annoyed when you complain about doing it. Her job is to do the best thing for the company and the team. It is not to do whatever it takes to make you happy all the time. (Location 302)
If you find yourself resenting every manager you work for, you may need to think about whether the cause is them or you. (Location 308)
Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems. Try not to make every 1-1 about how you need something, how something is wrong, or how you want something more. When you have a problem, instead of demanding that your manager solve it for you, try asking her for advice on how she might approach the problem. Asking for advice is always a good way to show respect and trust. (Location 310)
Here are some questions to consider as you develop this part of your career: (Location 325)
Has your manager delivered good feedback to you? Bad feedback? Any feedback at all? Has your manager helped you set any work-related goals for this year? (Location 329)
You tend to see alpha geeks in the CTO role at technology-focused startups, (Location 540)
Ultimately, the value of planning isn’t that you execute the plan perfectly, that you catch every detail beforehand, or that you predict the future; it’s that you enforce the self-discipline to think about the project in some depth before diving in and seeing what happens. A degree of forethought, in places where you can reasonably make predictions and plans, is the goal. The plan itself, however accurate it turns out, is less important than spending time on the act of planning. (Location 815)
Here are some guidelines: (Location 852)
Real Life of a Manager (Location 954)
Giving feedback on career growth, progression toward goals, areas for improvement, and praise as warranted (Location 1074)
Working with reports to identify areas for learning and helping them grow in these areas via project work, external learning, or additional mentoring (Location 1074)
Communicate Your Style and Expectations (Location 1122)
My goal in a 1-1 is first to listen to anything my direct reports want to discuss. I want the meeting to be driven by them, and I want to give them space to bring up whatever they feel is important. I view a 1-1 session as much as a creative discussion as a planning meeting. The downfall of the rambling 1-1 is that, if it’s left unchecked, it can turn into a complaining session or therapy. Empathetic leaders can sometimes allow themselves to get sucked into an unhealthy closeness with their direct reports. If you start focusing a lot of energy on hearing reports’ complaints and commiserating, you’re quite possibly making the problem worse. You don’t have to have a to-do list, but problems in the workplace need to be either dealt with or put aside by mutual agreement. There is very little value to repeatedly focusing on drama. (Location 1191)
The Feedback Meeting Sometimes your 1-1s will be devoted to informal feedback and coaching. It’s good to hold these kinds of meetings at a regular interval, (Location 1197)
If you have an employee with performance issues, feedback meetings should happen more frequently, and if you’re thinking of firing someone I advise you to document these feedback meetings. That documentation will include the issues you discussed and the expectations that you set with the person, in writing and sent to the person (usually via email). (Location 1203)
One final piece of advice: try to keep notes in a shared document, with you the manager playing note taker. For each person you manage, maintain a running shared document of notes, takeaways, and to-dos from your 1-1s. This is helpful for you to keep context about what has happened, and is useful for remembering when and what feedback was given. It will also be an essential historical record to refer to when you’re writing reviews or delivering feedback. (Location 1231)
Autonomy, the ability to have control over some part of your work, (Location 1272)
There’s nothing worse than feeling like you can’t make a single decision on your own, or feeling like every single piece of work you do has to be double- and triple-checked by your manager. On the other hand, delegation is not the same thing as abdication. When you’re delegating responsibility, you’re still expected to be involved as much as is necessary to help the project succeed. (Location 1274)
It’s important to remember that being a good leader means being good at delegating. Use the Team’s Goals to Understand Which Details You Should Dig Into When you feel like you want to micromanage, ask the team how they’re measuring their success and ask them to make that visible to you on an ongoing basis. Then sit on your hands if you must, but wait a week or two to see what they give you. If they have nothing to share, it’s a sign that you may need to do a course correction, which probably means digging into more details. How do you decide when to ask for this information to begin with? My philosophy is simple: if the team is making progress on its goals, the systems are stable, and the product manager is happy, I rarely dig into the details beyond a cursory overview. However, that requires goals with a plan for people to be making progress against, and a product manager who can give you another perspective. When you are managing a team that doesn’t have a clear plan, use the details you’d want to monitor to help them create one. What are you holding them accountable against this month, this quarter, or this year? If you can’t answer that question, the first step is to help the team create those goals. (Location 1280)
It’s OK to ask for status summaries and OK to use your team as a way of surfacing the most important information from all of these sources, but use a light touch. The team will not be productive or happy spending half their time gathering information for you that you could easily find yourself. (Location 1296)
Different details are important at different project stages. In the beginning and design stages of a project, you may want to be more involved in order to facilitate a good set of project goals or a good system design. When you’re close to a delivery date, progress details become more important, because there are more decisions to be made and those specifics convey much more actionable information. (Location 1303)
Establish Standards for Code and Systems I’m one of those deeply technical managers, and I have opinions about the way systems should be built and operated. Letting go has been hard for me, so I developed some guidelines to help me feel better about the structure around these issues. Developing basic standards as a team helps (Location 1308)
scenario: Jack is having a hard time with a project, but hasn’t been asking for help with his problems. You finally hear about his struggles. At this point, it’s appropriate to tell Jack that he needs to be more proactive in sharing his progress, even if it means admitting he’s struggling. (Location 1320)
Instead, your goal is to teach Jack what he needs to communicate, when, and how. (Location 1324)
In the long run, if you don’t figure out how to let go of details, delegate, and trust your team, you’re likely to suffer personally. (Location 1329)
Your time is too valuable to waste, and your team deserves a manager who is willing to trust them to do things on their own. (Location 1334)
Continuous feedback is, more than anything, a commitment to regularly sharing both positive and corrective feedback. Instead of saving these kinds of comments for the review cycle, managers and peers are encouraged to note when things are going well and raise issues as they happen. (Location 1345)
There are some steps you can take to be great at giving continuous feedback: Know your people. The first required part of successfully giving continuous feedback is a basic understanding of the individuals on your team. What are their goals, if any? What are their strengths and weaknesses? At what level are they currently operating, and where might they need to improve to get to the next level? You can get some of this knowledge by reading their previous performance reviews if you have them, but you’ll also want to sit down with every person on your team and ask for his or her perspective on all of these questions. (Location 1351)
Good managers have a knack for identifying talents and helping people draw more out of their strengths. Yes, you’ll also want to look for weaknesses and areas for improvement, but if you spend most of your time trying to get people to correct weaknesses, you’ll end up with a style that feels more like continuous criticism. (Location 1362)
You don’t have to do this in public, but every week there should be at least one thing you can recognize about someone on your team. Even better, look for something to recognize weekly for everyone who reports to you. (Location 1367)
Use a habit of continuous feedback to talk about things that don’t seem to be going well as you start to notice them, rather than waiting until the review cycle to have uncomfortable conversations. (Location 1374)
As situations arise, use coaching to ask people what they might have done differently. When things are going well, praise them, but also make suggestions as to what could be even better in the future. Coaching-based continuous feedback means going beyond a simple “good job” to really engage with the details and form a partnership with your direct report where the two of you are working together to help her grow. (Location 1377)
Writing and Delivering a Performance Review Here are a few guidelines for writing and delivering a successful performance review. (Location 1408)
Try to account for the whole year, not just the past couple of months This will be easier if you keep notes on what has happened with each person throughout the year. One tactic is to keep a running summary of your 1-1s, including any feedback that was delivered. If you haven’t done this, I encourage you to look through your email to remember which projects launched, review what activities were happening month by month, and put yourself back into the perspective of that time period. (Location 1419)
Spend plenty of time on accomplishments and strengths (Location 1429)
When it comes to areas for improvement, keep it focused (Location 1434)
What about the case where you have very little meaningful feedback for improvement? This indicates that the person is ready to be promoted or given more challenging work. If the person is doing a solid job at her level but isn’t ready for promotion, the feedback should indicate one or two skills she needs to expand to become qualified for promotion. (Location 1445)
Schedule enough time to discuss the review I usually give people a printed copy of the review as they’re leaving on the evening before the review is scheduled. (Location 1455)
My manager explained this to me twice. First, when I got my own VP promotion, he walked me through all of the materials we’d be gathering to support my case. Projects shipped, yes, but also signs of leadership, and work that pushed me beyond my immediate team. (Location 1494)
how to play the game. If you’re a manager, you are going to play a key role in getting people on your team promoted. Sometimes it will simply be up to you to determine who gets promoted, but more commonly promotions will be reviewed by your management, or a committee. So you’ll not only need to have a good idea about who deserves to be promoted, but you’ll need to make a case for their promotion as well. What does this process typically look like? Generally, you’ll look at the people on your team a couple of times a year, consider their job level, and ask yourself, are any of these people close to the next level? In the case of the early-career staff, the answer is likely to be yes. (Location 1498)
that they’re learning how to estimate their own work, getting it done roughly within the estimates, and learning from their mistakes. The evidence for promotion often takes the form of projects or features they’ve completed independently, participation in on-call rotations or other support, and engagement in team meetings and team planning. (Location 1508)
When members express the desire to be promoted and they don’t have a strong case for promotion, telling them what goes into the process will help them understand what they may need to change. You should also prepare yourself to start identifying promotion-worthy projects and trying to give those projects to people who are close to promotion. You, as the manager, are in a good position to identify what’s coming up for the team. Depending on how work gets assigned, you may either directly assign these projects to people, or encourage people to volunteer for projects that are a stretch goal for them. Keep an eye out for opportunities for your team members to stretch themselves and grow. (Location 1515)
Many people will not continue to advance past a certain level, at least not within the same company or team. There are fewer opportunities for people to show the kind of leadership or breadth of impact needed to get promoted as they become more senior. Sometimes there is nothing you can do about this, except perhaps to refer them to other leaders in different parts of the company for mentoring or guidance. As much as it might hurt you to lose them, they may be better off in another team or even another company with new challenges. Many companies expect you to be acting at the next level before you get promoted to it. This practice exists to prevent the “Peter Principle,” in which people are promoted to their level of incompetence. (Location 1520)
If there is no growth potential on your team because there’s no room for people to work at a more senior level, it may be a sign that you need to rethink the way work is done in order to let individuals take on bigger responsibilities. (Location 1526)
Ask the CTO: Coaching Someone Out of the Company (Location 1567)
Many organizations have a rule of “up or out” for early-career employees. (Location 1574)
Generally, you want to make sure that long-term employees are capable of doing their day-to-day work independently, without a lot of oversight or help. (Location 1575)
Others, like your employee, want to progress but for whatever reason don’t seem to be able to do it on your team. You owe it to your employee to be clear that this is the case. This is what is meant by “coaching out.” Make the situation clear to him. You have told him repeatedly what the next level looks like, and he has not been able to show that he can work at that level, so you don’t think that your team is the right place for him to grow his career. You aren’t firing him, but you are telling him that he needs to move on if he wants to progress. (Location 1579)
Assessing Your Own Experience (Location 1588)
The negative person is easier to deal with than the brilliant jerk. Make it clear to him that the behavior has to change, bring clear examples, and provide corrective feedback quickly after things happen. Sometimes the negative person is just unhappy and the best thing to do is to help him leave the team on good terms; you must be prepared for this outcome. (Location 1709)
It’s time — now — for you to figure out how to manage your time. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself with days gone by and little to show for them. You still have responsibilities as a manager. You still have deliverables that require you to do more than sit in a meeting — things like setting goals for the team, helping your product team put details on the product roadmaps, and making sure that an assigned task actually got finished. (Location 2153)
Managing your time comes down to one important thing: understanding the difference between importance and urgency. (Location 2163)
Responding to email is a good example. It’s easy to get sucked into email as a distraction, because the red dot tells you there’s something new, and it feels urgent to you to acknowledge it. And yet how often is email really urgent? (Location 2172)
As you navigate your new obligations, start to ask yourself: How important is the thing I’m doing? Does it seem important because it is urgent? How much time have I spent this week on urgent things? (Location 2206)
But more likely you look at the state of things and realize that what your team needs is a manager. Because you need to hire X more people. Because Y has a lot of potential but needs some coaching. (Location 2212)
Decisions and Delegation How do you feel at the end of the day these days? If you’re like many new full-time managers, you probably feel quite drained. (Location 2222)
The best way to describe the feeling of management from here on out is plate spinning. (Location 2234)
Delegate Complex and Frequent Tasks to Develop Your Team Tasks like project planning, systems design, or being the key person during an outage are the biggest opportunity you have to grow talent on your team while also making the team run better. Strong managers spend a lot of their time developing members of their teams in these areas. (Location 2267)
Delegation is a process that starts slow but turns into the essential element for career growth. If you teams can’t operate well without you around, you’ll find it hard to be promoted. Develop your talent and push decisions down to that talent so that you can find new and interesting plates to learn how to spin. (Location 2280)
Sometimes you’ll hear ideas that seem very ill-considered. “Help me say yes” means you ask questions and dig in on the elements that seem so questionable to you. Often, this line of questioning helps people come to the realization themselves that their plan isn’t a good idea, but sometimes they’ll surprise you with their line of thinking. (Location 2335)
The popular management book First, Break All the Rules2 (Location 2382)
Who are the rising leaders of your teams? What is your plan for coaching them to take on bigger leadership roles? What tasks are you giving them to prepare them for more responsibility? (Location 2565)
Manager Accountability Whether you have experienced managers or first-timers reporting to you, there is one universal goal for these relationships: they should make your life easier. Your managers should allow you to spend more time on the bigger picture, and less time on the details of any one team. This is why they’re around. They’re more than just people who take some 1-1 meetings off your hands; they are responsible for taking a team of people and helping that team succeed. When they repeatedly fail to do this, they’re failing to do their job. (Location 2684)
Ask Questions Ask the team what their goals are. Can they tell you? Do they understand why those are the goals? If they don’t understand the goals of their work, their leaders (manager, tech lead, product manager) aren’t doing a good job engaging the team in the purpose of the work. In almost every model of motivation, people need to feel an understanding and connection with the purpose of their work. (Location 3025)