Still totally obsessed with how to do this manager job

I think I have a management philosophy:

1. My job is to help my people have the career they want. Whether it ends up being on my team or not.
2. My job is to set the team up to be successful. Give them opportunities.
3. I have awkward conversations so you don't have to. And so they actually happen.

My job is to help my people have the career they want. Whether it ends up being on my team or not.

Seems like maybe my job should be something more like "make sure the team meets it's obligations", "projects we own get done", something like that. But meh. I'm gonna go ahead and assume that the career you want does not involve letting everyone down and leaving projects undone. Let's look ahead to how to make you successful now to set you up for where you want to be. Possibly the hardest part of this is figuring out where you want to be. So cool, some of this is helping you try a bunch of things so you find out!

My job is to set the team up to be successful. Give them opportunities.

It is not about what I do - it is about what they do. And it is about them owning the successes.

One of my first favorite stories of being proud of them was the first time we hosted a bootcamper (someone coming to be part of our team for a week and learn what we do.)  I was out of town at a recruiting trip for most of it. They taught her the layout of the system, helped her get started on some real work tickets (and she successfully completed more than one!) and on their own held a little meeting at the end of the week for her to tell them what she learned. All I did was find someone to come bootcamp with us, make sure there was at least one person to answer her questions, and that they had at least one ticket lined up for her. The actual week involved so much more than that - and I had NOTHING to do with it. All I did was help set up the opportunity and get out of the way.

I have awkward conversations so you don't have to. And so they actually happen.

The first time I said this, I thought I was joking. Having the hard conversations: "Did you know this came across as angry?", "We need to find a better way to work together on this", "I thought we already had this covered, what happened?" and much harder than that - turns out actually talking about these things goes WAY better than hoping they will get better, or hinting at things. How is someone supposed to know my expectations if I don't tell them? How are they supposed to know how they're viewed by other people if no one says anything? A lot of these are outside my team "Hey, we thought you were going to do X." "This thing your team is doing isn't working for us because Y, how can I help you change it?" "We need help to remove our dependence on cascading.jruby. PLEASE." I still kind of dread the conversations, but you know what? Feels so good to survive one. Well worth it.

Communication

I kind of wanted to talk about how all of these depend on communication and trust, but I think that's another blog post waiting to happen. I think it boils down to these are my goals, and communication and relationships are the tools I use to get there.

I think about this way too much! If you also want to think deep thoughts about what it means to manager, you may want to hang out with us on #mgmt on freenode.