I’ve been writing a series of posts on management based on my experiences. If you’re starting with this one, you may want to have a look at: https://www.jlgoodwin.com/words-pictures/2020/9/17/management-the-job-of-a-manager

Introduction

I’ve written in other posts about what the job of a manager is; a lot of that related to how the manager should support the team, but, as a manager you need support, too. In my experience it is often the case that managers are not very well supported and they are expected to “just get on with it,” with very little guidance. Or the guidance is of the form: “Well, you fucked that up, don’t do that again or we’ll fire you.” So, in that situation you end up managing yourself. I’m going to describe a few dimensions of what that means. 

Time Management

Howie didn’t work on my team, my project, anywhere near me and yet for some reason he would come to my cubicle, sit down, and talk to me about nothing. These little chats were quite one-sided and sometimes even after saying “sorry, I’ve got a lot to do,” the monologues would still run to an hour. My boss could be seen to drift past my cube opening and the glare I was getting was meaningful. Finally, I just started not turning around when I would sense Howie entering my cube and just continue working. This didn’t dissuade Howie however because he would just plop himself down and deliver a soliloquy about the Red Sox (or some other shit I had no interest in). Finally, when I would feel the guard hairs on my neck signal Howie’s approach I would just say “Fuck off, Howie” there would be a quiet shuffling of feet and he’d move on, probably seeking another victim…

Nobody is going to manage your time for you. Folks above, beside, and below you in the org-chart will dump things on you as if you have nothing to do. The problem with this is that if you just accept this, you will end up burnt out and not accomplishing what you want to do, and often not even what other folks want you to do. Treat your own time like the precious and limited resource that it is. Block time in your calendar to work on your own tasks--this can even be “spend an hour thinking about the hiring plan” or “spend an hour thinking about the teams priorities for the next month.” The key part here is to actually take that time, and do those things: don’t read email, don’t answer instant messages, don’t get distracted by clerical tasks. This also ensures that you do these things on the company’s time--and not lying awake in bed at home. 

Go to only those meetings where there is an agenda and where decisions might be made. Feel free to delegate to other members on your team and ask them to summarize or alert you to things that might be significant for you. If these are Zoom meetings, request a recording and watch it at 1.5x or 2x speed at your leisure. Resist any meeting that could be solved with an email conversation; try that first and then, as a last resort, have a short meeting. In general, keep meetings short. Start with a default booking of thirty minutes and make sure the topic and the objectives are clear. Manage the meeting and keep it on topic; ask to table things that are off-topic, or drive them into email. Do this even if it isn’t your meeting. Develop a polite but firm “Don’t waste my time, I’m busy” vibe (which I also used to call the “Fuck-off” pheremone) to discourage time wasters and meeting addicts.

The other side of time management is actively maintaining a disciplined boundary between your work time and your off hours. Once I understood this, I essentially committed to work strict eight-hour days. This means focusing and working effectively during those hours; it also means that when you are not at work, you don’t read emails and instant messages. Don’t commit to things that would require you to work “around the clock.” Having this separation gives you perspective and creates a value system for your life independent of your work and your work role. Work to live, don’t live to work.

Americans get such a shitty amount of time off, so use it all: Take all of your vacation and all of  your sick time. Shut off all communication with the company during your vacation. If you don’t want to completely eliminate email and slack from your phone (which is ideal), temporarily turn off the notifications. Of course, this relies on you having the self discipline not to proactively check them. I recommend getting out of your work context as much as possible during vacation time. If you can’t physically travel, plan activities that interest you and will allow you to be immersed in them. This gives you time to recharge, to gain some distance and perspective, and an opportunity to see how things go when you’re away. If your life has no pleasure in it then you’re headed for serious emotional and mental trouble.

Managing your emotional and mental state

I worked for smaller companies for most of my early career. In general, people were somewhat more emotionally invested in the products and their contribution to them. After all, if you were careless, then you and your co-workers could be out of a job quickly. The first time one of these companies was acquired into a Giant Multinational Corporation, I noticed a steady decline in people’s attachments to the product and the team--and in their expression of emotion. I remained quite emotionally engaged, and often sent passionate emails to my superiors when I saw bad stuff happening in the product or in the team. After a bit, the director of our division invited me to a chat. They said, “Look, you’re very talented and we like a lot of what you’re doing, but you’ll never get anywhere at Giant Multinational Corporation by being so emotional.” This was of course delivered in the most medicated deadpan I’d ever heard in my life. It was at exactly that point that I vowed to get out of the Giant Multinational Corporation before I had the life sucked from me. 

When you are an individual contributor, your moods and day-to-day run of emotions (unless they’re pathological) have relatively limited impact on the broader team. When you are a manager however, if you are unaware of your emotions and how you’re projecting them in your communication, in your manner, even in your decision making process, those emotions can have a big impact on your team. I went through a period in the early-middle of my career where I found myself experiencing flashes of intense anger in situations that didn’t warrant them. It got to a point where I had a couple of encounters with people that came just short of employment threatening. I realized (with help from people close to me) that I needed to talk to a professional about it. I started therapy and worked on that for several years. I learned a lot about myself and about what was triggering my emotions, including where some of my defensive behavior towards other humans came from. It helped me make a lot of progress in my career and in my life. I share this because I realized that emotions are ok to have, and that you can’t repress them, but you can understand and manage them.

Your honest expression of emotion based on caring about your team, your project, even sometimes the company, lends credibility to your leadership. People can tell when you’re being real with them, and when you repress your true feelings, it creates a distance that erodes true leadership. Of course, as I mentioned above sometimes anyone’s emotions can go haywire and therefore self-awareness and being proactive about your emotional state (and its causes) is imperative. Even on a day to day basis, you should pay attention to how you’re feeling. For example, if there is a particularly contentious meeting with a challenging person coming up and you are tired or have recently had another emotional challenge, feel free to ask to change that meeting and give yourself some time to recover. If that’s not possible, be aware that you can be triggered more easily in that situation and do your best to manage the encounter so you have time to contemplate your responses.

In order to resolve problems in the workplace, sometimes you have to share your emotional or mental state with someone who is causing you difficulty. Ignoring emotional trauma on a team can create real world impacts, such as failure of communication, underperformance, or lack of teamwork and coordination. These conversations can seem very confrontational, but framed as “When you do X, it makes me feel Y,” it can be a positive discussion that may lead to a better working environment. Avoid attribution in this process, e.g, “You are doing X to undermine me!” You may feel undermined, but you don’t have any idea why they’re doing X until you get them to tell you. Remember that you too have a contribution to these interactions. For example, you might realize that you have a fear of people undermining you from experiences earlier in your life, and that this person’s actions are reminding you of those experiences.

Positive visualization

One challenge that comes with moving from working as an individual contributor to acting as a manager is swapping the instant gratification of accomplishing tasks for the delayed gratification of your team achieving goals, sometimes over years of effort. It can be hard to feel like you’re accomplishing anything and it can be very demotivating. I recommend setting aside a time every day to think about your fantasy positive future for yourself and your team. It can be as detailed as you like and it doesn’t have to be super realistic, but it should represent the feeling of where you’d like to be in the future. Don’t edit yourself, don’t criticise it, just tell yourself a story of success and add in all the things that you dream would happen. You’re not making a commitment to have all or any of these things happen in real life. However, after doing this for many years and looking back at what happened over those years, many of the features of my positive visualization had been achieved. For example, I’m very happily retired, having visualized that outcome for several years. By visualizing it, you’re starting to plan what might be necessary to achieve it, and can (even unconsciously) influence a lot of the micro-decisions that happen every day and creates a direction that you might not recognize existed, save in retrospect.

It also lets you recognize whether the longer arc of your team’s progress is being achieved more efficiently than any list of statuses on tasks. Being a fantasy, it is flexible, so if a macro-economic change occurs, and changes the whole business, you can just add it to the story and start thinking of the new positive outcome.

360 Feedback

You may or may not get feedback from your own manager; even if you do, the quality of the feedback will depend on how good a manager they are. Actively seek 360 degree feedback from your management chain (not just your manager), including your peers, your stakeholders, and the folks who work for you. Ideally this should be through an anonymous mechanism, perhaps through your manager or HR, so it can be honest without fear of retribution. There are many frameworks to help folks structure and express their feedback constructively. I recommend picking one and using it; lack of structure tends to make all but the very stroppy not respond. Before you look at any feedback, evaluate yourself honestly in the same terms, using the same questionnaire. Compare your answers with the feedback that you get back, look for gaps and conflicts, the areas where you think you’re doing one thing and others see it as the opposite. These are opportunities to get better at your job, so every candid, thoughtful piece of feedback is a gift that to be cherished and considered. Look for significant signals supported by multiple people and work on those things in the interval between repeating the feedback, quarterly or every six months.

Relationship management

Your team has stakeholders and dependencies on the teams run by your peers, so pay attention to your relationship with them. It is often easy to get immersed in the details of your own team’s tasks and ignore the broader context that is around your team. Make sure to connect with, and listen to, your peers and stakeholders at some regular interval. Some may have more priority for your team than others, and the frequency and intensity of contact should vary proportionately, but this maintenance will help your team succeed. 

Be there for your peers if they need advice, or if you need advice, pay them the compliment of asking them for theirs. Be open with them, and offer help and support if they need it. Building strong relationships can help protect you in cases of larger political dysfunction in a company. Always deal with them with integrity; don’t mislead them, and if your team is failing to deliver for them in some way, own up to it and work to mitigate the impact.

Playing to your strengths

Nobody is all-around awesome; we all have strengths and weaknesses. As a manager, you should structure your team and your processes in order for you to play to your strengths and minimize exposure for your weaknesses. There are many tools and books that can help you identify what you’re good at and where you need work. People frequently try to “improve” in their areas of weakness and, certainly by craft and practice, you can get better in some areas. In the meantime, however, there is often a person standing next to you who has the skills you lack, and you could empower them immediately and see results immediately. I am very much not a detail person, or a perfectionist, so projects that are imperative, but filled with a million boring details, each of which needs to be perfect, are not my thing. However, when I’m hiring I look for folks who love that sort of thing, who describe themselves as obsessive about details and enjoy ticking off all the boxes. I try to balance my team with some of them for just these sorts of projects; conversely I don’t send those same folks off on quick and dirty “lean” projects to test the market.

Learn how to negotiate

Once I started managing teams with multiple stakeholders, I realized that much of my job involved negotiation. Teams always have more demands on them than capacity to meet them, so you are always trying to prioritize your stakeholders. All stakeholders think they are the most important--hence the negotiation. I also realized that just advocating for what I wanted (or what I thought was the most reasonable) wasn’t working. I got my company to send me to a course at Harvard that focused on negotiation. It was one of the most useful courses I’ve ever taken. I came away with an entire framework for approaching negotiations and for finding compromises that were mutually beneficial. It also turned out to be a good life-skill in totally non-work related situations.

Be kind to yourself

My new boss only talked to me for thirty minutes every three weeks. That actually wasn’t so bad, since at this point I was pretty experienced and I didn’t require a lot of direction. The content of those meetings were mostly them downloading the new things that were wrong with my team and my product, and the additional un-scoped, un-staffed tasks we needed to accomplish. Every so often at the end of our time I’d ask “So, is there anything that we’re doing well?” and there would be a pause like an old computer having to spin up a device long asleep, followed by a couple of sentences acknowledging the good work we’d done. Of course, that was usually followed by a reminder of the latest things we needed to work on, so we wouldn’t become complacent.

Finally, and this is going to sound nuts, praise yourself. Not out loud to anyone else (except maybe to your life partner), but to yourself. Say “That was fucking awesome, I made that happen!” or even “I love me!” I know, I know, across many cultures, for whatever fucked-up reason, we’ve all been taught not to be proud. “You’ll get a big head!” or “Don’t be so bold!” or “Don’t be arrogant!” I’m not suggesting that you be blindly self-congratulatory or praise yourself even when you’ve fucked up: Own that shit and do better.  However, when you do things that you know are good, acknowledge them to yourself, even if nobody else decides to notice. This also helps your independence from a withholding boss; these folks often withhold praise to goad achievement-oriented employees into jumping higher and higher for them. Don’t fall into that trap; appreciate your own achievements and take pleasure in them.

I was new at the company and was a few months into running my new team. I was excited that I had gotten the team to start shipping features again, and I was resolving a bunch of the productivity issues that had been blocking them. I was called into a meeting with our CEO and my peer on our biggest stakeholder/dependency team. The CEO proceeded to take us to task for not coordinating the release of a new feature that my peer’s team had shipped. I was pretty amazed: Everyone had told me that “culturally” we didn’t do that sort of thing at the company. We shipped things when they were ready and we didn’t worry about the short-term marketability. It was made clear to us that we needed to fix this lack of coordination or the CEO would fix us… I felt incredibly stupid to have led my team into this spot when I should have known to question the “culture” story, and ascertain that it was not just the old “culture” that we were discarding as the company grew. It kept me up at night, going over it in my head relentlessly for days. Finally, I realized that I needed to take control of our relationships with our stakeholders, even going so far as to staff teams inside their organizations so that we could truly coordinate and support them as customers. I also started discounting the “culture” stories that old-timers tried to impose on me and paid attention only to what the CEO was doing now. I slept fine once I saw the path forward.

When you make mistakes, you should certainly acknowledge your mistakes and take responsibility for mitigating them--but do not beat yourself up about them. Everyone makes mistakes, and many of the folks whose persona is “I’m the big expert and I’m never wrong” are often the folks who make the biggest mistakes and then try to bluster their way past them. You learn by making mistakes and by fixing them and then figuring out how to not repeat them. This brings up a corollary: “It is better to make your own mistakes and not someone else’s.” There will always be a lot of people who want to tell you how to do things, and you should certainly listen to them and evaluate their advice. If you don’t agree with their reasoning, and you are more comfortable with your own approach, you should follow your own direction. If you’re wrong, and it’s a mistake, you learn something valuable about how you were approaching that situation. If you follow someone else’s direction when you don’t agree with, or understand it, and it fails, you are left holding the bag anyway and you haven’t learned anything nearly as useful. 

These are the aspects of self-management that I’ve found to be most productive over the years. It turns out that doing these things in your non-business life is also very rewarding.