Scattered thoughts on management:
- Managing
- Culture
- Onboarding
- Performance Improvement Plans
- 1:1s
High-level overview 👇
Leverage is about making small changes that have huge impacts.
Why is managing well important? Management gives you leverage.
Optimizing managing process can have ripple effects in your company.
Managers dictate most of people's experiences at companies.
They effectively oversee the social contract btw the company & employee.
If employee's have a bad experience w/ their manager, they'll likely leave.
Managers are so important Keith Rabois suggests optimizing for your manager as much as the specific company.
Good management matters more than ever:
Andy Grove wrote High Output for industrial, conveyor belt era
Today, employees don't just need to be productive, they need to be creative
Which means they need to be inspired & internally motivated so they can be generative & productive
Great ICs are expected to become managers, even if they have neither the skillset nor the interest. But being a good IC doesn't make you a good manager.
Let IC's be IC's if they want, & create paths for ppl to be managers.
People aren't born managers. They need to be trained.
Onboarding:
- The best indicator of how long someone will stay in the org is their experience in the first day.
- Make sure everything's set up so they can ship something their first day.
- Make sure they can easily understand priorities of the company and where they fit in.
How to have a 1:1
- Weekly 30 min 1:1 with your reports
- Update & agenda prepped in advance by the reports
- Align on what are the top three things that are most important to get done by this time next week. Capture those & check in next week:
Q's:
Goal setting:
Often problems come up that seem like they're communication problems, but really they're planning problems.
Different ways to do goals (e.g OKRs) just make sure they're clear and transparent for everyone across teams to see.
Performance Reviews:
- Decouple performance review from compensation bonus (do that before the review)
- The goal is no surprises
- It's a way to retain people, renew commitments, and reset expectations if needed.
Feedback:
- Be direct, clear, & concise. Give it during regular 1:1s.
- Make sure you ask for it too, and make it a good experience for the feedback giver or else they won't give it.
- You're looking for people to take ownership & show growth-mindset when taking feedback.
Conflict resolution:
When people hate each other it's usually because they're not hearing each other.
If you can get them essentially repeating back what the other person is saying, you'd be surprised at how conflicts can evaporate.
Read NVC:
How to run group meetings well:
- Make sure people are prepped ahead of time (updates published ahead)
- Having a meeting owner to move ppl along
- Also have a note-taker to track decisions & next steps
- Don't create weird incentives where ppl get promoted b/c of face-time
Comp:
- More important to figure out what's fair within org than in market, as that's what ppl care more about.
- Different approaches: Uber famously paid 75% of market as a gut check "How much do you believe this"? Netflix famously pays aggressive salaries but skimps on equity
Performance Improvement Plan:
- PIPs are opportunities for struggling employees to reinvent themselves.
- "These were expectations for the role. This is observed performance. This is what we need to do to bridge the gap."
- PIPs need to be specific. Not "Improve communication"
Firing well:
- Fire crisply & kindly
- Don't negotiate
- Don't have long transition periods. Cut the chord.
- Don't demote (usually)
- Don't feel too terrible. You're letting them go to a different company where they will be more valued, more respected, and more successful
Mistake founders make:
Hero'ing: doing the work themselves on behalf of their reports.
This is bad because you start resenting your team and because they develop a learned helplessness.
If you have to do it, acknowledge explicitly you're doing it so it's known it's temporary.
Culture:
Solves the resolution to bandwidth problem.
You can't be involved in every decision as the company grows, so you want to create the cultural infrastructure by which people do what you want them to do when you're not there, when they don't even know you well.
Culture:
Having an explicit culture "We're for X, not Y" can be helpful to self-select & stand out: Be known for something or be known for nothing.
Ppl think culture is like architecture when more like gardening. You plant some seeds & pull out weeds that aren't working.
Culture:
The best way to influence culture is to hire for it upfront
Make sure you link your hiring process to your annual review
If you evaluate candidates differently than you evaluate hires, you're not setting team up for success
More on recruiting:
Time horizons:
Either your company sort of fails very quickly, or all of your problems become in some way about managing growth.
Your time horizons are proportional to company age.
When you're 1 month old, you think 1 month ahead.
When you're 2 yrs old, you think 2 yrs ahead.
Learned a lot talking to @maccaw & reading his book: themanagershandbook.com
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