[Introduction] Although I have been in the industry for more than 20 years and have managed teams ranging from a few people to hundreds of people, I am personally very unwilling or afraid to discuss team management issues because management is result-oriented and has a posteriori effect. characteristics, and the biggest complexity faced in management is people. Everyone is a different individual. The same successful experience may fail in another environment. Therefore, discussions about management are often case analysis and are conducted on a case-by-case basis. Discussions may come to the topic of "human nature" and "sitting and discussing." However, "the great road is easy to obtain, but the small tricks are hard to find." In the spring window of this year, several young friends got promotions to varying degrees and invited me to drink coffee on the weekend, so I shared some of my views and experiences on management as my humble opinion on software team management. written.
Every time a person is promoted in a career, the job changes, but not all changes are obvious. It requires a change of mindset and a focus on developing new skills that are often related to those in the previous position. The skills for success vary widely.
There are many good resources on the Internet that can be used to help people who are getting started in management. There are also many books designed for CTOs or senior managers, but there are fewer learning materials for middle managers. While there are some approaches that translate well from CEO/CTO et al, such as building team culture, very little of what is available translates into direct help for software technology teams. More people are interested in this practical advice for middle management, where most people are likely to spend their entire careers.
1. From employees to new managers
In the workplace, you have to go through a series of changes every time you move up a level. One of the biggest transitions can happen when you first move from an individual contributor to a management role.
1.1 Personal impact becomes difficult to measure
As an individual contributor, you definitely have to be hands-on. There's a straight line between daily tasks and results: You write code for a feature of your team's product, and once you're done, you can see the feature before your eyes. Every time the team reaches a milestone, you know exactly how you contributed to the team's success and can even quantify those contributions if you wish.
When you move into management, you move away from that straight line. The work that gets done is no longer your own job; instead, your role is to coach, inspire, and guide the team to get the work done, while staying connected to the larger vision/strategy to make it easier for the team to get things done.
This can be one of the hardest jobs for a new manager to adjust to. They just want to step up and solve the problem themselves, but this often actually does more harm than good. Those who try to do the work themselves can end up micromanaging or becoming a bottleneck on the project.
The new management position is about solving problems by removing obstacles, streamlining processes, and helping others become more productive. Now instead of solving the problem yourself, create an environment where others can solve the problem. This is how managers add value. This is a major shift in mindset: how you view yourself and how you define your success.
1.2 Measures of success become lagging indicators
Unfortunately, there is no longer the same honor as the honor of being an individual contributor because of one's previous role. Streamlining processes and coaching teams are essential tasks, but rarely have immediate results; sometimes it takes a while to truly feel and appreciate the impact of your work.
It’s hard to understand your impact when the work is being done by someone else. When you have a strong team, the value you bring as a leader can be difficult to judge or see. This becomes more and more obvious as you move up the ranks.
What success means to you and your team can be achieved by being the link between the parent organization and your team.
1.3 Communication becomes a valuable skill
Leadership is based on two-way communication (i.e. between you and your leader, and then you and your team), whereas before it was more of a one-way street between you and your manager.
The art of effective listening is crucial to clear communication, which is necessary for managerial success. ——James Cash Penney
Frequent communication with leadership is necessary in order to understand the larger vision of the organization, and then you can gain insight into what the team needs to accomplish and why. You have to work closely with team members to ensure that the best possible people are doing the best possible work; a big part of this is helping them understand the overall impact of what they're doing.
It’s imperative to look further into the future than ever before to see not only the project your team is working on today, but how it will connect to the goals of the projects that will be completed in the next one to two years.
To summarize, these are the biggest transitions from individual contributor to entry-level management:
Let go of the instant gratification that comes from doing/building/creating, and as you move up the ladder, your accolades and recognition will become less and less
A sense of accomplishment comes from mentoring, growing and advancing the team and those around them
Add value by removing barriers, streamlining processes, and helping others become more productive
Consider projects and product roadmaps over one to two years
Help teams connect their work to the parent organization, helping them see their value and impact on the company
2. From new manager to middle manager
When promoted to middle manager, you already have some management skills and experience. While it’s not as big of a transition as moving from individual contributor to new manager, there’s still a lot of change to get used to.
For example, you should be adept at letting go of micromanaging and instead trusting the people on your team to do their jobs, a.k.a. delegating. However, as a mid-level manager, the risks of the work performed by his or her direct reports are increasing.
2.1 Trust with the team
Now, your output is no longer writing code that can be fixed in a day or two, but making hiring decisions, performance management, and driving strategy. Mistakes in any one of these can have long-term and costly consequences, so it’s important to learn how to balance trusting your team with avoiding disaster. If a middle manager quickly becomes a micromanager, this can erode trust between you and your team in both directions.
2.2 The real point
Ignoring your direct reports where they need work and where they can be trusted will erode their trust in you. The key is understanding what's most important and how these decisions impact the overall strategy.
To put things into perspective, imagine two to three years from now and ask yourself the following questions:
How do all the teams come together?
How are resources allocated?
Which projects and people are critical to the organization's most important goals?
What do junior managers need to learn from this?
Which areas do not allow for failure and therefore require your own supervision?
Once you understand the real takeaways, you can implement the right checks and balances so you can feel confident in the decisions you make and have enough time to make adjustments if things go wrong.
Good management involves showing ordinary people how to do the work of good people. ——John D. Rockefeller
As a middle-level manager, you not only have direct reports, but also the teams led by your direct reports. There's a lot to keep track of here. Even if you can’t keep tabs on every team member, at least have a general idea of what they spend their time on each day. In fact, even so, it is still often beyond the capabilities of the individual.
That’s why it’s critical to have the right people in key roles. In engineering teams, culture can be established at the manager/product level or within functional units. Therefore, having some really good senior people (technical people, project managers, product managers, and UX leads) can help the team stay good and progress. Maintain constant communication with these individuals to ensure they know how important they are to the team.
That doesn’t mean you can forget about coaching and mentoring entirely. As a mid-level manager, helping your direct reports achieve their career goals remains important.
2.3 Planning for the future
As you advance up the ranks in the organization, typically, your subordinates will also advance through the ranks. However, as those who report to you take on increasingly important roles, preparations must be made for their successors.
What happens if the best employee on your team leaves? Or what can you do to get your best employees to want to stay on the team?
What resources are needed now and what resources will be needed a year from now?
Which employees on the team are likely to be promoted in the future?
Which positions need to be filled?
Are there team members who have outgrown their current roles or are able to handle possible future needs?
There needs to be a constant focus on the future, not just managing employees, but managing the work and goals of the team. Find a goal within two to three years and then develop a systematic approach to get there. When managing multiple teams, you need to find ways to make it easier for you to know what's going on:
What metrics do you need to measure and focus on? Why?
How do you build visibility into project progress?
This can be achieved in a variety of ways, from cross-level meetings to setting up a reporting system that automatically points to key data points. Don’t rely on just one method and make sure you don’t get a one-sided view.
Finally, how do you communicate these key metrics to your own leaders? How do you communicate successes and failures to your leaders?
Success as a middle manager is harder to define because a full day may look like just a lot of meetings with little timely and concrete output. More importantly, you must also have a clear understanding from higher leadership of what success you and your team need to achieve, and how hard you must work for the big picture tomorrow.
Management is nothing but motivating others. ——Lee Iacocca
Mid-level manager skills may include:
Continue to learn to let go of control and allow team members to make mistakes. Balance autonomy with potential risks and focus on what really matters.
People management is still coaching, but there's a new level of transparency for subordinates about their compensation.
Think about the future. How to allocate team resources? How do changes in priorities affect the allocation of staff and resources? Recommend a small but beautiful full-stack team.
Succession planning comes into play. Ensure there is a solid plan in place to develop the leadership team and maintain succession for all key roles.
Take responsibility for progress and execution. Track the right metrics and share those results with your leadership.
3. From middle managers to senior managers
When you move into a position a few levels above engineering, your role changes even more. Perhaps the biggest change you'll face is this: work is no longer about the "what" but the "how." Now you manage an organization composed of several unique teams, each of which may have its own culture, processes, priorities, and operating models. You must decide where the team should be similar and what is best for the organization as a whole.
When managing hundreds of people, you become too distant from those who do the "what", so the way to add value is to define and simplify the "how" and your job is to make the entire organization successful.
3.1 Establish team culture
You no longer know everything that is going on in the teams you manage. If you try to make this part of your job, you will become a hindrance or bottleneck to retaining top talent. Instead, build a culture for your organization. Once you find the right people in the right place, you need to step back and let them do the work.
Corporate culture is important. How management chooses to treat its employees affects everything: for better or worse. ——Simon Sinek
What does it mean to build a culture and values? Try answering these questions yourself:
What does it mean to join [Company Name]?
What do you stand for?
How should the decision be made?
How should the problem be escalated?
What principles are used to make tough decisions?
First define the most important values of the organization. It must be clearly defined. This is the basis for everything else. For example, a friend told me that he never prepares for the meetings he hosts. Instead, set aside time in the first few minutes of each meeting for all attendees to read the documents discussed at that meeting. In his opinion, there was little advance preparation, which ensured that the remaining meeting time was effective. This may seem like a small detail, but it shows someone who has a clear understanding of his own values and who imparts those values to his team. This is one small way to achieve team culture.
A large part of a top manager's job is to create and maintain a structure for internal work and communication. What meetings need to be held every week? Monthly, quarterly, etc? How often do you meet with the entire organization? How to share your company’s roadmap and how often?
It is also important to identify the culture guardians in your organization. Are they managers? Or a senior engineer? Make sure you know who they are, but also make sure they know who they are. Let them know you understand their value and help them see themselves as leaders.
Every decision made at this level must be well thought out and reflect organizational values. Once a decision is made, be open to revisiting it. If it doesn't work, then iterate and update until it does.
3.2 Growth guidance and personnel management
How do you connect with a team when there are too many people? Need to try different things until you see what works best. Keep trying new things to avoid falling into a rut.
Here are ways to stay connected with those who report to you:
office hours
Have lunch with different teams, randomly select groups, and more
sporadic one-on-one
cross-level meeting
large plenary meeting
Communicate regularly via email, video, etc.
Now that you're managing more people than you can hold in your head, does it matter if every engineer on your team feels like he or she knows you? If you have hundreds of people to manage, this can be an impossible challenge. But don’t forget that your role is at this level of the organization, representing the company and its goals.
You're not going to be friends with every employee or even know everyone's name who works for you, but making an effort to be approachable will help people follow your lead. The more people you work with and know about you, the more effective you will be as a leader.
The core is trust. People need to trust you and you need to trust them.
The first rule of management is empowerment. Don't try to do anything yourself because you can't. ——Anthea Turner
3.3 Trust, but verify
But there's a caveat to this kind of trust: it must be verified. This can take many forms, for example, diving into one or two programs at a somewhat regular pace. Get a presentation from key players and have time to ask questions about the work, timeline, and goals. This will provide an opportunity to examine the architecture, point out red flags, and confirm that progress is meeting expectations.
Just like a startup, it’s possible to set up monthly updates or quarterly business reviews. These discussions provide an opportunity for you to answer questions from those who are working on the things, clarify the vision or goals for the project, and ensure that the team's understanding is aligned. This is a more sustainable way of working rather than just assuming you know what's going well and what's not based on a bunch of status reports.
You can't keep an eye on every project every day, but you can establish a system to keep yourself in touch with your team so that you can communicate effectively with multiple parties.
If there is no trust, it is critical to get that person out of that position or into another position as quickly as possible. If you can't trust the core roles on your team, work won't be effective.
3.4 Monitoring and project reporting
You basically act as "you" when your subordinate teams interact with each other. You need a manager who is consistent with your vision and can accurately present the company's goals to the team. If what you say is inconsistent with what the middle manager says, things can get ugly. Likewise, if what you say is different from what your colleagues or CEO say, that can breed distrust.
Management's job is to communicate the message of leadership in a compelling and inspiring way. Not just in meetings, but by example. ——Jeffrey Gitomer
If some middle managers are not representing you accurately, they need to be corrected or replaced as soon as possible. You should be honest and clear with middle managers about your expectations: What is their job? What is your job? Their job is to gain a deep understanding of the company's goals and how their team meets those goals, and tell you what's working well and what needs help. Your job is to support their decisions and communicate clearly on behalf of company leadership.
With so many people and projects under your purview, it’s important to get regular status reports in the language of the organization, such as OKRs, to share progress upwards as efficiently as possible. However, these reports only provide the simplest view of work in progress. In order to truly understand what is going on with your team, high-quality communication with middle managers is a must.
One trick is to pick a few projects to review each week to look at key metrics, milestones, deadlines, and overall status. This is a great way to do a quick, random audit of the work being done to gain insight into early red flags: Is there a risk? Dependencies? What changes need to be made? Create a spreadsheet or other structured format for review projects so that each project is judged and discussed using the same language.
3.5 Talent assessment
You are now managing middle managers and it is important to think about the future of these people and roles and have a plan in place for when someone needs to be replaced. Pay special attention to identifying high-potential talent on your team. who are they? Did they get what they wanted? What is their future path? You can ask middle managers for their advice, but chances are there are some standouts who can see clearly even from a relative distance.
The way management treats partners is the way partners treat clients. Sam Walton
You should also identify those who may be too important to the success of the team. There should never be a single point of failure. If a key person leaves and the company is in danger, then the situation is very bad and needs to be corrected immediately. Find ways to create backup and redundancy for your most critical personnel.
Make sure you’re involved in the team’s hiring and evaluation process, and even in the interview process for certain positions. Sit back and listen to how middle managers give feedback to employees and interview potential new employees. This can tell a lot about how team culture spreads. It's also an opportunity to spot red flags that could have real long-term consequences.
When someone does leave, be sure to take the time to conduct an exit interview. Finding flaws in your people management system is just as important as finding bugs in your code. When a person leaves, there is always an internal factor and an external factor, try to understand both and find a way to improve. Always look for and check in with the brightest and least satisfied people on your team. They will alert you to problems in your team that may be small now but will become big problems in the future.
3.6 Manage your own time and resources
In this executive role, the work never stops and there is always more than you can do. It's up to you to decide what is the most valuable use of your time. Hire people you trust who will help you be more efficient while focusing on your most important tasks.
One important way to do this is to make sure you have a great assistant or other support person. Find someone who is truly invested in the job, someone you can spend a lot of time with, and let this person understand how to make your job easier and more efficient. You can hire a chief of staff to serve as your second-in-command and make decisions for the team on your behalf in your absence. This is someone you'll spend a lot of time with, working on ideas and making sure you're on the same page. This role can be formal or informal, but it is very important to have someone you can trust in this role.
Talk to the CEO about how to best use your time. Discuss this with your peers as well. How do they pass their time? What do they authorize?
Make sure that, even if you delegate many tasks, you still prioritize time with your clients. For all the internal work you do, it’s easy to forget about the people outside your organization who really matter. If you lose touch with your customers, you lose touch with your purpose. If you don’t understand your customers, you can’t lead your team effectively, so it’s worth carving out regular time in your schedule to be consistent with your customers.
3.7 Develop a five-year plan
When considering a problem, you should think further. It’s not uncommon to focus on issues two to five years into the future, and getting bogged down in details and tactical work can be a distraction, but when you can, these tasks should be delegated to your very capable middle managers. One way to help this process is to simply write them all down. Create a document that defines your priorities and high-level goals. Write down a desired timeline and outline strategies to achieve it. Update the document every year and refer to it frequently and it will be your guide.
Keep an open communication loop from the team to you to the CEO to you and your team. You are the middle man and will learn how to succeed by listening.
Make sure you know your industry inside and out. You are no longer solving immediate problems, but looking to the future. Where will the industry go? What are competitors working towards? Is the company raising capital, going public, scaling up, or changing direction entirely?
Set goals for continued growth and make sure everyone on the team has a goal. Some should be long-term goals, and some are practical goals. Create a culture that values doing important work and accomplishing the team’s goals rather than being the busiest, smartest, or loudest person in the room.
Finally, create a roadmap and share it, not necessarily every detail for the next five years, but definitely share what you've been working on with your team and CEO. Align people with your company's vision and yourself, and you'll gain their trust and enthusiasm.
The work isn't easy, but doing amazing work on a large scale might just be your best experience.
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