Management Mantras
Repeat after me.
Don’t Do Me Any Favors
In the course of getting work done at a company, nobody should be doing anyone else any favors. Everything you do at work should be the most important thing you could be doing to add value to the business, and those things should be aided by people whose job it is to support that prioritized effort.
In the course of doing work, favors are either misunderstood responsibilities, gaps in company process or design, or people working on non-priority things:
Sometimes someone will say “I’ll help you out here” when really it’s just their job. Them saying they’re helping you out is either an exercise in self-marketing, a power move, or confusion.
Sometimes someone will say something like “Alice really did me a favor in onboarding me so well”. But if Alice has to onboard you as a favor, that’s a gap in your team responsibilities that needs to be fixed.
Sometimes someone will “help” you out by breaking prioritization rules that exist for a reason.
Employees Don’t Get Charity
A subset of the “Don’t Do Me Any Favors” mantra is Employees Don’t Get Charity - business and managers should never claim to be doing something altruistic for their employees. People don’t want your charity, and if you’re doing something for your employees it’s almost certainly not charity and instead a reward that you are giving them because they’ve earned it, or an action you’re taking to help your team, which is your job.
Relatedly, my number 1 piece of advice on delivering compensation information is that when people say thank you, you respond “no thanks needed, you’ve earned it.”
I Can Fix It
As a company scales there becomes an increasing roster of people you can blame when things go wrong. E.g. it’s not my fault this didn’t work out:
It’s recruiting’s fault for not getting me people.
It’s sales’ fault for not selling the product
It’s my managers fault for not doing the thing I asked them once
This can get totally out of control to the point where people ask for raises for work that never had any impact, because they did their part. Good companies don’t allow this to happen - they fire people that can’t seem to get correlated with success.
To be 100% clear: at good companies, if the projects that you touch always seem to fail, you are guilty until proven innocent.
As a manager, it’s imperative that you coach your team to take ownership of any problem that causes your work to not succeed. You might risk a very short term hit on optimizing your bonus, but even in the medium term this strategy is much, much more optimal.
If there’s a problem, say “I can fix it.”
Management Happens Every Day
99% of management is doing uncomfortable stuff every day: pushing people to do a little better, pushing yourself to be a bit better, resolving conflict, giving feedback. As a manager, your literal value add is what you do to make people and teams perform better than they would have without you there.
Your job is to change behavior.
This can’t be a job you do once a quarter. Many managers dream of big inspired moments of super high leverage decisions that make their whole year. Management is simply not that job. Management is the accumulation of daily nudges, assistance, enablement, help, and toil.
Management happens every day.
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your views may sound gross to quite a few management people - as it enforces a different perspective on themselves and their very specific responsibilities. I like this - nice thoughts! many thanks!
It's all the cracks in the process that make the work bearable and competent people stay. Managers like you are scum of the earth.