jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Becoming A Manager
Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
Own Your Feedback (Part 1): Receive Better Feedback by Asking - Padmini Pyapali We’ve talked about giving feedback to our team members, but we need feedback, too - from our managers, or researcher’s we’re supporting, or other stakeholders. Pyapali makes some specific recommendations for getting good feedback from others. They all involve asking, and how to ask: Be Timely and Specific - you’ll get better feedback if you’re asking soon after the thing you’re asking about, and if you ask specific questions Provide a Reason...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Becoming A Manager: Coaching | Becoming A Manager: Feedback |
Common management failures in developing individual contributors - Camille Fournier Fournier writes about some common ways that managers - especially new managers but I’d argue it’s quite common even in more experienced managers - fail to develop the skills of their team members. While we’ll often make time for a team member to learn some new framework or to read some papers in a new area, building them up in their technical/product leadership ability is more rare. Not only is this a wasted growth opportunity...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Alignment |
That Burning Feeling When You’re Right - Roy Rapoport Rapoport reminds us that being right is nothing. Seeing the correct path to take is table stakes. If you can’t convince others to join you on that path, nothing will get accomplished.
Continue...How to become a Good Lab Manager, Elizabeth Sandquist, ASBMB Today This is an older post but it’s one of the most read on the ASBMB blog, and it was posted on twitter again because the upcoming ASBMB meeting will have a workshop on the topic. The post is well worth reading, and extremely relevant to us. Its top tips, which Elizabeth expands on extremely well, are: You can learn management skills. Have a five-year plan for your lab. Set clear standards and expectations. Optimize...
Continue...Do Introverts or Extroverts Make Better Leaders? Wally Bock I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that the population of people who have chosen (a) research and (b) computing for a career tend to be introverts, and that can make the transition to managing other human beings a jarring transition. But managing well is a set of skills, and there is no one who finds all of those behaviours - seeing the big picture, sweating the details, working closely with people, working closely with abstractions (and all simultaneously!) - immediately natural. “When looking at...
Continue...Maker vs Multiplier - Pat Kua There’s an old joke about becoming a 10x developer by spending your time helping ten other developers become twice as effective. I think this article is a nice way to distinguish between the contributions of individual contributors and those doing “glue work” like us managers (not that you have to be a manager to be doing multiplier-type work).
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers |
Success Factors in R&D Leadership - Gritzo, Fusfeld, & Carpenter, Research-Technology Management This is a paper from a few years ago which took a look at leadership development data from 47,000 respondents; both managers and those evaluating them, in R&D and outside of R&D, and compared the two. They found - well, it’s hard to read it any other way than R&D managers were generally worse managers than non-R&D managers: When the results were consolidated, R&D managers were rated more favorably than their non-R&D counterparts...
Continue...Growth - Fred Wilson A VC describes growth he sees in several of his new technical leaders. He sees two different syndromes in them; it’s much easier for him to grow the “Deer in headlights” new leader as opposed to those suffering from the incorrect confidence of “I got this”. Relatedly, if you find yourself managing a new team, this from Claire Lew is a good primer on getting ready for a first team meeting.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Technical Leadership: Other |
The Engineering Manager Event Loop - David Loftesness via Chris Eigner This isn’t new, but I really like the idea: what a generic tech software development manager should be thinking of daily, weekly, and monthly on people, projects, processes, and themselves. It’s not quite right for research computing - thinking about recruiting and hiring on a daily basis is to put it mildly not the regime we’re normally in - but a lot of the other items hold up. What other changes would we have...
Continue...Google Spent Years Studying Effective Bosses. Now They Teach New Managers These 6 Things - Michael Schneider, Inc Google’s New Manager Training - re:Work, Google Effective Management for New Managers - Angela Riggs I’ve written about Google’s Project Oxygen before in this newsletter — an effort that launched half-expecting to find that technical management didn’t matter ended up discovering that it very much did. Project Oxygen was the effort to better understand which management behaviours improved team performance, and their re:Work effort is their (largely...
Continue...Time Machines & Leadership: 10 things I wish I knew at the start - David Boyne Written for new managers, but it’s always worth revisiting the basics. David Boyne gives ten items he wishes he knew earlier, with 3-6 specific tips for each: Look after yourself Plan ahead Hold effective meetings Communicate effectively Make time to learn (especially about management) Keep your hand in the day to day work while you can, but… Learn to let go Have the team improve (retrospectives, data, individual growth)...
Continue...New Manager Training: The 4 concepts to Teach - Claire Lew, Know Your Team Being Glue - Tanya Reilly If you’re at the point where you’re starting to manage (or develop) team leads or managers, Clair Lew’s article and collection of resources on four things to teach new managers is useful. Her four concepts to teach (which she covers in details with resources to use to to teach them are): The mindset shift: IC → Manager. (This is so important; no promotion or job change is as tough a transition as your that move from...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
Don’t Create Chaos - Stay SaaSy How to Lead Decisively when you Don’t Know What’s Next - Karin Hurt and David Dye, Let’s Grow Leaders Making Decisions with Others - Deepak Azad “Great leaders vacuum up chaos” - The Stay SaaSy post uses this as a nice way to describe one really important function of managers. We have to be entropy-fighters, reducing chaos and uncertainty about how a project will go forward, what priorities should be, what are good next steps for a team members...
Continue...8 Leadership Myths Every Manager Should Know About - Kate Dagher A bit basic for long time readers, but it may be useful to send new managers (or someone you’re growing towards management), and it’s always useful for us to remind ourselves of the basics. Of the below, I’m still working on not leading everyone the same way, and bringing others into the spotlight. Even though I know intellectually those are the right approaches I still tend to use my default settings on all my...
Continue...Noticing Change - Aviv Ben-Yosef One of the recurring themes of this newsletter is that research computing is important enough to do with professionalism, and that professionalism is nothing more than being deliberate about what you’re doing, while continuously learning from what you and others have done. Learning from what you and your team has done necessarily means noticing that there’s been a change. And there’s no way to systematically notice improvements - or regressions - without gathering data, taking notes, and otherwise keeping track...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization |
Bucketing your time - James Stanier, The Engineering Manager We’ve talked about organizing tasks in buckets before - In Issue 37 I’ve mentioned my experiments with trello, and in Issue 39 I linked to an article about having a “dashboard” that covers both issues, things to keep an eye on, and future-looking work. This is a nice article about why I find these approaches work well for me - it’s a way of systematizing the discipline of not just getting lost in the day-to-day while...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones |
Meeting everyone on a new team - Anna Shipman Last time we talked about leaving a team, this time an article about doing one specific thing when joining a new team as a manager or director - speaking with every person in your new organization. Shipman describes having 30 minute meetings with each person in her new 50 person organization over the course of several months. Long time readers will recognize it as looking a bit like the first half of a weekly one-on-one; mostly...
Continue...The Management Flywheel - Camille Fournier One of the huge challenges for managers - which can be overwhelming for some new managers - is that changing people systems is hard. And all problems are people problems. Fournier points out that managers that try to get out whatever problem their team is facing by saying “We’ll Just Use Technology X” or “We Just Need The Right People” are probably not going to succeed. In her experience, and mine, there’s no big-bang change of people or technology...
Continue...It’s Management, Not Micromanagement - Kristen Heyer, The Success League Heyer pushes back on the fears that new managers often have of being “micromanaging”: Many newer managers confuse management with micromanagement. One of my favorite books on the topic of micromanagement (My Way or the Highway) defines it like this; “Micromanagement is when participation, collaboration and oversight interfere with performance, quality and efficiency.” Unfortunately, management (oversight that adds to performance, quality, and efficiency) often gets confused with micromanagement. I agree - and I’ve seen way...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Feedback | Becoming A Manager: Delegation |
Help, I’m a Research Computing Manager! - Jonathan Dursi, SORSE event At the really nicely run SORSE event last week, I gave my 10 minute pitch that research computing actually prepares you pretty well for the advanced skills managing needs, we just need to shore up the basics. The basics I covered won’t be of a surprise to any readers - one-on-ones, feedback, delegation. The talk and the resources I recommended are on the page; also, I updated my one-on-ones quickstart guide (PDF, epub) that...
Continue...What is expected of a Engineering Manager? - Rodrigo Flores Flores, a manager of managers, has a nice article on what he expects of his managers. In priority order: Support the members of your team and help them grow. Follow along the deliveries, setting quality standards, making sure the team has the support they need and upper management the feedback they need. Keep a constant practice of creating, improving or eliminating team or company processes. Note the order. A recurring bit of advice from people...
Continue...Leading People With Experience - Mark Wood A common issue - one in retrospect I’m sort of surprised didn’t come up in the recent “Ask Managers Anything” round - is what to do when you’re placed in a position of managing or even being team lead someone with more experience in the job that you have. This happens all the time, and it especially worries new managers or team leaders who haven’t quite understood the role yet - in a software developer team they might...
Continue...No More Misunderstandings Paraphrasing - When, Why, and How - Padmini Pyapali A reminder of a powerful technique for communicating with anyone - your boss, your team, or stakeholders. Double check understanding, constantly, by asking questions about what the other person has said, paraphrased in your own words. Paraphrasing is a great approach but the more fundamental method here is being aware that you may not have understood what was meant by the other person.
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
Managers: What do you do when your teammate shares their grief? - Lara Hogan Hogan, taking lessons from her mothers pastoral care when she was going up, shares some humane steps you can take if someone unexpectedly shares grief with you over a significant tragedy in their lives. These steps are human for both the team member and you. The steps are: Have a handy, simple response ready - Hogan has a few to hand such as “Oh, I’m so sorry” or “That sounds incredibly...
Continue...Starting a new manager relationship - Sally Lait A lot of us in research computing become managers by being promoted within an organization, so we sometimes have the advantage (and disadvantage..) of an extended handover process between the previous manager and you. Lait here describes her preferred method for taking over a team in such a situation: Initial hello and quick backgrounds - can be done in a group setting 1:1:1 handover - previous and new manager + team member meetings, find out current state...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Managing Your Career: Other | Technical Leadership: Other |
Tech Lead Management roles are a trap. - Will Larson When I was asked at my SORSE talk if it was possible to be both lead developer and manager, I replied that anything was possible but it is really, really hard. The most stressed I’ve been in the last couple of years was when I’ve had both significant technical and managerial responsibilities - they are completely different skillsets requiring your mind to be in different kinds of places. Bouncing between the two is definitely playing...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other |
Questionable Advice: “How do I feel Worthwhile as a Manager when My People are Doing all the Implementing?” - Charity Majors> The Non-psychopath’s Guide to Managing an Open-source Project - Kode Vicious, ACM Queue Majors’ article is a good reminder for new managers that it’s really hard to recalibrate job satisfaction or the feeling of accomplishment when you’ve moved into management. All you can do is focus on the big, long timeline stuff while still taking joy in the little moments, and make sure that...
Continue...Thoughts on Engineering Management - Ben McCormick McCormick writes a series of five articles on technical computing management. The broad topics won’t be a huge surprise to readers, but they’re good reads in that they’re all in a very coherent voice and philosophy: What EMs do - focussing on facilitating information flow, driving progress forward, and building a sustainably productive team - and that all of those are time consuming Choosing what to work on - which does a good job of separating the focus...
Continue...The Tools Don’t Matter - Ken Norton Just a reminder that as technical folk, we tend to jump straight to tools when we’re starting to manage projects or teams for the first time. I’m flat out embarrassed by how long I spent choosing planning tools, processes, etc when I started out in my current job. It had the advantage of feeling like accomplishing something, but it was basically just stalling the harder work of managing projects, products or teams - communication. Norton has a list...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
What Good Leaders Do When Replacing Bad Leaders - Andrew Blum At some point in your career, you’re going to step into a role as a leader where the previous leader made a hash of it. They weren’t necessarily a bad person or incompetent, but for whatever reason what they were doing wasn’t working. Blum talks about how to manage that transition. A key point for me is an early sentence: Good leaders create a separation between the past and the future. Creating that rupture...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals |
When a 1:1 turns into a vent session - Yihwan Kim One-on-one 101 - Tiffany Longworth, Clickety The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster - Michael Lopp A couple good articles on one-on-ones from a a couple of weeks ago. In the first, Kim offers five pieces of advice around vents. In particular, vents aren’t about problem solving, they’re about letting something out - and that something has been festering for a while. So Kim’s advice is: Don’t rationalize, and definitely don’t interrupt Don’t assume...
Continue...How to manage former peers as a new manager - Claire Lew It’s kind of goofy that one of the most awkward situations for new managers to navigate is the most common situation we put people in for their first management role in research computing - taking their old boss’ job and managing their peers. This is not actually a difficult role - you have a huge advantage over taking over a new team both by knowing the work of the team and the team members,...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
Filtering your language as an engineering leader - Rob Begbie, LeadDev Borrowing Lines from Great Leaders Around You - Lara Hogan, LeadDev Everyone who’s managed or been a team lead for long enough has had the experience of thinking aloud or asking an idle question and then having a team member waste hours following up on what they thought was now a Suddenly Important Thing. As a manager we need to stay involved in the work enough to understand what issues are likely to come...
Continue...Timeboxing: The Most Powerful Time Management Technique You’re Probably Not Using - Nir Eyal I’m a little surprised to see that timeboxing hasn’t come up on the newsletter as often as I would have thought - it was one suggested strategy out of five in one article we covered in #53. It’s a very useful technique for making sure you get things done, and for scoping those things. Problem with a to-do list include: Many of us aren’t great at breaking down the to-do items...
Continue...Management as a Technology - Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen, Harvard Buisness School Working Paper 16-133 Management is important, and the issues involved are complex, and like a lot of things that are important but complex, it’s the subject of a lot of study. That study looks different than those of us who came up in the natural sciences are used to - people systems are way harder to examine than, say, fluid systems - but it can be every bit as insightful....
Continue...How Many People Can Someone Lead? - Pat Kua Whenever I give my “Help! I’m a Research Computing Manager!” talk, this is a question I get. Kua here says 5–7 (I often say 7 ± 2), but says it depends and gives a very helpful list of things it depends on. It includes the obvious things (a more experienced team - individually and working collectively as a team - requires a little less of a manager/lead, so you could lead more of them; similarly a...
Continue...How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors - Camille Fournier Fournier has coached a lot of managers, and she shares some common failure modes of new managers: Doing all the technical design work yourself Doing all the project management yourself - your team members will need to learn those skills as they advance Neglecting to give feedback Hoarding information - intentionally or unintentionally Focussing on the their own output and not that of the team
Continue...You can be directive without being a jerk - Lara Hogan Being Nice and Effective - Subbu Allamaraj I think one of the hardest things for new managers - especially those coming from the very hands-off collegial culture of research - is determining the right amount of directiveness appropriate for a given situation. The usual failure modes, in order of the frequency which I see them, is the very common laissez-faire absence of direction and the less common tech-lead-becomes-manager “do this, this, then that, and...
Continue...Owning your power as a manager - Rachel Hands One of the common mistakes I see in new research computing managers is an unwillingness to actually accept the fact that they now have a position of power. This is especially true when the new manager has been promoted to a manager of previous peers. For a lot of people, suddenly having power is uncomfortable, and that’s ok (it’s way better than the other failure mode, of really relishing the newfound power), but you can’t just...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization |
Your Calendar = Your Priorities - John Cutler Cutler points out that our scarcest resource is time. There’s a saying in policy circles “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what your priorities/values are”; in research computing managerial work, where our budget is typically pretty constrained, it’s our time which reflects our implicit priorities. Those implicit priorities may not be what they should be! Looking at your calendar (and making sure your calendar reflects what you actually do - e.g. blocking off time for...
Continue...The Void of Empowerment - Aviv Ben-Yosef Ben-Yosef talks about the void managers and leaders of successful teams can feel in steady-state when, frankly, they don’t feel needed. Stuff is working well, there are relatively few fires to put out, and the Universe is unfolding as it should. But that’s success. It gives options for growth, letting you take on new responsibilities while delegating work to team members for their growth. One thing I really like about this article is a distinction it makes: working...
Continue...Not everyone can become a great leader… - Matt Schellhas This is a good first-person account of how pernicious the whole “great leaders are born not made” nonsense is. Schellhas talks about being held back from becoming a manager for years because he didn’t look or seem the part. He did, in the end, become a (successful) manager and leader, and recognizes how at least he got the chance eventually, many never do. On top of discouraging people who don’t look and act like they...
Continue...Managing people - Andreas Klinger This is a bullet-point list aimed at new managers, and so there’s some basics here - but it’s always useful to review the basics, and we always have new members joining the list (hi!) including new managers. I like this list because it expresses a lot of ideas that have come up on the list before, but in ways I haven’t read. I wouldn’t necessarily express all of those thoughts this way, but it’s useful to get another take on...
Continue...Everyone’s a great manager until they start managing - Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale, Raw Signal Group Four mistakes I made as a new manager - AbdulFattah Popoolah, LeadDev What you give up when moving into engineering management - Karl Hughes, Stack Overflow Blog When we see people do a different job than we do — especially when they do it very well or very poorly — it’s easy to think “that doesn’t look so hard”. Plumbing, graphic design, customer-facing roles; we watch for a while...
Continue...Management Development As Skincare Regimen (Twitter Thread) - Angela Riggs So how should you start learning the new skills you need to be a manager? Riggs has one way to think about it. I’m always on the lookout for new analogies for management, leadership, and strategy. For management I personally like sports metaphors, but they’re so overused that every ounce of insight that can be extracted from those comparisons have long been exploited. I’ve always found war and combat metaphors distasteful and aggrandizing, and now...
Continue...Run your day, don’t let the day run you - Kahlil Lechelt A manager or leads’ day in research computing is much busier and filled with a wider variety of demands than we’re used to as an IC. It’s vital to maintain some sort of control over the tasks you’re working on. Lechelt gives good advice: Everything goes in a task list - email is not the place to store to-dos. Have a small list of things you will get done today, leaving slack in...
Continue...The Uninspiring Manager - Matt Schellhas Too much of what I imagined an excellent manager should be early in my career (not having really seen any) was focussed on personal characteristics. Such leaders should be engaging, people-persons… and inspiring. It’s not that any of those things is bad, of course. Those are all traits and behaviours that can be put to good use as a manager or lead! But so can the default behaviours of quiet, attentive, carefully-thinks-before-speaking introverts. Or of keep-ticking-things-off-the-list achievers. Or of...
Continue...Energy Management for Newer Managers - Cate Huston One of the first things new managers discover is that they have to abruptly switch from having a relatively few deep tasks they’re working on to many tasks, much of them fairly small. So there’s a lot of discussion and about task management and task management tools. (Note “task management”, not “time management”. It’s not a power given to we mere mortals to manage time. We manage tasks. One of the key skills new managers have to...
Continue...Making The Leap from Individual Contributor to Engineering Manager - Natalie Rothfels & Doa Jafri, Reforge Speaking of promoting a team member to manager - Rothfels and Jafri talk about the challenges faced by an individual contributor taking on their first management role, and the skills they need to learn. I like their discussion of them, binned into five categories: Hone concise, clear, context-driven communication (including bridging communities and having tough conversations) Developing emotional regulation and self-reflection (someone can’t lead others if they’re constantly freaked...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Productivity |
Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact - Brie Wolfson, First Round Review We start off in tech with ticket trackers and to-do lists, and tend to carry that through to our first leadership jobs. But they’re inadequate when you become a manager or lead. As a leader you no longer have the comfort of merely being responsible for set of discrete tasks that can be independently ticked off. You’re probably not even only responsible for individual projects. No, you’re...
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