jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #12 on 28 Feb 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Delegation, Managing A Team: Other, Becoming A Manager: Coaching
An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader - Gergely Orosz
A reader wrote in referencing this article saying that it was useful particularly in the context of a growing research software team supporting multiple projects - providing a structured way to delegate while promoting the team member’s development and responsibility. And it is a great article!
The idea is that, rather than as the team leader you run all of the projects in your team, you tap your team members to run them, with you supervising and coaching. For more junior staff members this could mean designing, kicking off, and managing a project that lasts 3 weeks and is mostly their own work with some contributions from someone else; after racking up some successes it can progress to leading major efforts. By delegating this project management you’re both taking some work off your desk (eventually, anyway - this would take quite a lot of managing and coaching!) and developing your team.
This could end very messily without clear expectations, and the author - who has worked at Uber, Microsoft, Skype & JPMorgan - includes an extremely detailed ten-page google doc of how to run a project; in the article he describes being very prescriptive about “this is the way you will run the project” for his team member’s first attempt or two, and as they become more successful they gain progressively more autonomy about how it’s done. As they grow more confident in their skills, they can even be the ones to mentor the team members who are just starting out on their project management efforts.
I really like this. I see lots of posts along the lines of “Help, I’m a New Manager”, and there’s articles intended to help, like this perfectly decent recent one: This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers. But the way people learn to manage projects and teams is to actually manage projects and teams - ideally, starting from small and progressing to large, and with a lot of supervision. This is a great way to help your team members do that, and to be ready for their next role, while reducing the number of tasks you are personally juggling.
This reminds me a lot of the idea of the responsibility ladder that Manager Tools introduced me to. I came from an environment where everyone I worked with had gotten a PhD, and so had the experience of managing of at least long-term project - their own dissertation research. The first time I hired someone who didn’t have that experience wasn’t a great time for myself or them — I’d give them a huge multi-month piece of work and just assume they’d figure it out. After all, that’s just how we do things in research, right? They flailed, I was frustrated and baffled - this person was smart, what’s wrong?
Diligently, intentionally walking people up that responsibility ladder, up to managing projects of significant scale, is an excellent way of tackling the two biggest responsibilities we have: getting things done, and developing the people on our staff.
