Always be quitting - Julio Merino

This resource first appeared in issue #79 on 18 Jun 2021 and has tags Managing Your Career: Other, Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing

If we knew we were quitting (or just going on a long vacation) in two months, what would we be doing differently at work? Probably documenting a lot more, making sure people were coming to meetings so that they could take our place when we weren’t there, training up people to be able to take over parts of our role for us.

But those activities are key and routine parts of being an effective manager or technical leader. Merino commends this approach to us - to be imagining that we were leaving, and being in the mindset of making ourselves less necessary. It’s a vital approach to scaling up our team and making room to take on new challenges, even in the same role.

In particular, Merino suggests -

Document your knowledge, long-term plans, and meetings
Bring others to meetings
Train people around you
Identify and train your replacement(s)
Give power to the people
Don’t make yourself the point of contact - establish mailing list or other forms of communication
Delegate
Always be learning

These are great points to be consistently working on, whether you’re a manager, an individual contributor with a technical leadership role, or even just intending to take on either of those roles.