Good Managers Lead Through a Team - Linda Hill & Kent Lineback. By Linda Hill & Kent Lineback | 12:22 PM April 3, 2012 We consider the ability to manage a team so important that, in a recent book, we made it one of the “3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader:” Manage Your Team — the first imperative — is about creating a real team and managing through it. For the record, the other two imperatives are Manage Yourself — which is about building relationships based on trust, not authority — and Manage Your Network, which is about connecting and collaborating with those you don’t control. “Manage your team” might seem clear and straightforward. Yet when we talk about it, we often find it’s not an intuitive concept for many managers and for some it even cuts against the grain of what they think they should do as bosses. Perhaps the easiest way to explain the problem, as we’ve come to understand it, is through the phrase we used above — manage “through the team.”
Every group is not a team. Teams are more productive and innovative than mere work groups. Apple's Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers. About five years ago, Apple (AAPL) design guru Jony Ive decided he wanted a new feature for the next MacBook: a small dot of green light above the screen, shining through the computer’s aluminum casing to indicate when its camera was on. The problem? It’s physically impossible to shine light through metal. Ive called in a team of manufacturing and materials experts to figure out how to make the impossible possible, according to a former employee familiar with the development who requested anonymity to avoid irking Apple. The team discovered it could use a customized laser to poke holes in the aluminum small enough to be nearly invisible to the human eye but big enough to let light through.
Applying that solution at massive volume was a different matter. Most of Apple’s customers have probably never given that green light a second thought, but its creation speaks to a massive competitive advantage for Apple: Operations. Not every supplier gives in. Apple's segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom. There is a myth, more of a meme actually, about the ‘inevitability’ of commoditization.
It is a view of the world that sees things linearly, in terms of singularities, and the so-called “one right path.” In this realm, where commoditization is God, horizontal orientation (versus vertical integration) rules the roost. How else to define consumers, not in flesh and blood terms, not as spirits that aspire to specific outcomes, but rather, as a composite set of loosely-coupled attributes. This mindset is compelling because it is simple and familiar, but it also leads to blind obsequiousness. Historical edifices are held as indelible fact. There is one small fly in the ointment to this ethos, however, and its name is Apple.
Apple’s gaudy performance relative to its industry peers The following inconvenient facts must be an affront to the horizontal, commoditized, open, market share zealots. How can you not confuse the tail with the dog, with that kind of framing? The folly of conventional wisdom. Engineering Management. From late 2006 to early 2009, I was privileged to hold a variety of management positions in Facebook Engineering, ranging from manager of various teams to director of engineering. During that time, the engineering department grew from about 30 to around 200 engineers. It was an era that roughly spanned the launch of News Feed, Facebook Platform (the first F8 conference), the launch of our self-serve advertising system (now a major contributor to our positive cash-flow), internationalization of the site, and Facebook Connect. We went from being a niche college social network with less than 10M users in 2006 to a global phenomenon with over 250M users by early 2009. It was a period of time during which the company grew from being a small startup (under 100 employees) to a medium-sized company (800+ employees). 1.
Hiring is number one 2. 3. 4. 5. Over the next five days, I'll write a post about each one of these, elaborating what I mean by them and why I think each is important. How To Scale a Development Team. As hackers, we’re familiar with the need to scale web servers, databases, and other software systems. An equally important challenge in a growing business is scaling your development team. Most technology companies hit a wall with dev team scalability somewhere around ten developers. Having navigated this process fairly successfully over the last few years at Heroku, this post will present what I see as the stages of life in a development team, and the problems and potential solutions at each stage.
Stage 1: Homebrewing In the beginning, your company is 2 - 4 guys/gals working in someone’s living room, a cafe, or a coworking space. At this stage, you’re trying to create and vet your minimum viable product, which is a fancy way of saying that you’re trying to figure out what you’re even doing here. Stage 2: The first hires Resist the urge to introduce too much structure and process at this point. Focus at this stage is key. Crisis on the brink of Stage 3 Stage 3: Breaking into teams Cohesion. Google’s 8-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve. IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen. Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.
They wanted to build better bosses. So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints. Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers. Now, brace yourself. “Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.” “Help your employees with career development.” “Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.” The list goes on, reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of “The Office.”
“My first reaction was, that’s it?” But then, Mr. But Mr. H.R. has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. Though Mr. D. For now, Mr. Superstar Leadership: Workplace Culture Damage Control. Meghan M. Biro On April 25, 2011 I’ve written lately about various aspects of workplace culture…People are always the number one consideration in my opinion. This topic always directly relates to recruitment and employee retention. It’s inescapable. It’s part of your workplace DNA. Performing a workplace culture audit of a prospective employer and how to nurture company culture, both as a manager and as an employee are so key. Every workplace culture/organization (and employee) has good and bad days. In the first example, if management fails to communicate its trials, distrust will flower and thrive. Communication and trust are the underpinnings of healthy workplace culture. When trust goes, so also goes culture, that valuable mix of the personality of the workplace and its brand and the collective experience of what it means to work in the organization.
A simple measure of damage to a company’s culture is employee turnover. IMAGE via Flickr. What agile means to me. [Update: in response to some of the comments here and on HN, I thought it might be worth updating with a note on my personal experience with Agile, which appears at the bottom of the post.] Agile (with a big 'A') has become so mainstream now that it has started to become the problem. An alarming number of people who espouse the virtues of Agile, and who quote the Agile Manifesto believe that Agile is a project management methodology, and that Agile really means SCRUM, XP, Kanban, and that it is embodied in the daily stand-up, whiteboards or writing requirements on post-it notes. I was once told by an Agile Trainer (LOL) that the correct way to phrase the requirement "we need advertising placeholders on the site, and some way to manage which ads appear where" was "As a User, I wish to be marketed to.
" Needless to say his company lost a $m project on the back of such BS. So, a few lessons I've learned along the (hard) way: A few things that help this happen on a practical level: