3 Things Managers Should Be Doing Every Day. “When are we supposed to do all that?” That’s the question we constantly get from new managers, only weeks or months into their new positions, when we describe the three key activities they should be focusing on to be successful as leaders: building trust, building a team, and building a broader network. To their dismay, most of them have found they rarely end a day in their new positions having done what they planned to do. They spend most of their time solving unexpected problems and making sure their groups do their work on time, on budget, and up to standard. They feel desperately out of control because what’s urgent–the daily work–always seems to highjack what’s important–their ongoing work as managers and leaders. So they push back because they think we’ve just made their to-do list even longer.
Building trust. Building a real team and managing through it. Building a network. How do they do this? Once they learn this lesson, they look at their daily work differently. On Managing Developers. I’ve been a software engineer, a novelist, a journalist, and a manager–and managing developers is easily the trickiest thing I’ve ever done. (Not the hardest. But the trickiest.) I don’t pretend to be an expert, or a great manager. But I can assure you I am someone who screwed up a lot along the road to being better. Here are some mistakes from which I have learned: Just Because You’re In Charge Doesn’t Mean You’re In Control The great irony of management is that the higher up you go, the less actual control you have.
Developers turned managers, especially “full-stack” (aka “dilettante”) developers like me, often have trouble with this. It’s even harder to distinguish between “that’s not how I would have done it” and “that’s wrong and needs to be refactored/rewritten/reassigned” when reviewing someone’s work. Engineering managers who don’t come from an engineering background have even less control, along with less understanding of development processes and pitfalls. Agile Is Good. A Critique of “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture” I enjoyed Brian Chesky’s recent post called Don’t Fuck Up The Culture, where he proclaims to the employees of AirBnb the importance of culture in everything they do. I like Airbnb and its nice to see a founder emphasize culture. But there’s sloppy thinking in the post. The first problem is we have a field of study of culture: it’s called anthropology.
When business and tech people sling the word culture around as if was invented along with silicon transistors they get themselves into trouble. Chesky wrote: Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion. No. This means a CEO or founder has tremendous power regarding culture. Fire anyoneHire anyoneDecide how/why people are rewardedDecide how/why people are punished And with those 4 powers, every CEO is in fact a Chief Cultural Officer. And of course the most vocal challengers to most cultures are the first to be shown the door. There is no company that has the same culture today that it did 10, 20 or 100 years ago. Related: Beyond Benchmarking: Why Copy the Competition? - Bill Taylor. By Bill Taylor | 3:58 PM October 8, 2007 Two weeks ago, I was in Texas to talk with the leadership group of Christus Health, a hospital and health-care company based in Dallas.
Christus has 9,000 doctors, 30,000 employees, and major facilities in six US states as well as in Mexico. In addition to being a world-class organization, it is a devoutly religious company–its core mission is “to extend the healing ministry of Jesus Christ.” So what’s a nice group like Christus doing with a “game changer” like me? Dr. That refreshing attitude speaks to one of the big problems with the widespread phenomenon of benchmarking competitors. The leaders of Commerce Bank, based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, have created one of the few passion brands in retail banking. The first time I met the bank’s leadership team, they were adamant about their disdain for traditional benchmarking. (Actually, Commerce does study its rivals, but only to discover “the stuff that drives customers at other banks crazy.”
Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast. Editor’s note: Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of the recently released book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup. I used to think corporate culture didn’t matter. Discussion of vision, mission and values was for people who couldn’t build product or sell it! We had work to do and this MBA BS was getting in the way! And then my first company failed. Cambridge Decision Dynamics did not fail because we didn’t have a great technology or a great product or customers. Compare this to the rapidly growing company Eventbrite that I visited recently with some of my students. There was palpable energy and excitement in the air when we stepped in the door. A minute later, we walked by a whiteboard with the prompt “Home to me is…” that was covered with enthusiastic employee suggestions.
Eventbrite office in San Francisco (photo: Bill Aulet). How to scale up your team to greatness. By Robert Sutton Smaller teams of four to five work more effectively, according to Robert Sutton, professor of management science at Stanford University. FORTUNE -- My Stanford University colleague, Huggy Rao, spent seven years studying how organizations scale up excellence. We discovered that the process happens largely through teams -- by growing new teams at the right rate in the right way and weaving together the efforts of multiple teams across the company. Such dynamics are crucial to even tiny young companies. For example, Pulse News, maker of a "news aggregator" app, was started in 2010. Performance problems began to flare up after the company grew to just eight people. So founders Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta split Pulse into three small teams. MORE: Whole Foods takes over America When the company expanded to 12 people (working in four teams, all in the same room), each team maintained a bulletin board that communicated their current work to everyone at Pulse.
Keep teams small. Management Methods | Management Models | Management Theories.