Unlike Babies, the Best Managers Come with Instructions

Which makes sense as the formal phrase is "direct report".

While it was unintentional in my original post, "report" seems to work better than "direct" here as IMO my statement holds for a manager's indirect reports as well and thus "report" covers both direct and indirect. But now I'm just amusing myself with word games :)

Manager READMEs start out with good intentions, but every example I've seen is flawed for multiple reasons:

1) It's manager-centric. Why would you give employees a guide to their manager when you could give them an "Employee README" that is focused on the new employee? When I join a company, I want to know what's expected of me so I can succeed. If the company delivers this in a form of a manager README then I'll still be missing the big picture goals of the company. Managers - Focus on your employees, not yourself.

2) Manager READMEs become an aspirational target. Describing yourself in text is challenging for the ego. I've seen too many manager READMEs that read like a picture-perfect version of what the manager aspires to be, rather than a description of how the person actually operates.

3) The self-promotion aspect. When managers post their README all over internal company chat, public Twitter, their LinkedIn profiles, Medium think pieces, and the company blog (like this article), the document becomes a brand-building exercise. This puts even more pressure on managers to only write down their most perfect, idealized vision for what they want to be. Or they spin their flaws as some sort of superpower with creative wording. I once read a public manager README that was nothing like that person's actual management style, but it read as if that person was a textbook-perfect manager.

My recommendation: Skip the manager README fad and focus on your employees. Write an "Employee README" onboarding guide for each of your employees, that you customize with individual expectations and information for each employee before they join the company. Keep it in a shared document that you can update over time to include an up-to-date job description, list of responsibilities, and key expectations for that employee. Don't try to make management all about the manager's personal brand.

I don’t honk that’s possible as someone will always have to do the bureaucratic bits of people management - in my experience most engineers don’t want to do this bit at all and only focus on the tech

I’m in one right now. We manage each other I guess. It works well. We recently decided to add a lightweight annual career goal type check in. We have a sort of informal lead that is recognized politically as the person you’d go to if you needed to resolve a dispute or air a grievance. I came from a gig where I was managed being managed very directly and I don’t miss it at all. If people want more structure we can accommodate them, but I think most of us feel like it’s just process we don’t need because our culture highly values trust in one another.

> Why not do both? "Hey folks, here's my README, I'd encourage you to write something similar and share it with everybody."

When it comes to team building, I think it's much more valuable to say "this is how we operate" instead of having everyone write down "this is how I operate". The former is a mutual guidebook for everyone to work together, while the latter feels like an edict that everyone else needs to work around you.