Where are you located!?
Getting a proper answer depends on location. Employment laws vary a lot for any feedback to be relevant.
Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#22It may be counter intuitive, but from my point of view, when you start managing individual contributors, YOU start working for them. Even though you are able to delegate work, a good part of your job is to clarify what needs to be done, how, etc... Especially that you are moving from solo to team based, you are also managing and clarifying requirements (stories or whatever) for your team. It's something you were poss…
> It may be counter intuitive, but from my point of view, when you start managing individual contributors, YOU start working for them. A surprisingly large number of managers think that ICs work for them. This is the single biggest reason why managers are hated so much.
It goes the other way too, plenty of ICs think they work for their manager. How do you convince them otherwise?
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#23Being a good manager is 90% hiring the right people. Who the right people are depends on your circumstances, but a metaphor that always worked for me is that building a team is like building a puzzle. You need pieces to fit together.
If you’re a typical line manager and just got handed a team with no say in its composition, well, good luck. Nevertheless the best you can do is fit together the pieces you have as well as possible.
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#24Not a manager. But from what I have seen, effective managers need to play several games at once, in an intentional, balanced way. It’s easy to say “oh, I won’t be petty or political,” but being effective means a certain amount of jostling with peers, resourcefulness regarding how you accomplish your goals, and a certain amount of image management so your team gets credit for what they have done. It’s not an easy job…
I only have a limited career as a manager or non-leaf member of the hierarchy. people are going to jostle around you. but if you accept input from anyone, don't play games, and be brutally honest with everyone - it is actually appreciated by other parties and gets you pretty far. your image management is just 'this person doesn't screw around'
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#25Make them owners of areas you are not so interested in solving yourself. Leave technicality to them to sort out. Focus on areas you like.
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#26Johanna Rothman: https://pragprog.com/titles/rdbcd/behind-closed-doors/
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#27Being an awesome manager is not about delegating, it's a about
* Creating the right environment for teams to do their best (See book Leading Teams below).
* Being skillful at challenging pre-conceptions.
* Coaching people and teams to work in the most effective way.
* Communicate, communicate, communicate.
* Hiring people who are smarter than you.
* And, a difficult one, having honest 1-to-1 with people when they are not delivering to know what is going on in their lives and, in the worst case, to help them go (aka fire/made redundant).
My favourites resources are:
* Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet
* The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
* Leading Teams by Richard Hackman
* The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt
I'm not a manager (I don't like managing people), but I've been working for ~13 years coaching engineer managers, tech leads and engineers. You have to let the baby go so the people you hired (which should be smarter than you!) can do their job. Obviously if you see something that is wrong, by all means raise it, but be careful that it's not one of your own pre-conceptions!
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#28What I've seen as effective as a new manager is to think about scoping whole and independent areas of responsibility for each individual on my team. This requires upfront thinking and planning, but pays in the long term as individuals come into these areas as end-to-end owners. In many cases, overtime, they became deeper experts than me in their respective areas, such that 1 + 1 > 2 in the long run. As far as specifi…
The four-quadrant matrix I am familiar with is:
Urgent Not-Urgent
Important Q1 Q2
Not-Important Q3 Q4
- Q2: Do it the next time you can
- Q3: Do it now or don't do it at all
- Q4: Don't do it at all
Compare this to the modified matrix:
One-Time Repeating
Important MQ1 MQ2
Not-Important MQ3 MQ4
- MQ1: Do it yourself
- MQ2: Delegate
- MQ3: Don't do it at all
- MQ4: Delegate but maybe not done at all
It is interesting that Q1->MQ1 and Q2->MQ2 quite straightforwardly, but (Q3, Q4) -> (MQ4, MQ3) seem to be swapped.
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#29Bit of a lecture but I don't see this mentioned anywhere:
Most people don't know what to manage means because most of what's written on it is about the How(s), and not the What or the Why of it. When it clicks that to manage means to extract value from, a lot of how to do that falls into place. The value from people can be in terms of work, tasks completed, commitments to outcomes, growth of a persons skills and the quality and efficiency of their work, etc. Lots of possibilities. Whereas managing things usually means assets and money, and it's analogous, but not related to the OPs question.
Often people use the word "managing" as a black box to mean they'll make decisions about it, usually later or when they have to, but that's not really extracting value from something. Being a gatekeeper or critic isn't managing either. Your job is to be a proxy for the desire for the value your team generates, and the better you understand (and in turn, appreciate) the value it provides, the better manager you're going to be. When you get a lot of value out of people, they feel valued, and it's a positive cycle. If you don't get a lot of value out of them, you treat them like shit and they notice that as well.
A manager of people understands the value their team provides outward, and finds ways of getting that value out of the members using various tools like mentoring, examples, incentives, clear vision and alignment, service and esteem maintainance, acknowledgment and appreciation, among others. Once you have this frame of mind about extracting value, you have most of what you need to manage well.
Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?
#30Why don't you read some books? - Out of the crisis and The new economics , Deming - Workplace Management and Toyota Production System , Ohno - Peopleware , DeMarco & Lister - Managing the professional service firm , Meister (delegation) - Leadership Handbook , US Army
Peopleware is a gem of a book, yet most managers and leaders in the tech world haven't heard of it (or at least never read it).
A recent example from my last gig: the way of working was to shuffle people relentlessly between teams to address tight deadlines.
Just to emphasise how bad this was, team names were "Feature Team X" (where X is a number), because management wanted teams to shift very quickly. This was in a company which was building a product, but treated people as in a body shop. What the managers didn't realise is that encouraging that detachment between teams and what they were building, also made teams not really care about what they were building. The message was clear: teams don't own any part of the product.
Absolutely bonkers.