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Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

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Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#41
I consult internally in a large tech company on management among other org design and behavior topics.

I recommend Managing Humans and Bringing up the Boss. They are the most practical and useful day to day. Avoid Making of a Manager. It’s recommended often but it’s a memoir masquerading as a management book and way too focused on the writers specific situation.

Also get coffee with your HRBP. They are a wealth of knowledge and best to start the relationship before you really need them.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#42
Managing is making other people’s work easier.

Delegating does that when otherwise the manager would be a bottleneck.

Delegating does not do that when the point of delegating is making the manager’s job easier.

“What can I do for you?” is the best question a manager can ask.

Complaining is among the worst things a manager can do.

Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#43
TL/M like you're doing (leading a project but also managing people aspects) can work but it's not ideal. If your team grows much beyond where it is now, you should probably decide if you want to be a TL or an eng manager, as if you try to do both, you'll do neither particularly well.

That aside... Trust. Trust your team, trust your manager, trust other teams. Resolve or escalate when that trust is violated (which ideally is a 1:1 conversation as a first step). Just try to remember that most people are some degree of competent and are trying to do the right thing.

Managing is an incredible opportunity to spread your knowledge around and increase everyone's productivity (and hopefully happiness). Your job is to unblock your team through any and all obstacles. Hopefully your experience helps here, and to increase it you should try to get another manager to mentor you.

I've been managing for a few years now. I miss the coding sometimes but I like watching people grow and being part of that growth.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#44
post #40
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes the other way too, plenty of ICs think they work for their manager. How do you convince them otherwise?

I’m a really big fan of giving ICs a goal and letting them plan and execute how they’ll get there on their own. If they have questions I’m there and if they’re going down a dark hole, I pull them out of it. But otherwise, I just get out of their way. It’s kind of sad because you can tell pretty quickly who has always been told what to do. In the beginning they’ll struggle so you can’t just leave them to drown. When t…

> So it turns into two competing management problems. How do you convince them that management works for them? And how do you groom them into leadership positions? The first is the easier of the two.

1. How to convince someone that management works for them?

By constantly affirming in team meetings publicly, that I - the manager - am here for you, to help you. Then, you build trust by demonstrating your support every week.

2. Grooming into leadership positions?

You only groom people who want to be there. Not everyone wants leadership positions. People who want it will seek it. Often these people are ladder climbers that you will need to filter through.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#45
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I think that there are people who are capable of working mostly independently when simply given goals and people who are not (yet?) and should be given clear instructions on what to do and how to do it - and IMHO the key part is to accept that both are okay, especially in different roles, and you "just" have to understand which is which and appropriately match the roles, levels and management style to these people.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#46
My advice is to accept that few people — especially those who believe they know more than you do — enjoy being told what to do. The trick is to seek out high value opportunities from your best and most knowledgeable (i.e. influential) reports, then to move the earth to make space and time for them to execute. Leadership happens on the floor. Don’t expect your vision to be shared amongst your reports.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#47
Context not control. Tell them what problem you want solved, not how to do it. If they ask for help, offer your experience like a peer not a boss: "This is how I would do it. What about this here?".

They will do it differently than you. Accept that. As long as the goal is accomplished it doesn't matter how they got there.

As long as they understand why they are doing something and the constraints, magic will happen. In the meantime get out of the way and clear blockers for them.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#48
post #4

What 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 - Q1: Do it now - 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 If I understood your post, the translation is: - MQ1: Do it yourself - MQ2: Delegate - MQ3: Don't do it at al…

I'd rather argue that MQ2 should be implemented as a standard process that is explicitly listed as a job duty of some position with appropriate documentation and possibly training, and MQ1/MQ3 are those tasks which can be simply delegated for someone to do once.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#49
Lots of people here kind complaining about bad managers. I tried to be a good manager but its exhausting, you end up doing everything yourself because its easier. I think it might be easier to try to be a bad manager, at least at first. Give deadlines, tell them what you want, and let them figure it out. I dont like giving projects like that but realistically its pretty normal, dont over think it.

Re: Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

#50
Delegation is never really well taught. However, it is an activity that has a lifecycle that starts before you give somebody a task, and ends after they give you back the resulting work product.

A "task" is often hard for software engineers to grasp because they think in terms of units of coding activity, like handling a ticket in a Sprint queue, but a task in a business sense is generally a larger activity than that.

For example, think of a work project. One of your responsibilities as a manager is likely to break that project down into smaller pieces. If you keep breaking these pieces down, the atomic-sized piece is a "task", which should map more or less onto the work (some sequence of actions) a single person can accomplish in a short period of easily projected time.

However, tasks also come with a kind of protocol, you must define the task, the expected projected delivery time, the success criteria, and then know how to integrate the delivered work back into the larger project.

Very important, you have to try to carve the task out so that it can be accomplished by your staff given their capabilities, and if there are elements of that task that are outside of those capabilities marshal resources from elsewhere to fill in the gaps.

Here's a semi-technical notional example:

Project: Integrate with upgraded vendor supplied data source.

You might break this down into tasks one of which might be some database work to be accomplished by your Database person "Jane". The task might be "prepare database to receive upgraded data source".

Jane receives this task, thinks about the sequence of actions she has to do to accomplish this task, then goes about doing them. Perhaps she's unclear about one of the tasking requirements, and decides instead of dropping the old table, or renaming it, she'll put the new data into a table called "new_vendor_data".

Jane finishes the task in a day or two, and lets you know she's done and that the new data can go into the "new_vendor_data" table.

Your job is then to integrate this information into the project, which in this case might mean you go to "Peter", who's working on the ETL from the vendor's API and let him know now where to put the data, then you go and update the database and API documentation, and think through any other places where this information is needed.

The lifecycle of the task is now complete.

This is a really trivial example, but the method for how it works translates into non-technical fields. You can build tasks with your marketing staff member and see them through their lifecycle as well -- defining success criteria, and such unique to each discipline.

At larger scales, defining these tasks, and coordinating their lifecycles becomes a pipelined and multi-threaded discipline, and being good at it is part of what makes one a good manager and an efficient and effective team. Very good managers view this as a service they provide their staff that keeps them running with full work pipelines and no downtime or uncertainty.

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