I have a set of questions I ask in some variation at the end of my 1:1s.
What are you taking away? What was most useful to you?
These two I got from my coach and I use them both at work and in my own coaching. The concrete questions are useful, but it can also be a source of implicit feedback about what was useful / what was less useful.
Is there anything I can help you with or do for you?
It’s amazing to me how often this starts another conversation about what someone needs help with. I also like that it frames asking for help as a normal thing.
Is there anything I can be doing better? Is there anything I do that you particularly appreciate?
I ask these more periodically because I want it to be unexpected enough that people actually think about it and try to give me an answer. The second question is useful for getting at least some specifics if the first one doesn’t elicit any information.
Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that I should have? If I made you complain about one thing, what would it be?
Useful for flipping someone’s thinking around if I feel like there may be things I’m missing.
No team is perfect, but I think it’s often kind of obvious when a team is bad – there’s usually a level of chaos or drama, a sense that they can’t be relied on or don’t really deliver the value that the organization needs. I think it’s also quite obvious when a team is good, mainly from the output of the team, but the underlying operating that goes into that tend to be less obvious.
Practically, most teams are somewhere in the middle. Not terrible, but not as good as they could be either. Here’s my list of what I think makes a good team. If you think I’m missing anything please let me know in the comments or on your preferred social media.
Clarity of purpose – people understand why the team exists.
Defined work streams aligned with purpose – people understand what the team is doing (and why).
Good team communication (openness, psychological safety) – communication is the foundation of collaboration.
Connected, but not cliquey – the biggest predictor of work happiness is having a friend.
Good delivery fundamentals – this is the team delivering its purpose, consistently and over time.
Work gets done and to agreed standards
Delivery is consistent medium term, not just short term sprints + burnout
Mistakes are a source of learning
Team is reliable <> people are reliable
Time is spent on higher value activities (complex tech designs > linting)
Good people fundamentals – the necessary ongoing maintenance work for any team. Without good people fundamentals, management debt gets generated, which over time becomes corrosive.
Everyone has a good manager
Onboarding is predictable
Feedback loops are solid
Under-performers are addressed (up or out)
High performers get developed
Equity (in work allocation, advancement)
Good process fundamentals – like the oil that keeps a team moving, process is the base level organization that facilitates team effectiveness.
All process has a purpose
Easy things are easy
Hard things are possible
Processes are fluid and evolving (continuous improvement mindset)
The above items were the static needs of a team, if a team is going through a period of higher growth there is some additional complexity, such as:
More complex hiring (new roles)
More intense people development (stretch assignments)
Removing bottlenecks before they hit
Updating processes before they break
Balancing risk/reward, (stretch assignments, creative bridging of gaps)
I would love to find a new name for this, now that JK Rowling is cancelled, but in the Harry Potter books, house elves are powerful magical beings, who are condemned to (mostly invisible) servitude, largely of people who would uphold harmful power structures (much like JK Rowling herself).
The tragedy of the house elf is that they could be capable of so much, but they do not get to do it, because they are busy pleasing people who can never be pleased. Some of them become so enmeshed in that situation, that they cannot allow themselves to be free, even when they have been freed.
What does this have to do with management? Well, new managers often present exhausted and overwhelmed, and the question I often ask in this situation, is, “how are you house elfing your team?”
House elfing comes from a good place, often tied to some idea of “servant leadership”. People who internalize this idea that they exist to work for their team, and the way they know how to do that is to pick up all the small annoying things, run all the meetings, plan all the team activities, pick up the boring grunt work, tidy up the bug list etc.
The outcome of this is that they are:
Wholly reactive ➡️ unable to focus on bigger / more impactful work.
Buried in small details ➡️ unable to step back and see the bigger picture.
Exhausted ➡️ running around all day picking up after people does that to you.
Overwhelmed ➡️ see also: reactive. By being buried in the details, you don’t have time to make the meaningful improvements.
Worse, these managers often start thinking it’s their job to make their team happy. Wrong! It’s your job to make your team effective. Constant picking up of small things does not make your team more effective – noticing the patterns and improving the processes, or the projects themselves does that.
And here’s the thing, the biggest problem I have with servant leadership: you can’t be the servant of people you have power over. So either you deny that power dynamic, or you give away that power.
Because if you behave in such a way that your team starts to believe your job is to make them happy, what is going to happen when you inevitably have to disappoint them? When you have to tell them they didn’t get the promotion, or the project has been cancelled, or the is no budget for the thing they want?
They will blame you.
Everyone on your team is – hopefully – an adult. You don’t need to “protect them” from the realities of the workplace. Trying to do so is patronizing and a recipe for making yourself miserable. If you believe people are adults, you can focus them – make it clear what’s important, what’s valued and what’s not – and trust them to take their share of team housekeeping.
I’m not saying you should refuse to do anything – I’m saying you should not do everything. I’m also not saying you shouldn’t help your team, that is an important part of your job. But it is your job to help them through kindness not erode everyone’s effectiveness with niceness.
The thing about house elfing, is that it comes from a good place – the desire to help. This is something to honour.
It can also be a product of some level of insecurity, that by doing small tasks you are providing value. It’s a way to get the small dopamine hits that we miss from writing code. This is something to critically evaluate.
To escape the house elf trap:
Pay attention to how often you are house elfing. Make a list of things you do when you catch yourself house elfing.
After a week or two, evaluate the list. How much is on it? What has that cost you in terms of focus time or energy?
Redefine your priorities. What are your most important things to do?
Catch yourself before you house elf. Let that thing go undone (by you). Does someone else pick it up? Does it need to be done at all?
Remember that even if you can successfully house elf a team of five, there is no way to succeed in this mindset with five teams of five. This can be one of the biggest ways that people get in the way of their own advancement – so the time to readjust your approach is now.
Meta-problem (n): root cause issues of a collection of symptom problems.
One of the things I do as an engineering director, is live in the realm of the meta problem. The thing that is behind the problems that people are talking about.
For instance, a meta problem of an individualistic mindset on the team might result in:
Poor onboarding
Inequitable division of work
“Not my job” attitude
Lack of collaboration
Lack of feedback
Yes, these things individually need to be addressed, but that will look different if you address them one by one, or guided by a North Star of “collective responsibility”.
Similarly, a meta problem of poor people management might result in:
Lack of feedback
Lack of interest in management
Lack of growth
Lack of clarity around team purpose
Burnout
Fear of change
Resentment of authority
Addressing the root cause by doing good people management and empowering others to do good people management will shift these issues more effectively than considered one by one.
Teams that are struggling have a collection of issues, and part of transformation to a functional team is to root cause and address the meta problems. Working symptom by symptom may not change, may actually re-enforce the meta problem. E.g. if you have a problem of code review being slow and a meta problem of team workload, then the answer is different if you have a problem of slow code review and a meta problem of individualistic mindset.
Addressing meta problems often involves shifting the culture in some way. Things are the way they are for a reason – a series of decisions reflecting organizational priorities at the time, distorted by the coping mechanisms of individuals (particularly those with more influence on the team). It takes time to address the ensuing consequences, but much less time if you take it holistically rather than symptomatically.
Broadly speaking, my overarching agenda for any 1:1 is as follows:
It starts with the checkin, “how’s it going?”, an open ended question that some people respond with a status update, and some do not. The important thing is what comes next – finding out how the person feels. Sometimes a status update is useful context for that, sometimes it’s just how we get there. Either is fine.
Then we move into the most interesting part of the 1:1: what could be better.
Information / context is where I spend a lot of time for new hires, or someone taking on new responsibility. E.g. if I have a new lead, they might have questions about how things work or what they share about how they think things are going will surface things they may be missing or need to pay more attention to.
Practical help is less common, but sometimes necessary – if someone is overwhelmed, or needs to escalate something, then that’s something we would spend time on. Equally, I might help them with finding help elsewhere.
Development is the most interesting part of the 1:1. This is about helping them be more effective (or sometimes just happier at work). For many people, it’s not necessary to be in this space every week, but making some time for this more often than not is key to supporting people’s development.
Below is my model for developmental conversations.
Thanks for the Feedback breaks feedback into evaluative feedback (where someone stands) and developmental feedback (how someone can improve). Coaching is separate – where the individual decides what they want to do, and can – in context – build on both of these, or exist outside of it in a pure coaching relationship.
Evaluative feedback is critical – if someone doesn’t know where they stand, that can undermine everything else – but is the least empowered place. The failure mode is the evaluation loop, where you keep discussing the evaluation but it doesn’t change, because there was no meaningful action. In this space, there’s a lot of emotional work on both sides, but no movement.
Moving into “how can I improve” moves into action, and is more empowering. The person can change the outcomes or evaluation through changing their actions. It’s less empowering than coaching, because it’s more about implementing suggestions. The feedback loop is more productive than the evaluation loop, but progress is linear. The disempowerment trap is to return to evaluation through the question of “is this enough?“
Coaching is the most empowered space, because it is where the person asks what do I want, the empowered choice loop is where transformation – or exponential growth – happens. The disempowerment trap here is to give away the choice, and ask for direction instead.
I want to be clear that no space in this model is bad, typically we need to visit all of them. However the difference is between people who are highly coachable and those that are not is the time spent in each place.
Someone highly coachable:
Gets some evaluative feedback.
Takes suggestions well.
Figures out how they want to build on it and what they want to do.
This follows the top path, and as a result very little time is spent in evaluation, some time in developmental, but the bulk of the time is in the coaching space, and that extends well beyond the time spent together.
Someone who is not coachable:
Doesn’t have ideas on how they can improve.
Asks what to do instead.
Falls into an evaluation loop.
This follows the bottom path, and cycles down and around, i.e. even after moving into developmental, returns to evaluative. The bulk of the time is spent in evaluation, with a small amount of time in developmental, and none in coaching.
Whilst the evaluation space is not a hugely productive one, it’s unwise to skip it entirely. Someone who is hard on themselves might seem very receptive to feedback and full of ideas about how they can improve, but if they come to this from the idea that they are falling short and need to do better, it’s less empowering than if they are confident they are doing well and valued, and deciding what they can do to truly thrive.
When I coach new managers, or transition ICs into management, one of the key struggles initially (which I also remember myself) is overwhelm. For some, this ends up in exhaustion, and those are the people who often switch back onto the IC path – they find management unsustainable at that time (some return to it later; some do not).
Superficially, it’s understandable that people become overwhelmed. They get a bunch of new responsibility, and need to process that responsibility; it can take some time to filter through it all and figure out how to manage it. The context switching can also be very draining, particularly context switching at different levels of abstraction (i.e. from strategy to detail level code review).
But one of the deeper things driving this, is that ICs often differentiate through strong time management. They work their schedule to really prioritize the deep work for some chunk of every day, they figure out how to churn out small things alongside it. They manage their time well, and that makes them effective.
Shifting into management, the biggest challenge is not time management, but rather energy management. This requires a different approach.
As an engineer, often the most challenging thing to do in a given week is some gnarly problem. Carving out four hours of complete focus to make a dent in it can make a huge difference.
As a manager, often the most challenging thing to do in a given week is a hard conversation. It might even be a short, hard conversation. The biggest challenge is psyching yourself up to do it, and whilst you might (arguably should) spend time preparing, often that is more about managing your own emotions in order to do it, rather than the actual work required.
Even aside from the truly challenging things, to a more “normal” week, being emotionally present in your 1:1s or team meetings allows you to detect potential problems earlier, and help people more effectively. If you show up distracted and exhausted (which happens to everyone from time to time, we’re human) you’re less effective in some of your highest leverage activities.
If your meetings are not high leverage then that is a similar, but related problem. If you don’t have time or energy to think through how to improve (or delete) them, then that will not change.
Similarly, being proactive instead of reactive is largely an emotional regulation issue. It requires getting ahead of things, perhaps by doing something very tedious, versus reacting to whatever seems most pressing in the moment. Making active decisions here requires a level of emotional calm and mental clarity that we lose when we are stressed and overwhelmed. Proactive work is also less of a dopamine hit than reacting and “fixing” something.
If you’re a new manager and feeling overwhelmed, the first thing is to figure out whether you have a time management problem or an energy management problem.
What things do you add to your todo list on Monday, but delay until Friday? Why do you put them off?
What things do you struggle to do at the end of the day even though you technically “have time”?
Looking at your task list for the last week, what was draining beyond the time spent on it?
Looking at your task list for the next week, what do you worry you won’t have time for? Why is that?
Looking at your task list for the next week, what are you dreading? Why?
Looking at your task list for next week, what are you looking forward to? Why?
What do you think is the most valuable thing you do? Why? How much time do you spend on it?
What do other people think are the most valuable things you do? Why? How much time do you spend on them?
Audit your calendar / regular work and ask yourself for each thing: how valuable is this, how much time is spent on it, and whether or not it’s energy-giving, energy-taking, or neutral.
Once you’ve worked through some of these questions, you will probably know whether the problem is just sheer volume of things (which okay, time management, but probably mainly figuring out what you can get rid of) or whether it is not the volume, but the emotional drain of certain activities.
The final question is this: When you step away from work, are you able to disconnect. If not, what do you keep thinking about?
Thinking about work long after we have finished for the day – especially in terms of ruminating on things we are stressed about – is how we work forty hours in time and sixty in energy. If we physically leave the computer but don’t emotionally leave the work we exist in the limbo of neither working nor resting, and that creates resentment and exhaustion.
Some ideas to improve your energy management:
Think about things you can do at the start and end of the day that ground you.
Such a cliché, but even just a 20 minute spin class before I start the day makes a huge difference to how I experience it.
Think about things you can do during the day to ground you.
Schedule lunch breaks, and take some time to do something, away from your desk.
You could take a short walk, savour a hot beverage, or read a chapter of a book.
Make a daily (or weekly) list that accounts for energy rather than time.
If you have a heavy road mapping week, or are doing performance reviews, perhaps you won’t be in a frame of mind to write a chirpy blogpost on engineering best practices. Accepting that and planning for it is much easier than dreading it and struggling.
Look at your calendar and commitments for a day, and consider what is emotionally realistic versus technically possible?
Recently, I was dealing with a huge chunk of my team being in the vicinity of a war zone. So much emotional energy went to that situation and those 1:1s – even though they took a the typical amount of time – that I kept 1:1s with people who were not directly impacted by that shorter and lighter. Is that ideal? No. Would I do it every week? Also no. But in that kind of situation it’s better to be realistic about my own limitations and set expectations accordingly.
Take 15 minutes to think about each meeting before you have it, decide what outcomes you want to drive and how you can do that most effectively.
If you don’t have time to do this, you probably have too many meetings. See about deleting some! (Start with the boring ones, they can most easily be replaced by text).
Consider the activities that you find most emotionally draining. Is there anything you can do to change your relationship with them?
Are you on a learning curve? Do you need to take more time to better understand how to approach it?
Are your expectations for yourself too high?
Do you lack an understanding of the purpose of the activity? Can you find one?
Is your relationship with the activity shaped by previous bad experience? Can you change it? E.g. you dread your meeting with your current manager because your previous manager was horrible. Actively catching yourself in old thinking patterns, resetting your expectations and re-enforcing to yourself that this relationship is not that relationship can help shift your relationship to the meeting over time.
Do you need to be doing this activity? Can you transition it to someone else, or just stop doing it?
If we want things to be different, we have to create space for them to change. Being overwhelmed each week and finishing behind and exhausted are a vicious cycle. Whilst things may improve “naturally” over time, as you get more comfortable with the role, much stress and suffering can be alleviated with some meta-thinking into how you’re approaching your work, and adjusting self-management to emphasize energy-management as even more important than time-management.
Good luck! Let me know how you get on. My inbox and Twitter DMs are always open.
One of the challenges we face as engineering managers is how people react to process differently. Sometimes it’s like we’re talking about entirely different things – we propose something we expect to be lightweight, and people react like we’re instituting TPS reports or time-tracking in six minute intervals (normal for lawyers, everyone else: hell no).
For the past couple of months, I’ve kept a post it on my desk. It says:
How are people doing?
– Downtime – Social isolation – Perspective
You can probably guess what it’s for – it’s a reminder of the core struggles I’ve been noticing from people.
Downtime: downtime is lower quality, and people struggle to recharge. Also, given restrictions they aren’t planning vacation, and might delay taking time off for when they can do something (this ‘when’ never comes).
Social isolation: especially for people who live alone, it’s easy for this time to be very isolating. Many people are lonely.
Perspective: It’s been very easy for techworkers to live in a bubble for the year or so, and combined with other two things it’s not uncommon for people to lack perspective – to get more angry or upset or anxious than they would usually.
Whilst we can’t do much about the current situation, these are reminders to:
Encourage people to take time off – and take time off myself. Little and often has been working better for me. When someone starts to seem a bit fried, I encourage them to at least take a long weekend. This is easier in environments with untracked AFK where people actually take it. I know some companies gave people extra vacation days in 2020 – what a great idea. Even Putin gave people extra holiday this year (although maybe it was just a disguised lockdown 🤷♀️).
Take the time to check in with people as a human and ask how they are personally. Encourage team social events. Just do my little bit to maintain some sense of connection in the darkest timeline.
Encourage a little more perspective. Generally, for example five of us from DuckDuckGo are attending LeadDev Together, and also specifically – when people have a harder time seeing the other person’s point of view, it’s more likely to create (or exacerbate) conflict. Often the first step to resolving these things is to encourage people to think a little more broadly.
So much of decent management is consistently showing up and giving a damn about people as human beings. This has been harder than ever to do over the past year, with our own struggles depleting our emotional energy.
Sometimes it seems like some people think the pandemic is over, but it’s not, and even once life resumes it will take time for people to recover and reset. I think I’ll be keeping this post-it on my desk for a while longer, so I’m sharing this post in the hope that it may be helpful to you, too.
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