8 - Managing People, Not Resources

Managing teams would be easy if it wasn’t for the people you have to deal with.

Some people react allergically when you call people resources and talk about managing resources. While not exactly allergic, I agree with the underlying sentiment. A resource is something you can manage without much tailoring; you can treat one bag of sand like the next bag of sand when it comes to making dikes. With people, that is never true. We have probably all been planning for projects and creating a plan that includes a certain amount of “anonymous full-time equivalents (FTEs).” Then a bit later, we start putting names to it and realize that we need more or less effort based on the actual people we have available for the project. One Java developer is just not the same as another; and honestly, we would never consider ourselves to be just a resource whose job someone else could do with the same efficiency and effectiveness. So, why do we then pretend that we can manage our people like anonymous resources?

For me, it comes back to that legacy thinking inspired by manufacturing, where replacing a worker on the assembly line was actually much easier than it would be today to replace a Java developer. In this chapter, I will provide some guidance on how to approach management using humanistic practices.* The beauty of this chapter is that the approach is valid across the organization, from the first line manager all the way up to the CIO. And after all, the way people are being managed in your organization has a huge influence on your culture. So, getting this right, setting the right example, and encouraging the people who work for you to follow the same can make a real difference.

When I just started working after university, I saw a few things in the organization I was working for that I really didn’t like—the way certain things were handled. My boss, who had a very open mind and an open-door policy, allowed me to vent and then provided one of the best pieces of advice in my career: “Mirco, you will not be able to get the organization to change, but what you can do is change your part of the organization. Once you are a manager, manage your teams the way that you would like to be treated, and then get results. As you climb higher in the hierarchy, your area of influence will increase and, with that, a larger and larger part of the organization will work the way you would like it to. It will be hard, but who knows? One day you may be at the top and will have only yourself to blame for the culture you have created along the way.”1 I am still pretty far away from the top, but his guidance has stayed with me throughout my career.

What I am writing about in this chapter is the way I try to operate as well. Those readers who have worked for me or are still working for me will know that I am far from perfect and that I use these practices myself whenever possible. Becoming a better people manager is a never-ending job.

The first practice that I want you all to do (if you are not doing it already) is to have regular one-on-one meetings with the people who report directly to you. It’s very hard to manage someone as a person when she is just an anonymous entity that you only know through her work product. And no, having an open-door policy is not the same as setting up one-on-ones. With an open-door policy, your directs might still feel that they are imposing themselves on you, and the resulting meetings might have less structure than you would like them to have. Your setting up the meetings and following through sends the sign that your people are important to you and that you are making time for them.

A weekly or biweekly thirty-minute slot works out very well. You want to use this meeting to learn more about the person over time, without it feeling like an interrogation. Always give the direct the first part of the meeting to raise anything she has to say or ask, and then provide your updates and information that could be important for her afterward. Once you start doing one-on-ones, you will see that after a while, the direct comes prepared with her items and that you get a lot fewer requests for ad hoc meetings. One-on-ones not only provide you with the opportunity to get to know the person, they will also make you more effective as a manager, increasing the time you have to focus on your job. This is possible because the people who work for you won’t disrupt you during the week with nonurgent queries, as they know they have time within each week (or every other week) when they can receive guidance on all of those things.

In my experience, you should not skip more than one in four, or 25%, of the one-on-ones for them to be meaningful and positively impact your relationship with your directs and their results. Everyone I know loves one-on-ones after doing them for a while, so stick with them for at least two months before you judge them.† Many of the people I have had one-on-ones with went off and introduced them to the teams they work with, which is a great endorsement of the practice.

Just about everyone I know would like to get more feedback from his or her boss, yet as bosses, we are often uncomfortable giving feedback (especially the constructive kind that requires behavior adjustment; positive feedback is somewhat easier). If you think about it, you probably learn the most from constructive feedback, but it is a bit uncomfortable to give. Plus, there are good ways to give feedback, and there are bad ways. I come back to Dan Pink’s mastery, autonomy, and purpose;2 you want to motivate the direct to improve by appealing to all three aspects.

Your feedback should focus on concrete situations that are recent, not generalizations such as “you are often late” or “your work product is not of good quality.” It should describe the impact the behavior had and should ask for a change in behavior. An example: “When you don’t use an agenda for a meeting like you did this morning with our vendor, we spend a lot of time discussing with no clear outcome in mind, and don’t achieve a result. Could you do this differently next time?”

You can see that this example is timely (from a meeting the same morning), it shows why you want the behavior to change to increase mastery of the skill in question, and it leaves the direct with the autonomy to decide the next steps to improve. Of course, the direct can ask for further guidance, but this simple feedback model works in line with Dan Pink’s motivators.

I use this template, which keeps me focused on the key elements of feedback (behavior, consequence, and the need to change): When you do x, y happens, which is not optimal. Can you find a way to do it differently next time to lead to a better outcome?

You can use the same template for positive feedback. In this case, you obviously don’t ask for a change but rather for the direct to continue doing the same. This kind of positive feedback appeals to the three motivators a lot more than a “good job” or “you did well.”

When I started as a manager, I felt bad delegating work that I could do myself or that was not terribly rewarding (e.g., filling in forms). Listening to the podcast Manager Tools, I learned of a concept called “Managerial Economics 101,”3 which means that if the same task can be done by someone with a lower cost rate, then it is uneconomic to not delegate it. Understanding this changed my life as a manager, as I started to feel less bad about delegating such work to people who work for me. On the flip side, I also started to think more about tasks that my boss might not have delegated because she felt bad, and I volunteered myself to help her out. Trust me, she was very thankful for me picking up those tasks. Keeping this in mind can get you a lot of positive credit with your boss.

The key to making delegation meaningful for the employee is to use the three motivators during the delegation process. Explain how the tasks will help the direct learn something new, how it helps you as a manager to do your job better, and after the initial handover, let the direct determine the best way to do it as long as the outcome is correct.

An example could be: “Michael, could you please help me by doing the weekly status reporting going forward? When you take care of this for me, I can focus on preparing the key messages for the meeting, which allows me to present the progress of our project much better to our stakeholders. The reports need to follow our standard template for status. I am happy to show you how I did it in the past, but I will leave it to you to determine the best way going forward. I am happy to do the report together for the first couple of times. Do you have any questions about the task?”

As a boss, your job is to protect the individuals in your team from outside criticism. When a problem occurs in your team, you will have to cover it without delegating the blame to the person in your team who is responsible. The team will appreciate this. For praise, the opposite is true: the more you share with the rest of the organization the positive impact a member of your team has made, the better you will look too. These two practices empower the people on your team to do the best job they can for you. And the rest of the organization will always hold you accountable for the results of your team anyway, so pushing blame further down or withholding praise actually does nothing positive for you.

This is the other aspect of management that is worth highlighting—creating a blameless culture. If you think back to the argument I made about the system being responsible for the behavior of people, it becomes clear that for any mistakes, the system is more to blame than the individual employee. Etsy goes so far as to make each engineer deploy to production on his or her first day on the job. After all, if the new engineer can break production, the system is clearly not good enough to withstand simple mistakes.4 So, whenever you have failures or problems, your root-cause analysis should not focus on who did what but on how we need to change the system so that the next person is able to avoid making the mistake again. Combining this kind of post-incident behavior within your team—with the protection from blame from the outside, as mentioned before—will start shifting the culture of your team to a more positive and empowering environment where they can thrive and achieve the best results for the organization. But how do you measure this culture to see whether it is improving?

There are a few different ways to measure culture. One that we highlighted in the DevOps metrics paper Measure Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Culture to Optimize DevOps Transformation, is the Westrum survey measures:

I personally prefer a slightly simpler version of an internal net promoter score (internal NPS), which is adapted from the common NPS measure for customer satisfaction. I used the following four statements in one of my projects, for which each team member had to rate the appropriateness:

Of course, you can mix or change any of these, but what is important is that you don’t look at the absolute value; you need to look at the trend over time. Are you improving the situation in your part of the organization or not? Remember that advice from my old supervisor: you can only control your part of the organization. The corollary to this is, if your part of the organization is not a good place to work, it is all your fault. Being able to measure how culture is changing is important for you, as you otherwise won’t know whether things are getting better.

In the activities for this chapter, I added one about measuring how well your managers are managing their teams. I am shocked that almost every time I ask directors what they use to measure the quality of people management in their teams; often, they have no measures whatsoever. Is it any wonder, then, that management is not improving and the culture shift is slow? Don’t make the same mistake; make a people measure part of each manager’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Use the overall cultural measures discussed here as a shared KPI across all your managers.

In this chapter, I looked at how the role of management shifts when moving away from legacy-style management, and I provided you with some tools to manage knowledge workers. Remember that we are not working in a factory with assembly lines; we are dealing with knowledge workers who perform a creative endeavor. But we are also working with technology, so let’s move into the last part of the book, where we discuss the technology aspects of the transformation.

First Steps for Your Organization

Set Up One-On-Ones

It is important to find time in your calendar for each of your directs starting two weeks from now, and be sure to make them recurring meetings on a weekly basis. Make them thirty minutes each, and set the agenda as fifteen minutes for the direct first and fifteen minutes for you second. It is common that the direct may run over with his/her fifteen minutes, and that’s okay. You can find another chance during the week to update the direct with any information that you didn’t have time to share during your portion of the one-on-one. I also highly encourage you to take notes and to follow up on the points discussed in the previous week; this will provide a very rich background of information when it comes to performance discussions, providing a progress measure for your direct report.

Define Culture KPIs for Your Managers

You probably have heard the saying “you get what you measure.” Though culture is somewhat evasive to metrics, there are some things you can do:

Leverage the internal NPS that I highlighted in this chapter, and break it down by team as a good high-level measure.
Measure one-on-ones of your managers. This allows you to measure whether or not your manager builds effective relationships.
Spot-check the strength of the relationships of your managers. Ask them about some of the fundamental and noninvasive things a boss should know about their people if they have a positive relationship. For example, do they know the names of their directs’ kids and partners, and their directs’ favorite pastimes?

And yes, you should do the same for yourself to avoid looking for the proverbial speck of sawdust in your manager’s eye while ignoring the wooden beam in your own.

This concludes part B of this book, which is about the people and organizational dimension of modern IT delivery organizations. We looked at different ways to provide your employees an organizational structure, the business context, and the necessary feedback to achieve the three motivators that Dan Pink describes: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We spent additional time diving deep into the organizational and people change that most organizations struggle with during their transformation—the move from testing to quality engineering—which provided an example of how to improve autonomy, mastery, and purpose through organization and process design. Your people will be the factor that makes your transformation succeed or fail, so spend enough time and effort on them during the transformation. In the next part, I will talk about the technical dimension as the last dimension we need to discuss. Technology is at the core of most businesses now, so we need to get this one right too, to be successful.

* If you are familiar with Mark Horstman and Michael Auzanne over at Manager-Tools.com, then you will find quite a bit of material inspired by them in this chapter. Their podcast and their conferences (which is what they call their trainings) are some of the best guidance on management that is out there. The podcasts are free, and the conferences are very affordable and available around the world. Give them a try.

† There is a lot of guidance on one-on-ones on the Manager Tools website including introduction emails and a series of podcasts on how to run them well. If you have specific challenges with them, check Manager Tools for this as well; it has plenty of good advice on how to tweak the one-on-one for specific circumstances.