Working as a manager is always a learning experience, for me at least. Maybe everyone else just knows what they are doing, but I definitely won’t pretend I do. Except if my bosses are reading this, then I DEFINITELY know what I am doing…
So with the idea that always learning is the best thing you can do, here is another entry in the catalogue where my direct reports are the ones teaching me. This time it is all about creating opportunities for growth and give them the space they need.
Max Headroom
As much as I would love to somehow link my learnings in this blog post to the famous 80’s AI (which inspired some television airway hijackings), I am mostly using it here because it is funny to me.
Though, there is truth to the phrase “max headroom”. As a manager I am always trying to help the people on my team grow and become better. Whether that is as an individual contributor or by following me into management is up to the individual. I spend much of my 1:1s talking about how to get to the next level, but recently I saw what is actually important, the space to grow!
Recently, I got sick, like super sick. 11 days sick (shout out to my nephews for finding something so virulent and gleefully sharing it to me). I was basically out of commission, which left my team in a bit of a bind, which I so arrogantly thought. What actually ended up being the case was my new team who has been looking for ways to collaborate better, collaborated the best I have ever seen.
What I saw where a few of my devs stepping up to the plate to organize and lead the team to get out a demo for the week I was down. This is likely something I would have been trying to organize and making decisions around, so it would not have been something they would have the opportunity to do, at least not at this early in team development. So, not only did they step up into a role that might not have been open had I been well, they CRUSHED IT. It was fantastic to see them exercise these muscles that I figured they had, but now they actually had a real application of it to try out. Extremely gratifying to see.
So what is the learning? Get sick more often I guess? Take more vacation (I mean probably)? Slack off? Nah, I like my job too much to slack off. I think the lesson is to not always be in charge as a manager. Give some “headroom”, see what other people can do and encourage them to be empowered when you can.
Experiments
Now this learning was more collaborative between myself and one of my direct reports. As mentioned, growth is a big talking point for me with my direct reports. With this particular developer, we identified some challenges in completing work assigned in sprints / meeting deadlines. This was by no means due to them not working hard, in fact I would call them one of the hardest working individuals I have ever worked with. The fact was they are so helpful that they get pulled into a lot of different tasks.
So, they wanted the permission to run a few experiments, the first being a capacity planning idea for the team, along with some sprint hygiene goals and the other “experiment” was being allowed to just block out time to do the work they have assigned to them.
Of course, I was 100% on board. Part of being a programmer is about experiments in code, try something and see how well it works. Why would our working processes be any different. Whether the experiment succeeds is not the point, trying is. The capacity planning experiment didn’t get as much traction as we might have hoped, but we did learn from it. The blocking out time has been very effective and helped in more than just getting work down.
This doesn’t seem like a complicated idea, but you have to be comfortable with change, and you HAVE to make experiments zero risk for everyone, meaning information gathered from any experiment is a win, whether it results in something permanent. Trying stuff is scary, but it is a great way to trial things and better than all of that, empower people around you to grow!
Post Cover Image from: Nicolas Thomas