My management philosophy - II

It's been a long time I wanted to write a sequel for 'My management philosophy'. But, guess what? With the 'manager-hood' comes certain necessary evil. One of the most significant among those is the meetings. During the past month, I would've spent a good 25-30% of my time on meetings that ate away my 'free time' almost entirely. With all my 'free time' gone, I couldn't find any for writing up my next set of thoughts for the blog. I, really am tempted to talk lots about this 'time-pass' of busy executives around the world, but I want to talk about something more close to my heart. Of course, we will come back to this subject, a very important aspect of 'manager-hood', in a few more posts.

In this post, I want to talk about how I think a team should be managed. Rather, I will talk about how (I think) a team shouldn't be managed. I've had many experiences in the past with my previous managers, all of which taught me, how not to manage a team (unfortunately, more than, how to manage!)

1. Manager's job is to manage the team, not the individuals.

In a perfect world, people would manage everything for themselves - whether he is a fresher at the job or 10 year experienced specialist. When we talk about people, we are talking about adults, more than 18 years of age. I think it is safe to assume so about all people working in an organization. 99% of the times, adults know what they're doing, can make choices for themselves, and are conscious about the time-lines (schedules and such). There may be exceptions, and again, the above rule can't be extended to all categories equally. So, what's the point? The point is, it's hence natural for people to resist the idea of the so called 'manager' to barge in their private world and 'manage' stuff for them. It's very important to understand that the line between managing and controlling is very thin. People perceive them differently. Management for me could be controlling for another. So, my learning is this. Don't ever try to 'manage' individuals. It's simply an unsafe practice to do so. It will do more harm than good - to you (and your family, in turn), to the individual, to the team and even to the whole organization.

Instead, manager should look at his job from a team perspective. Manager owns the end-result of the work done by the team, not the individuals. I believe, that individuals own their actions, being responsible adults. But, at the same time, manager is accountable (not exactly responsible) for all happenings - good and bad - that happen in the team, even if it is an individual that wronged. The line is thin between the two cases, but it's important to give the benefit of doubt to the individual.

Manager must oversee work at a team level on a regular basis (weekly, might be a good choice) with additional help, as needed. It helps to avoid surprises at the end (could, potentially be even the beginning!)

Manager must promote a culture within the team, so that it can perform well. One very good example of a rich 'culture' is that of sharing knowledge freely among the team members. Think of innovative methods of promoting such a culture in your team and implement them.

Manager must ensure that resources, as appropriate for the job, is available to his team to perform well.

Manager must make sure that his people feel safe in his group, both at the job and otherwise. He must be ever-ready to come forward and protect his people from external issues, either from customers, from other teams, or even internal to the team. Essentially, people should feel being in a secure environment.

Manager must ensure that good things happen to good people, that is most important to keep people cheerful and engaged. In short, a manager should act as the HR for his own group.

Most of that I wanted to talk about are already covered under this section, so I've only a few more items. Hold on!

2. Don't pretend to, but show a genuine interest in peoples' affairs. It is easier to impress people that you're keenly interested in the team's/individual's affairs, while actually ignoring most of them. Couple of managers I'd in the past, adopted this strategy and also had been successful for sometime before they were shoed away by the people in his team. Remember, you may fool some people all the time or even fool all people for some time, but not all people all the time!

3. Practice what you preach. It is very tempting to advice people on things, that you may not even have the most distant idea about. Perhaps, the only reason you do this is, you'd similar advices from your own manager in the past. After all, what's wrong is just passing on good advices? No, you're wrong.

Advices are people-specific and environment-specific. Environment can be anything - ranging from the job, the team, the organization etc. Before giving advices, the manager ought to double-check with his conscience if it makes sense for him and can be implemented in his own life? If not, discard it.

4. Always know the context first, before passing opinions. Don't interfere into your team's issues and offer advices, especially the 'unsolicited' ones, if you don't know the entire context of the issue. You're probably just wasting everybody's time, if you do that.

5. It is not necessary that a manager is super-knowledgeable about everything, and must have opinions on everything that happens in the team. There is nothing so sacred about a manager's position, that he should fear of compromising it, while asking opinions, even from the junior-most engineer in your team. People, infact will respect the manager for it.

6. I'd a manager in the past, who whenever we met in a team meeting or otherwise, used to talk only about what we didn't do, but ignored what we did. He believed that a manager's job is to interfere into team affairs, only when something is terribly bad. The truth is, people, irrespective of the titles they have at their jobs, irrespective of their work environment, and even irrespective of social/economic background, want to be reaffirmed or noticed by others, especially the manager, of their actions and want to get recognized and eventually rewarded for their contributions, in the same order of priority. So, it is suicidal for the manager to ignore, either purposefully or by oversight, the achievements, however small, of his team members.

We'll talk about other interesting aspects of management, when we meet next time. See you soon...

My Management philosophy - I

I've a management philosophy. Well, it's not really mine, but the wisdom that had been passed on for ages and most recently to me, by some of my own managers, and of course through my own learnings and experiences.

I'd been manager for about a year and half during my previous job. It was not a very fruitful job for me, and in fact a burden most of the times. I'd gone through certain most difficult times and absolute pains during this period. I soon realized I didn't have enough orientation to people, and particularly used to get most uncomfortable and impatient when working with people, just the opposite of what you want to see in a manager. I'd advices from various segments of people, some said straight to me that I'm no good at it, go and look at yourself in the mirror and decide if I want to take this up; some others were even harsher and said don't turn and look this side, you're a hard-core technocrat and understand only binaries and logic. There were a few, though, that said "Don't worrry, this is just a starting point. Relax..." and all those beautiful words. Quite a few of my friends told me, "Hey, why do you worry? This is the way it works. You got to be a manager at some point in your career, else you can't survive".

Different opinions left me obviously confused. I started to feel like the father in the story about how he and his son tried to carry a donkey across the river, when he paid attention to and acted based on opinions from the onlookers, unable to make a decision himself and finally ended up losing his son.

My thoughts were already wavering, when I started to get advices on where my career is going? I started to feel that those who opposed the management culture and the need for it are right, and for a long time believed that human minds behaved in too many illogical ways for anybody to comprehend. Having working with pure logic for the past entire decade on engineering software, how can somebody suddently switch to reading people's minds?
Impossible? Unfortunately enough, I still don't know the answer. I am searching for it...

But, now I appreciate the need for good team management for realizing success, more than before. I've worked with teams, which had arguably some of the best and technically bright minds, but had failed miserably to achieve what they envisaged. Not once, but many times. I'd seen people and the teams they were part of, falling apart due to minor misunderstanding between each other or the top management and unable to tune into the organizational goals and focus. I'd seen the team morale taking a dip due to reasons that seemed unknown and incomprehensible to common people. I myself have undergone all these different facets of "mis-management" in my career. It was the most common and the easiest blame game. Whenever we don't see anything working to our satisfaction, we easily blame it on management. But, do we really understand what exactly the failure is? Most of us don't really know, but still prefer to blame the management for all bad things that happened to them, and even their neighbours!

So, I decided to take a break from my 'management career' and pursue some more of that 'technical' bliss, while I spent lots of time learning from many managers in my organization. Not necessarily through 1-1 discussions with managers, but through silent observations. Although I had gone through similar exercises in the past, this one was different because I'd a goal. I'd to decide between technical/management career paths. Following were my key observations...

1. Most of the issues, that decide success/failure of the project, starts from within the team. If suppressed, they can grow to unimaginable proportions and eat up everything precious to you and the team - time, peace of mind and succcess, of course. Surprisingly, if left alone, most of such issues are solved automatically.

2. If you want to taste success, behave yourselves! Remember, there are two ends to a stick; when you're picking up one end, you're picking up the other too. Don't overreact and spoil a 'good' environment, although it's highly tempting to do so! If the envrironment is already tensed up, try not to worsen the situation at the least, if not improve it.

3. People want to be respected. When they feel the lack of it, that is when the problems really start.

4. Managers who are smart enough to understand the team and are good at the management of skills, will end up victorious.

5. Managers need to be technically strong to command respect from his/her people, but it is foolish to imagine that this alone will help.

6. There are not enough 'good' managers around! Perhaps, just a handful. Sad news, but then we've many truly aspring and prospective managers in the future.

There are plenty more smaller observations and conclusions, but the above mentioned pointers essentially constitute the basis for my philosophy about management. We will discuss more about it in the subsequent posts...

My new job...

As you may know already, I recently changed my job. I'm starting to settle down at the new place. I'm meeting up with the people in my team (there are quite a few of them!) one by one. It, frankly, gave me a scare initially merely thinking about the prospect to manage over 20 people that belong to two different products. Being part of a technology driven company and as part of a very demanding industry, it is imperative that the team builds on its expertise and knowledge of the domain more than anything else. Not an easily achievable goal at all.

After I talked to the people, I feel that we're almost there. No exaggerations, but all the people are real good in their field of work. Team leaders swear by them. It is exciting to see the spread of aptitude, skills and experience within the team. Of all, the part I liked best is that most of them believe in creating their own challenges out of their otherwise routine jobs. Some do research work on relevant areas, some develop own automation frameworks and go on to automate a significant part of their work, some keep themselves busy training and giving presentations to the entire company on the team's technologies and domain, some work to develop newer strategies for testing, some contribute to developing better processes..I also started realizing the great learning potential ahead of me, both from a technology and a people management perspective. All this excites me and I eagerly look forward to contribute my lot to the team.

However, all this has significantly raised my responsibilities, much more than I'd imagined when I joined the company. Now, my hope is to be able to maintain the same spirit among the team members as it had been before. I know there are lots of challenges involved, but I hope to keep going and do my best...