How do I manage people?

Lenny Markus
Jul 20, 2017 · 6 min read

Charity Majors recently posed a simple question on twitter:

She immediately got a flood of replies, with many good and very valid questions people should be asking their prospective managers/interviewers.

As a hiring manager, I found myself answering each question mentally as I read through the thread; and realized it could be fun to cherry pick the most liked questions (plus a few I find interesting), and turn them into a blog post. I will answer most of these questions with real examples of my experience at PayPal.

Caveat: Per the original question, I’m answering questions about my management style, and skipping those about “Give me the dirt on the company!”

(Disclaimer: You know the drill: My opinions are my own, and don’t necessarily reflect those of PayPal. )

So here we go, hypothetical interviewee: Ask Me Anything!

In my case it’s not rehearsed. I actually think about these things all the time. I prefer to call them well-defined :)

Change is constant at PayPal. One month ago, I returned from my sabbatical; and having decided to take on a new challenge, I said goodbye to one team (Onboarding), and moved over to a new one (Sandbox). Communicating any sort of major change needs to be done in person, so for both the outgoing and incoming teams, I announced it at the end of their daily standup. In addition to that, I made myself available for individual conversations, as I know that many questions go unasked in a group setting. (This should also answer feelings of instability.)

Staffing up requires understanding of team dynamics, and cooking mastery. A person is more than a bag of skills. Technical acumen is important, but each team member brings a unique flavor to the group. When I hire, I always try to find a profile that will complement and augment what we already have on the team. This has included hiring juniors when a team is top-heavy, finding candidates with non-traditional backgrounds for teams that are starting to get too homogeneous, fighting for QA in spite of engineers who claim they can handle it, etc.

Help people step up. Goals and accountability! Before you push somebody to step up, you need to know how they want to grow. Having clear conversations about goals helps me understand the type of opportunity that should be handed to a given candidate. When one comes along, (Right combination of scope / direction) it’s handed to a person, with loose goals, so that they can decide on direction and milestones. Once defined, as a manager, I hold them accountable to the milestones they themselves set. eg: The redesigned architecture for our Onboarding Platform is the result of an engineer-driven initiative, by someone who saw a gap, and just needed time and light direction to work on it.

Raw talent will only get you so far. In my teams, you need to be curious, and be willing to question how things are done. (Caveat: If you complain about something, you also need to offer a solution). Also, you need to have a customer service mentality. “The customer” could be an external merchant, as well as an internal team. eg: When somebody asks the team a question, I expect people to step up and answer, rather than let it go unanswered for days.

Finally, I don’t expect people to be passive order-takers. You should have your personal backlog of improvements/ideas that you want to get done. Be accountable for making whatever you work on better.

*Confused Stare*. You need to read the previous question again. Did I mention race/gender/orientation anywhere?

Yep. And Rally too. Sorry. (Upside: We also use GitHub Internally )

There are many flavors of this. When new features are being developed, many teams engage in usability testing with real customers. This happens on-site, in our awesome usability lab. I always encourage the entire team to attend. At the other side of the spectrum, we have programs like the [Small Business Challenge](https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/business-challenge), where a group of employees gets to work directly with a local small business, spending about 10% of their time with them.

“How I do one thing, is how I do everything”

Mentor? Singular? Nope. I actually have multiple mentors. Each person gives me a unique perspective on things, and I also encourage folks under me to get their own “brain trust”. However, I don’t think I strive to be _exactly_ like any one of them, but rather I cherry pick my favorite aspects of each mentor, and shoot for melding those into my own behaviors. My top mentors, in no particular order, Bill Scott, Chandra Chikkareddy, and Junaid Razzak .

When schedules and topics allow, I do bring second round candidates into team meetings, to see if we’ll scare them away :)

Establish strong partnerships with my Product Owner counterparts, ensuring they understand the value of trimming down tech debt, therefore allowing room for the team to improve things. Most dev teams can and will do the right thing, if the pressure to deliver new features can be dialed back.

Once you have the room to work, prioritize issues, and be pragmatic about what can be tackled. eg: Whole system rewrite? Unless you have an amazing justification, probably not gonna happen.

(Bonus answer: Don’t accumulate it in the first place. Avoid shortcuts unless there is no alternative)

Realistically, this is not a black and white answer. Different people have different needs for their schedule. Some arrive/stay late to avoid traffic, some leave early to pick up their kids at day care. The question you really want to ask, is how much overtime are your people working: As little as possible. People need to manage their work around ±40 hour weeks. I don’t allow engineers to overestimate their capacity for a given sprint.

Sometimes crunch mode will be inevitable, but it should be the exception, not the norm.

This is a good one, and should’ve had more votes on the thread. As a manager of managers, I do one-on-ones with my directs every other week; and I do skip level one-on-ones with the rest of the team once a month. These meetings are *never* status reports. I focus my time on feedback based on my observations over the past period, mentoring and career growth. There are two specials one-on-ones that happen once per quarter: I’ll have one where I do a checkpoint on the goals set for each individual, and another one, where they have to give *me* feedback on my performance, as well as that of the team.

It might be obvious, but I still remind everyone that should they need to discuss anything, they don’t need to wait a whole month. They can just come talk to me.

(As to the location, I always give people the choice to sit in a room, or walk around the campus)

Recognizing the need for some folks to receive training, and putting some things on pause until the necessary knowledge base was in place. Otherwise, I would’ve set them up for failure.

It’s a fair question. There’s a ton of reason why somebody could be “low performing” and you need to recognize them. Burnt out? Lacking motivation? Wrong Skillset? Wrong Manager? Personal issues? A good manager has to find a way to trim away those reasons. If I’m able to do that, and the person still does not respond, I do consider it a lost case.

When things get to that point, chances are that the team itself feels the drag of the person, and irreparable damage has been done. Probably best to encourage that person to “pursue other opportunities”.

You made it to the end? Good! If you like my answers, you might want to consider working for me. I’m hiring! I need Java + JavaScript people. Ping me on Twitter => Lenny Markus

Did I miss any good ones? Do you have any of your own? Ask me!

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