The Duality of Good Culture and Good Management
When I became a manager, I felt uncertain about how to manage, and my manager told me he would let me figure it out. After six months, I started to develop a plan, after some training, to build a culture for my team. My team was only 3 people at that time, but I was planning for growth. I’d like to share what I have done to create a strong, open, and clear culture in my group with the hope that my experience might help you effect positive change in your culture.
Define the Culture
A culture helps people determine what they should be doing without having to be told. If you have a strong culture, it can do great to help people be more autonomous without needing to micromanage them to make sure they were going down the right path.
My culture was aimed to be helpful, to be of service. Anonymity was the keyword. Anonymity in the sense of sacrifice. Much of my work life, I have wondered how some piece of work or some project will help pump up my resume or help guide me towards a promotion. I was far too long concerned in a selfish way how it would help me.
Instead, I have found becoming more selfless and less self-centered allows me to have a better attitude for work that is not glamorous. Much of the work we do is grunt work. It isn’t that I’m personally required for it to get done, but someone has to do it. The more I’ve put my nose to the grind, the better.
Replacing “I have to” with “I get to”
I promote this same attitude for my team by taking the time to recognize when people are doing that kind of critical work. That means positive affirmation, saying thank you, asking what their thoughts are on some work, text messages, emails, phone calls, and putting my face in front of theirs.
I also have found the way to break through conflict is to remove personality. Some times, that’s my personality or just the credit for the work. Everyone wants the credit, but when I have worked from the attitude of credit not mattering, I have had more success.
In the vein of helping others, I have tried to cultivate the idea that I always have time to help out. To the extend I actually have time doesn’t matter. It is an attitude that someone else’s work may be more important than mine. I don’t always know unless a conversation occurs. But I would rather have the conversation to see how I can help than to tell someone flat out no. It could also mean that their work is actually a higher priority than the work I already have, which as a concept, is difficult to understand without some humility.
I acquired this attitude when working on the Watch, and everyone was so kind. All the people I worked with would always take the time to answer questions or figure out how they could help out even though the project was rolling really fast, and everyone was just trying to not drown.
Positive Feedback
Typically, the engineering environment doesn’t lend to positive affirmation. Mostly, we’re concerned about failure analysis:
- When did the algorithm fail?
- Why did the algorithm fail?
- Where did we fail in the project?
- What was wrong with your performance?
- How could you do better?
Generally, success analysis is rare. So the focus is a negative one. You could say people are rewarded when a product ships, but if the shipping cycle is a year or longer, then it means getting crapped on for a year to be rewarded for a day or a week before it’s on to the next thing. Even worse, a project could get cancelled.
Over time, I find such focus has skewed my perspective of my work and my team’s work. Because I’m always looking for the wrong things, my default is that something must be wrong. Then everyone is on edge during reviews, and they’re looking for the worst parts of usually a successful project.
Just because you have a high bar doesn’t mean you can’t say good job.
To affect change, I work to be the manager I’d like to have if I was in that position. I thank my reports for their work. I start with the positive. I make verbal observations of what I like along with what I don’t. I make sure to thank them when they present work regardless of the work itself. I also thank them for presenting in meetings before I give notes on what they could improve.
I’m not aiming to give a shit sandwich (defined as good comment, terrible comment, good comment). I genuinely want them to succeed, and I think it is vital to having an open and fair conversation. I know from experience that a manager mostly does not know how long certain tasks take nor do they take into account how much time task switching consumes.
One-on-One Meetings
How often do you get to talk to your manager where you are driving the agenda? I never did this before Apple, but the culture is definitely working towards more transparency between manager and report.
I try to have one-on-one’s every month, but the reality is that a formal one-on-one is every other month or more frequent when someone working closely with us leaves the team.
I ask them what they want to talk about, and then I wait. Some people are shy or feel uncomfortable talking about what they want. So I work to cultivate in them a trust that they can share their dreams and their problems with me without fear. This is also the time I share feedback with them on how they can get to the next step or what work was really key. In some instances, I’m explaining my overarching dream for their work. I want them to be able to see the payoff at the end of the day, and I also want them to glimpse their work the way I see it.
Additionally, I try to see all of my reports once a week outside of a staff meeting. Just putting my face in front of theirs might bring up a topic they wanted to talk about in person. My teams over-communicate, which is fantastic, but I still want to build on that trust and relationship in-person.
Leadership Visibility
A manager can make or break an employee’s visibility in them being able to see the decisions being made higher up, being seen by the higher ups, and being part of the conversation.
A manager could easily say they want their employees to focus on their work, and then the manager would present data or results upwards. This does two important things that I don’t like:
- Removes visibility with respect to the employee
- Adds time in the communication process
If I share my employee’s results upwards, and someone has a question I can’t answer but the employee could have, I have just wasted time. I am impeding communication.
So, I have my reports present all their work. In fact, when I do some of that work on an individual contributor level, I have them present my work. I would rather give them the credit because it’s still credit to the team.
Visibility also allows people to see how decisions are made, which in turn allows them to accept decisions that go against what they wanted. This is certainly true for me. I found out that I don’t care so much if someone higher up makes a decision I don’t like. I’m more concerned that my voice has been heard especially when the culture makes decisions by consensus.
I didn’t want to get into management because I wanted to rise to the top. I was pretty certain and still am certain I’m not rising too high because I’m too extroverted in an introverted management chain. But I wanted the training and the experience because I thought I might just like the work. It turns out I enjoy being a manager because maybe just maybe, I could be more than incrementally better than all my previous managers.
This article was supposed to be about creating good culture, and it is. However, you might have thought it morphed into thoughts about being a good manager, which it did. But, it’s hard to create good culture without good management and vice-versa. They are two sides of the same coin, a duality like the more famous one in computer science (The Duality of Memory and Communication in the Implementation of a Multiprocessor Operating System), a favorite of mine.
If you like, follow me on Twitter and YouTube where I post videos of espresso shots on different machines and espresso related stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
Further readings of mine:
Staccato Espresso: Leveling Up Espresso
Learning how to drive in my 30's
How to run a marathon without training
LEGO’s: Stories of Destruction
