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The New Manager's Toolkit
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The New Manager's Toolkit

Brandon Hays • November 13, 2018 • Los Angeles, CA

In his talk "The New Manager's Toolkit" presented at RubyConf 2018, Brandon Hays delves into the complexities of transitioning from a contributor to a managerial role, providing invaluable insights and tools for new managers. Hays begins by reassuring the audience that there is no singular guide to management, emphasizing a practical accumulation of experiences instead.

Key Points:

- Understanding Management vs. Leadership: Hays clarifies the difference between leading and managing, stressing that management often entails navigating uncertainty and responsibility.
- Types of Bad Managers: Hays classifies common negative managerial archetypes, such as the Angry Police Captain and the Hovering Art Director, illustrating how detrimental these styles can be to team dynamics.
- Challenges of New Management: He recounts the initial challenges he faced, including managing meetings and the steep learning curve of understanding team needs through one-on-ones.
- Developing Processes: Hays details his experience revamping the interview process and the difficulties he encountered when his team didn’t follow the new approach, highlighting the real-world chaos in management.
- Accountability Systems: He reflects on creating an engineering ladder for his team and then confronting issues of holding team members accountable, leading to hard conversations about performance.
- Cultural Issues and Change: Towards the latter part of the talk, he discusses the need for cultural change within teams and how a focus on shared purpose aligns team efforts.
- Self-Care and Leadership: A significant personal journey emerges as Hays shares his struggle with burnout, ultimately leading to the realization that successful management encompasses self-care and vulnerability. He advocates for seeking support and practicing self-compassion.

Takeaways:

- Effective management is an ongoing learning process characterized by both success and failure.

- Trust and communication are vital in fostering a positive team culture.

- New managers should embrace their own vulnerabilities and seek help to perform better in their roles.

- The role of a manager is to coach, support, and communicate the value of the team's work both internally and externally.

Overall, Hays' talk serves as a candid encouragement for new managers to accept the challenges inherent in their roles while using frameworks and tools to navigate their managerial journey effectively.

The New Manager's Toolkit
Brandon Hays • November 13, 2018 • Los Angeles, CA

RubyConf 2018 - The New Manager's Toolkit by Brandon Hays

Congratulations, you've been entrusted to lead a team! But wait... what does that mean? You didn't go to school for this. You may not have even been told what your job exactly is. Some call this new responsibility the "Stone of Triumph".

In this talk, we'll explain leading and managing (and how they're different), outline what success looks like, and show techniques to get there. You'll learn how to build the skills and tools to carry the "Stone of Triumph" with less pain, and set yourself up for a long and happy career leading creative and technical teams.

RubyConf 2018

00:00:15.619 Hi everyone, welcome to the lead Rubeus track! I hate puns—I hate them so much! But Arne makes me do these things. First, I'd like to set some expectations for this talk.
00:00:32.099 It's called 'The New Manager's Toolkit,' and in your mind, you might have a picture of what a toolkit should look like. If you walk into my garage, will you see a well-organized, labeled, and predictable arrangement of tools? No, you will not.
00:00:44.940 I have a collection of stuff that I've accumulated through several times of need—a toolbox from my mother-in-law from a Christmas sixteen years ago filled with a bunch of items that I've collected through, let's say, 500 trips to Home Depot. Even with this modest setup, though, I've been able to handle most of my household needs with these basic tools.
00:01:02.219 So today, I'd like to drag you through an abbreviated journey through 500 extremely painful trips to Home Depot to assemble a list of about 20 tools you can use to solve most management problems that you're likely to encounter.
00:01:16.110 My name is Brandon Hays, and I lead and manage technical teams in Austin, Texas, for a company called Affinity. First, I'd like to dispel any illusion that I'm about to hand you detailed diagrams for an orderly, mess-free plan for your career leading teams and engineers.
00:01:30.270 I'd rather just tell the story of how one manager accumulated their set of tools. But this isn't my story; I want to tell your story. And I'm going to warn you, our story's going to take us to some dark places.
00:01:48.240 That said, let's start with the happiest moment: your manager calls you into her office and she says, 'You've done great work as a contributor, but you've shown a special amount of promise in leadership and collaboration. You've excelled at the leadership opportunities that you've had so far, and there's an opening on our team for an engineering manager. I think you'd excel at this.'
00:02:05.520 She is reasonably enlightened, and warns you, 'This is not a promotion from being a senior contributor to a junior manager.' It's a pretty amazing compliment, and you think about this opportunity, wondering if you have what it takes to do this job.
00:02:36.180 You don't have any formal training—there's no 'Wil Wheaton School of Engineering Management,' okay? So it's not a promotion; it's going to be more stress and it’s going to take you out of something you’re succeeding at and put you into who-knows-territory.
00:02:54.629 But you like people; you’d learn a lot, and it’s an interesting career track. Plus, your manager wouldn’t have asked if they didn’t think you could handle it. There's one thing pressing on you that’s pushing you in the direction of accepting: you think about the possible bosses they might hire instead of you and begin to think that it’s better than risking the future of your team on some random person you don't even know.
00:03:12.180 And you could at least start with a pretty clear picture of the kind of boss you don’t want to be. You've had some pretty bad bosses in the past, so let’s actually take a quick detour through the hall of bad managers throughout history.
00:03:36.450 The first archetype is the Angry Police Captain. This is the boss that thinks being in charge means being a disciplinarian. 'You’re a loose cannon, McCluskey! I've got the Board of Directors breathing down my neck, and you go and issue a pull request like this! I'll have your commitment for breakfast! Turn in your mechanical keyboard and get out of my sight!'
00:03:55.260 You may or may not have actually been screamed at, but there’s a distorted idea that being a boss means intimidating people into compliance. I had one that literally walked around yelling, 'I don't see hands on keyboards!' The second archetype is the Lumbergh; they solely exist to ensure compliance with company policies and protect their little fiefdom.
00:04:13.560 They produce little obvious value and hide that they reflexively steal credit for other people’s ideas. They act calm but are deeply insecure, making them particularly dangerous. The third bad boss is the Hovering Art Director. This is the boss who knows, or thinks they know, the intricate details of your job and can’t help but micromanage every keystroke to ensure it’s done how they would do it.
00:04:31.650 It only just now occurs to me that I should have made this entire talk a classification system for bad bosses, but we’ve got to move on to the granddaddy of them all, Bad Boss Alpha: the patron saint of bad bosses is definitely Frederick Taylor.
00:04:51.050 To summarize, Frederick Taylor worked his way up through the ranks in the late 1800s, then quit to become a management consultant. His first big client was Bethlehem Steel, where he pioneered scientific management, focusing on using science to improve productivity and reduce waste.
00:05:07.500 His basic theory was that rigorously optimizing each task would maximize the output of each employee, and therefore, maximize the success of the company as a whole. While this sounds like a solid strategy, the problem is that it requires a command-and-control management style designed to turn people into replaceable cogs.
00:05:21.080 This creates mistrust within the team and between employees and managers, leading to sabotage, allegations, and the modern archetypes of bad bosses that we talked about a minute ago. When you see problems in management, it's usually fair to say that it's a trust issue.
00:05:40.770 Taylorism resolves trust issues through strict measures and systems of command and control, which is certainly one way to go about it. To give you a sense of how Frederick Taylor felt about trusting employees, here’s a direct quote: 'One of the very first requirements for a man who’s fit to handle pig-iron as a regular occupation is that he should be so stupid and so uneducated that he resembles, in his mental makeup, the Ox.'
00:06:05.730 He must be so uninformed that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him, and consequently, he must be trained by someone more intelligent than himself to work in accordance with the laws of this scientific approach. And that’s the father of modern management, everybody! Dude sounds like a tough hang!
00:06:23.760 So basically, this kind of disrespect for workers is responsible for the prevailing management theory of the 20th century—cool, cool, cool! So foremost, you know that’s not going to be you. You understand the concept of servant leadership, and you throw your world's best boss mug in the trash!
00:06:38.130 In fact, you're not too thrilled with the idea of being a boss at all, so let's just throw that term in the trash with the mug. You accept this new responsibility, knowing you could be a better boss than the ones you've had before. Bright-eyed and full of optimism, you show up for your first day in your new role, looking around for the manual on how to do management.
00:06:56.700 That's weird—it should be on the desk somewhere! You check Emacs help and your man pages, but there’s no man manager. That’s when you realize you’re kind of on your own. So you start doing things that feel right and begin by having conversations.
00:07:20.550 You talk to everyone you manage to pull out context, find out where the pain points are, and these conversations are actually pretty fun! It's nice to get this additional context that you never had time for as a contributor. They even have specific feedback and requests for things they’d like you to do as a manager.
00:07:44.550 So first, you find out the old manager used to do one-on-ones, half an hour a week seems to be the going rate. So you arrange schedules to put those on your calendar and start talking with your team. Congratulations! You've just acquired the first tool in your new very own manager's toolbox.
00:08:01.350 You even found a great template for your first one-on-one! You follow it, take notes, and have pretty productive conversations. It’s a good start, but you're starting to understand what people mean when they talk about a maker's schedule versus a manager's schedule.
00:08:26.420 You’re meeting folks, uncovering issues for you to solve, and with all this, your calendar is starting to fill up. That's weird; I didn't put this in here. Forget you saw that! So you don’t worry too much about the lack of clarity. You turn your notes from the one-on-one feedback into tasks and put them in your trusty note-taking tool of choice, turning it into a rudimentary to-do list.
00:08:51.580 You have this nagging sense it’s like 90% of the stuff on this list is wrong, irrelevant, or never going to happen, but you gotta start somewhere, right? That's not the best feeling in the world. But there's one that's nagging at you worse: you feel completely lost as to what to do next.
00:09:20.760 But then you realize management is a multi-thousand-year-old discipline, and it’s probably a thing that exists somewhere. You ask around, and a friend recommends 'The Manager’s Path' by Camille Fournier. It gives you a pretty good perspective on the expectations of the job.
00:09:37.800 This realization comes just in time because now you have your first real challenge. You have some people coming in soon to interview, and you’re put in charge of revamping the interview process, which has just been whiteboard gymnastics and gut feelings.
00:09:54.240 It's time to make your first mark as a manager by creating a new interview process and interviewing some candidates. There isn’t currently a clear or well-documented process for interviewing, so you use your newfound research abilities and find some solid resources on up-to-date hiring practices.
00:10:14.480 You find info about using exercises, culture questions, and other ways to avoid the stereotypical nonsense about reversing binary trees. You compile all this into an interview process that you're pretty happy with and share it with the team before scheduling a series of interviews.
00:10:36.930 You spend a bunch of time creating resources for the interviews: mock problems, good questions, and a rough outline. Time to send in the team! The interview starts, and you get to see your carefully designed plan in action.
00:10:57.480 Here we go! Except, wait—why is one of these engineers having the candidate reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard? Damn it! There wasn’t anything in these blog posts about wrangling the team around the interview and getting everybody on the same page, and as a result, there's contention in the post-interview decision.
00:11:30.369 The team doesn't feel comfortable with you making an offer, even though you thought the candidate would be a great fit. Do you fight this entire team? You decide to take the L and ride the lesson that real life is a lot messier than you can capture in a Medium think piece. You have to sit there and absorb the fact that a potentially great candidate sank like a rock due to an interview that you lost control of.
00:11:52.689 It takes a lot out of you; you don't even want to go to work the next day. You lay there and struggle, but after a tough night, you decide to get back in there—you're a smiley guy!
00:12:20.100 Give smiley guy a hand, everybody!
00:12:25.679 So, after shaking that off and taking the day to improve the process for next time, you get back into your routine and realize you have another problem: your team has no sense of progress about how they're advancing in their careers.
00:12:42.389 You know your company cares about the engineering track, and you’re not sure why nobody has done anything about this so far. So you ask your manager if you can help create an engineering ladder for your organization, and she gives you a work in progress that she started. 'Knock yourself out,' she says.
00:13:10.800 You do some research and find a smattering of resources online to help build an engineering ladder, but there is not a lot of consistency among them. You synthesize what you can find and start compiling it all into something that makes sense for your team. After some time, you complete the work on a basic ladder.
00:13:43.569 It takes a little time, but you step back, look at it, and feel proud of it—rightly so! You start sharing it with the team, and they like the ideas it represents, feeling reassured that there are concrete areas they can improve to grow in their roles as engineers.
00:14:07.110 After taking a beating on the interview process, it’s good to have a win. Your manager notices your work on this, and after a couple of weeks, points out the great work you did. 'Hold on! Did that just happen? I think you might be getting the hang of this!'
00:14:37.470 Now that you're rolling out this accountability framework, however, one of the senior engineers you’ve been talking to isn’t meeting their marks on this engineering ladder, and you start to realize there’s a nasty side effect of accountability: you actually have to hold people accountable.
00:15:03.900 Are these people missing the mark, or is the ladder broken? You decide to investigate. On investigation, you find this engineer is exhibiting some pretty nasty behavior—intimidating others, making snide comments in meetings, and generally not doing the parts of senior-level work that involve helping their team.
00:15:36.570 Now you have a real problem on your hands. You've heard things about this person, but now you have a framework to hold them accountable. You're aiming to be a nice manager, but if somebody’s acting like a jerk on your team, it’s nice to know you now have the power to do something about it.
00:15:57.900 So you go talk to HR and tell them, 'I'm going to get rid of this person,’ and they tell you this company has made a significant investment in hiring and training this employee, and your job is to protect that investment. That didn’t go as planned.
00:16:27.240 On reflection, you realize the HR person wasn’t just covering their bases; this is a serious and weighty decision that you can’t take lightly. Your job is to help clarify and defend the values that make the team work well together, and when you understand those, you do know this person is harming the team.
00:16:49.200 So you talk to your manager, and you decide to put in the effort to help this person turn it around. That means putting together at least the basic components of a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). This will require techniques and tools you've never had to exercise before.
00:17:20.750 You look for books on the subject and realize the process starts by gathering enough data to understand the behaviors in this person that need correcting and assessing the impact those behaviors have had on the team. Then, it’s time for some hard conversations.
00:17:45.680 The best manual for hard conversations I've ever seen is 'Radical Candor' by Kim Scott. If you haven’t already read it, please do so—it's in my top five books that I believe should be mandatory for all new managers.
00:18:05.040 So, you've got your homework. You've read 'Crucial Confrontations' and 'Radical Candor' and see clearly what this person needs to do differently to move from a place where they’re harming the team to where they’re actually benefiting the team.
00:18:35.100 You pull this person aside to give them this tough feedback, and they’re surprised and want to fight you in this process rather than engage. But you chew that glass, follow the principles you learned, and they seem to understand how their behavior has hurt the team. They want to change.
00:18:54.750 For a lot of people, a PIP is a paper trail for being fired, but you actually want to invest in this person's success and turn them around. That's good; otherwise, it’s just a paper trail and nothing will work.
00:19:12.300 You lay out expectations with total clarity and meet with them weekly, following up week after week. You keep clarifying and trying to coach this person, but they just keep falling into the same behavioral traps over and over again, missing expectations—a verbal slip up here, a casual dismissal there—and their work performance actually seems to be declining.
00:19:49.080 They seem to resent being held to this new standard and have threatened to quit several times. So you go talk to your manager and HR again, and they all agree it’s time. You really wanted to turn it around, and you did your best to make it happen, but it doesn't always work.
00:20:19.600 So you meet with your manager, the HR person, and this individual, and lay out the situation; it’s not going well. You sit in a meeting and your boss explains to this person that their time with you is up and it's time for them to explore other opportunities.
00:20:55.040 Well, this wasn’t what you had in mind when your boss told you they thought you had leadership potential. This whole process has been stressful and exhausting; you feel wrung out and really want to cry. But you’re the jerk who just fired somebody.
00:21:24.200 You should probably keep your complaints to yourself. My friend Lee made this for me when I said I needed a drawing for my talk, and it cheers me up when I'm down. Right now, you're feeling pretty down.
00:21:43.320 Wow! What a transition from your first day thinking you’d be a cool manager! You don't want to be a boss, but whether you want it or not, you're the boss now, and everybody knows it. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe it’s not too late to fish that mug out of the trash.
00:22:05.120 You survived that process, but it hardly feels like a win. In fact, now that you’re in the day-to-day of managing, you can’t quite remember the last time you had a concrete win. You used to give this daily jolt of progress; now, there are no pull requests, no contribution graph, no milestones—just a gap between where the team is and where you feel they should be.
00:22:30.280 The work of closing that gap involves less of a sense of progress; there’s more of a sense of accumulating responsibilities. The number of people who need you in meetings, or just to have a manager present, seems to be growing faster than you can decline the meeting invites.
00:22:51.240 Now you're lucky to survive the barrage of meetings, ad-hoc discussions, and Slack messages. It’s very difficult to draw boundaries here because it’s hard to know which parts are definitely your job and which parts you can hand off to someone else or just drop.
00:23:12.780 I’m not going to pretend like that’s not my calendar! My friend Nick says a lot of smart stuff, and this is one of those things: we love leadership because it’s so squishy and hard to figure out.
00:23:27.920 The problem is, from company to company, the specific responsibilities of a manager vary widely. But you can count on a few core responsibilities. One of the things you’ve learned is that a big part of being a manager is to be available. If you look busy or talk through someone's one-on-ones, you're telling them they need to get support elsewhere.
00:23:42.680 So, you set up some office hours where you're just open and available. You learn about and start practicing active listening techniques. You even clear the day of meetings to set foreheads down to work so you can start improving processes.
00:24:04.470 Listening involves taking action on the feedback you talk about with the folks you manage. You transition from that ad hoc to-do list to moving your tasks into a more organized management tool like Trello. After getting a little overwhelmed at first, you're even starting to handle your Trello board.
00:24:25.040 Your tasks were stacking up really fast, but you're starting to let some things go, knowing you can't do everything. Now, with all of this happening, you're feeling like you're starting to get a handle on your work, just barely. But that’s a first!
00:24:47.580 For all your attempts to get control, you always have one chaos monkey in your system, and that’s interpersonal conflict. Sure enough, one of your employees comes to you to complain about an interaction with a product manager, where they didn’t give clear enough requirements, which doomed the feature to late-stage rework.
00:25:09.680 Now they're trying to figure out if they have to work extra hours to make up for somebody else's mistake. Now you have a choice to make: what do you do? Commiserate? Turn to Slide 68 to talk to the PM? Turn to Slide 71 to tell the person how to respond? Turn to Slide 132? Which one? Any suggestions?
00:25:33.150 Nobody’s got any suggestions? All right, just kidding; it was a trap. There was no way to win. Each option lures you into the swirling vortex of drama, involving yourself in the swirling vortex always increases it. Do not taunt the swirling vortex of drama!
00:25:53.850 Now you're stuck in this thing, and the worst part is, you have no idea how it happened, so you don’t know how to fix it. Is the situation terminal? Is the team just too dysfunctional for this? Is there any way to figure out what happened?
00:26:09.780 Your job now is to neutralize the swirling vortex of drama by finding the source issue and addressing it. Something didn’t happen in this case, so let’s dig in to find out what did happen: the vortex started when person one on your team had a trust break with person two on the product team.
00:26:26.690 Your instinct was to jump in and talk to person two, who became defensive, since a manager was going to them directly. They asked you to talk to their manager, and now manager two feels protective of person two and pushes back on their behalf.
00:26:46.740 They point out that the person on your team has been pushing person two's buttons for a while, but they've been letting it slide. Now you have three problems: the problem person one has with person two, the problem person two has with person one, and the problem manager two has with person one.
00:27:05.240 And now, too late, you’ve fallen for the trap, becoming the detour to route around the trust issue, and you've made the problem exponentially worse by creating an upward draft in the power dynamics involved. Not to mention, when team members go out for lunch or beers as separate teams, they wind each other up about the other team.
00:27:26.300 Now your team is frustrated, your other manager is mad, and you have a lesson to learn. You owe some apologies here; that was your one shot at solving this problem for the rest of your career! Oh, just kidding, this happens all the time!
00:27:48.500 So you let yourself feel bad for a minute, but you soon get another opportunity to do it again. Soon after, you decide to know how to neutralize the vortex. When you have trust, these problems become self-repairing, so you focus on finding the root cause for that broken bridge of trust.
00:28:06.040 This time, you choose to help rebuild the bridge by teaching your team to find common ground and build trust using skills learned in 'Crucial Conversations.' You get person one and person two together to find out where the broken trust lies, help them understand their common goal, and make a plan to work together toward it.
00:28:28.430 You teach the person you manage how to build trust by handing the other person that vital token: the benefit of the doubt. Well, that was a hundred times easier! Plus, your employee has learned important skills around conflict resolution. They're on the same team with the other person, so they’re more likely to manage future trust issues themselves.
00:28:52.740 This was a success story, thanks in part to leaning on frameworks for problem-solving. By now, you’ve learned to look for existing frameworks for the problems you run into, but when one doesn’t exist, you take a moment to write up some documentation on how you might address that same problem in the future in a journal or a wiki.
00:29:12.750 Then, you share that with your management team. That way, you don’t solve and resolve the same problems over and over again; you get to leave behind a framework to improve upon for next time.
00:29:32.510 You fix the problem and leave the framework. So in fact, you seem to be on a roll lately: having tough conversations when necessary, pushing back on your team to build bridges of trust, sharing your problem-solving frameworks, and clearing tasks off of your Trello board.
00:29:55.470 Now, for all you know, this job is everything; you still don’t really have a clear picture of what a manager's job is. With everything you've learned in the past few months, you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg, and that icebergs are just stalking you, plotting to sneak up on you.
00:30:16.670 Even though things are going pretty well, you have a tuned cultural sense and a fair amount of experience in software, and you’re starting to see patterns in people’s behavior: the cynical bite to their comments about a lack of direction, the disengaged thousand-yard stare in meetings.
00:30:36.310 You start to empathize with these feelings. There’s definitely something culturally not right. You even begin to understand what that person you had to fire earlier was sniping about, and no matter how many meetings you call to resolve problems, those trust issues keep coming up, getting slightly worse.
00:30:57.860 It’s like a creek in your floorboard; it seems to get louder every time you step on it. Teach kids early: when something doesn't feel right, it's supposed to be good! You notice all your tactical wins just feel like you’re pulling at the weeds, but not getting the roots. They keep coming back tougher each time.
00:31:28.479 At some point, you realize what’s going on here: your team’s problems speak to a fragmented culture, and they need help. You're not a quitter, and it’s not really in you to say that’s not your job, so you decide to strike right at the root of the issue.
00:31:54.400 Your team needs cultural change centered around a shared purpose, so you sit with each person to find their frustrations and document them while analyzing strengths and weaknesses for the team and setting up goals to shore up those weaknesses.
00:32:21.030 But how do you know if things are actually improving? How do you measure something as squishy as culture change? A manager tells you about objectives and key results (OKRs), and you dive in to help define some of those for your team.
00:32:36.400 Now it starts to feel like you’re actually making traction on stuff that matters, except, wait a minute, it feels like an important boundary has just been crossed. You were doing pretty normal manager’s stuff a minute ago, and suddenly, you’re trying to shift the culture of your entire team.
00:32:56.720 You took on this opportunity to learn how to manage people, not perform cultural foundation repair. You begin realizing you've now collected the problems of the entire team alongside your personal workload, and your brain screams at you, 'This is too much work!'
00:33:19.125 You go home wrung out every single day, and you’ve hunted down every scrap and resource available, making up enough of them to realize most of what you’re finding are just other people like you making stuff up and leaving signposts along the way. Your brain screams at you, 'Oh my god, there’s no track to get better at this!'
00:33:40.320 You’re already learning as fast as you can, but these challenges keep appearing faster than your fastest pace of learning. Then, in a one-on-one, you get some tough feedback that’s hard to hear. 'You don’t make me feel heard—I don’t feel like you’re a very good listener!'
00:34:00.530 And it’s not just your fedora that’s not helping—maybe leave that at home next time! Your team is trying to tell you that they don’t feel listened to, that the changes they want aren’t happening fast enough and are even headed in the wrong direction.
00:34:23.280 You took this job because you were great with people, and now everyone seems to be upset with you at once. Your brain is screaming, 'I was supposed to be good at this!' and you feel like your manager may have been mistaken in what she saw in you. In fact, she hasn’t said it, but you sense she partially holds you responsible for the palpable decline in morale since you started trying to change things for the better.
00:34:42.460 At this point, the temptation to quit or ask for a return to day-to-day coding is pretty high because a nice merge conflict or fighting a bug deep in your framework suddenly sounds pretty nice in comparison to this.
00:35:05.090 But you don’t think of yourself as a quitter when things get tough; you grit your teeth and push forward. Why, though, does it feel like this whole thing is conspiring to make you feel bad? You decide that you just need a plan.
00:35:27.970 So you pause, dig deep, cancel a couple of meetings, and conduct a little mini-retrospective on your current situation. You use the start-stop-continue method to make a plan to move forward.
00:35:46.080 Hey, you got knocked down again, but you toughed it out and survived the worst of it. With your plan in hand, you gaze at the horizon, grim determination on your face. It’s not the most satisfying place to be, but hey, it’s better than having given up!
00:36:05.760 Somebody, please tell me it’s better than giving up!
00:36:22.199 You start putting this cultural change plan into action, and amazingly, the plan is actually working! The team is starting to find their footing culturally. You manage to move things forward in a meaningful way against all odds, overcoming them through grit and sheer determination.
00:36:40.670 That said, folks are starting to notice your good work, and some outward signs of success are appearing. But that success comes at a cost, and internally, you’re starting to feel a little burned.
00:37:00.529 The only way you can relax is by playing video games, getting drunk, or watching YouTube, or watching YouTubers get drunk while playing video games. In fact, you’ve combined all these in every conceivable way just to try to get enough sleep to wake up and do this all again the next day.
00:37:22.090 But the end result of all this escapism is like putting a Band-Aid on a sunburn; it relieves the pain for a moment, but you keep going out into the Sun every day.
00:37:43.220 Determination carried you through the job crisis, but you still have to face yourself. Distractions aren’t cutting it anymore. Sunday nights, you're sick to your stomach about the upcoming week. The only thing pulling you in is the fact that you're desperately needed; everyone's depending on you.
00:38:02.290 You’re not saying nice things about yourself at this point. You run over all the things you've got to do for work before you sleep, if you sleep at all. You haven’t reached out to that candidate because you still haven’t talked to the team about that interview that didn’t go well.
00:38:21.210 Because you haven’t designed a better interview process, because your team told you they hate interviewing. You still haven’t planned the next team off-site because you can’t find something the entire team will want to do together, and half the team thinks off-sites are stupid anyway.
00:38:39.099 The list of stuff you’re supposed to do is getting much taller than you can see over, and on Monday mornings, you sit in your car staring at the building, or you sit in your bathrobe staring at your computer before you open it up.
00:38:57.040 You’re in your office and have no idea why you’re there. You hope your co-workers don't notice, but you think they do. You’re ready to crack. You know you’re not doing enough, but wait a minute—you are doing all you can.
00:39:12.340 So that means you must not be enough. Your best is not good enough because you are not enough. How do you fix yourself and somehow be more than you are? You’ve already tried to pretend, and that just makes things worse.
00:39:32.860 If you could just hold on a little longer, you could! Alright, these aren’t funny anymore—this is actually upsetting! What is going on? Okay, I think I’ve seen this—I know what this is!
00:39:51.540 This whole time, it’s been you! This is total internal shutdown! You’ve been ignoring this, and it is not good. You finally hit the breaking point; you can't even seem to get out of the house to go to work.
00:40:12.650 You were so busy focusing on making outcomes and taking care of others with your grit and heroics that you neglected to even check in with yourself. You can’t function normally; you’re not sleeping, always distracted, and your physical health is suffering.
00:40:29.180 You’ve been trying to warn you this entire time, but you haven’t been listening, and now you’re in agony. You talk to your friends and loved ones, and they tell you, 'If your job is making you this miserable, just quit!' But remember choosing this, wanting this, thinking you could do it, believing you should do it.
00:40:49.610 What were your reasons? Helping the team? Learning? Trying an interesting career track? Can you even fix this, or is it too late? But if you did quit, what should you give up? Go back to contributing, or find a different job somewhere else as a manager?
00:41:15.340 But you know you’re not a quitter, so why can’t you seem to turn this around? Are you just not meant for this? You can’t see through the fog anymore. You don’t know why, but a friend told you about a video and a book by Brené Brown about vulnerability.
00:41:39.370 You decide to check it out and realize that a big missing piece for you is having the courage to admit you can’t do all these things perfectly all the time.
00:41:58.520 So you make a decision: something that hadn’t occurred to you in all of this was to ask your manager for help. Maybe it’s because you wanted her to feel good about trusting you with this role and didn’t want to let her down, but you’re about to quit anyway, so what do you have to lose?
00:42:25.100 You talk to your boss, and while you didn’t mean to be the person that sits and cries in your manager’s office, here you are. She tells you to take a few days off and just relax a little bit—it's okay to step away! And while you’re away, the knot inside you starts to unravel a little bit.
00:42:44.990 You can think a little more clearly. In that time, you realize you’ve always been afraid to admit that you were underwater to your co-workers or to ask for any kind of help because of this image you’ve had in mind of the perfect manager who can do anything.
00:43:22.780 But when you get back, you talk to your manager to go through your responsibilities and see what you can drop. You work with your peers and team to try to get some stuff off your plate so you can focus on what really matters.
00:43:40.020 You open up some time, using one of the older delegation frameworks from 'The Seven Habits,' which works well enough. In looking for resources about leadership, you find the 'Reboot Podcast.' It's about being your true authentic self and leading from the heart.
00:44:06.150 You start to realize it’s okay to be a flawed person with limits and still lead others. Your friends have been telling you for months to see a therapist, but it seemed so weird or scary for some reason.
00:44:22.280 It’s a pain in the ass, and you didn’t want to be one of those therapy people, but it seems a little less threatening now. You’re open to it, so it takes a couple of tries to find the right person for you, which is frustrating, but you do click with one of them.
00:44:38.640 Abdi Grimm gave a talk a few days ago at Keep Ruby Weird that resonated with me. He brought up the point that programmers are obsessed with this idea of being brains in jars, completely focusing on our minds at the expense of our bodies.
00:44:58.330 But our bodies have so much to tell us. They are the part of us that always lives in the moment: when they’re tired, they’re tired; when they’re hungry, they’re hungry; they’re not fixated on some future state the way our brains are.
00:45:16.370 Your therapist knows this and starts working with you, beginning with some simple breathing exercises. This is an animation a guy named Nathan Pyle made to help, so try it: inhale and exhale.
00:45:45.670 You’re not going anywhere, so you have to play along. If it feels awkward, that's okay! Just focus on the sensation: inhale, feel your ribcage expand in all directions, and as you exhale, let your shoulders relax just a little bit.
00:46:07.840 If you’re into the rhythm, you can let your eyes close. Inhale, exhale. One more time: inhale, exhale.
00:46:29.520 Okay, that was one minute. Imagine doing that just a couple of minutes a day, a couple of times a day! It’s not about tracking or your quantified self; it’s about listening to what your body wants.
00:46:53.500 Is it sleepy? Is it thirsty? Is it warm right now in this room? How does the air feel on your skin? What’s something you could do to show your body some love in these moments?
00:47:12.230 You start finding yourself more able to cope. You begin to wonder, what if your mind and body were in harmony? You start taking small steps towards moving around, working out, even meditating.
00:47:33.170 You’re starting to be able to see over this mountain of challenges. They haven’t changed, but you now find yourself a little more able to cope. You’re making time to teach your team to self-manage, creating tools, and removing roadblocks, in an upward spiral that makes you less desperately needed, but more effective.
00:48:06.020 A lot of what we think a manager should be is defined in opposition to Taylorism or our bad bosses from the past, but it isn’t a moral imperative to be a certain kind of manager, nor is it expected that you’re magically able to solve all the problems for everyone all the time.
00:48:31.480 It is your job to be available, listen to your team, coach, and support your folks, and tell the story of why their work matters—both to them and the business. Naturally, there’s more to the job than this, but if you're doing these things, you're probably on the right track.
00:48:53.140 You had no idea that so much of this was going to be about working on yourself! It's important work for anyone, but it's especially important for those who decide to take responsibility for others.
00:49:17.900 Yes, it’s a privilege to be able to do this—to hire a therapist and to take time off. So use that privilege to make some space to help others, and in fact, that is the moral imperative of this job.
00:49:42.820 Bad management is poisoning our industry; it’s lowering the quality of life for everyone, muddying the definition of what managers are for, and worse, it's driving out the voices we need most in this community by reinforcing existing biases instead of examining them and breaking them down.
00:50:07.780 That sounds like a lot, but it’s not your job to fix this industry. It’s your job to be part of the solution, which is way less stressful. This wasn’t my story—it was yours. If you manage people, I hope this didn’t bring up old wounds too badly.
00:50:32.520 If it hasn't, I hope it doesn't scare you off. This industry needs managers like you, just as you are—imperfect, uncertain, struggling, failing, and learning!
00:50:54.890 My manager story actually started when Mike Moore took me to lunch one day and told me he was done running the Utah Valley Meetup and asked if I would take over organizing. I’d never really thought of myself as somebody who could do community stuff like that, but the fact that he saw that in me made me realize things about myself that I didn’t know.
00:51:22.920 A lot of you might know jovial Mike; by the way, but I actually knew him as disappointed pull request Mike.
00:51:40.410 That's the last and most important tool in the toolbox: gratitude. I suggest you write down notes of gratitude. You can keep them to yourself or share them with others, but taking that moment will help recenter you in ways that not much else can.
00:52:05.920 The process has been painful, but it’s stripped away some protections that were keeping you from being your authentic self. The true, vulnerable, authentic self that you are is enough to do this job; you are enough just as you are.
00:52:28.200 The miracle of life is that whatever state you’re currently in, you get to take another swing at it. With this knowledge, we need you! Take care of yourself! Take care of your fellow human beings and leave this industry a little better than you found it.
00:52:47.100 Thanks to you for listening and thanks to Affinity for flying me out to join you all.
Brandon Hays
@tehviking
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