At a high level this breaks down into helping individuals achieve success, helping teams work together to deliver projects, and coordinating with other groups so that the projects have value to the organization. Having managed and coached managers in the engineering space I am going to break down each one of these core priorities into the activities that I have witnessed to be successful.

People Management

Managers must create an environment where people can do their best work. This core priority is what differentiates a people manager from a project manager. For people to do their best work, there are several pillars of support that need to be in place and are the responsibility of their direct manager to provide.

Coaching and Development Managers need to identify and facilitate learning opportunities. Even if the manager has delegated the coaching to someone else, the employee needs to know that a representative of the company sees their growth and steers it in alignment with company value so that personal growth has the potential to translate into professional growth.

Performance Management All employees partner with a manager to ensure that hard work is recognized and rewarded. Even if an employee never brings this up, or if the manager is disconnected from the project that the employee is working on, they still have a need to have their hard work seen and seen by someone who can translate it into financial or positional reward.

Company Strategy Communication Managers must seek to understand company strategy and communicate it to the team with relevant team context. Teams need to connect their work to the strategy and vision of the organization. It is vital that a manager communicates the strategy and its updates to the team with clarity and regularity to fulfil the core need of individuals to be connected to purpose.

Solicits feedback Employees need to know that their opinions matter and have an effect on the organization. This need is met when their manager listens to their feedback and reliability acts on it.

Nurture Belonging The best work is done when individuals have a shared space to be human, where it is recognized that everyone has something to teach, and each of their opinions matter. In order to cultivate this environment managers needs to be inclusive facilitators of conversation and need to model vulnerability in order to cultivate a culture of belonging.

Crisis Management Managers need to provide clarity, transparency, and next steps for any employee level crisis. No matter the company, and no matter the department, crises are normal events. For employees to find resolution the manager needs to provide them with clarity on what is going on and what the company at large is doing about it. The employees need to have visibility to mitigations. And most importantly, the employee needs a productive avenue for their next steps or follow-up. There is too much to say about effective crisis management to fit into a single paragraph and will need to be covered by its own post, but those pillars of clarity, transparency, and next steps are critical for managing a team during a crisis.

Recruitment and onboarding How an employee starts a job has a huge impact to their success later on. In the recruitment process managers need to set the correct expectations about the role so that employees can prepare and orient themselves for success. Next during the onboarding process managers need to connect the new employee to the people, processes and tools required for them to be successful. If the onboarding process is skipped or deprioritized then employees are left disconnected from the organization, and unsure how to provide value. A deprioritized onboarding can cost months to a year in productivity losses for the employee, and results in team churn that slows down the whole department. One of the most impactful things that a manager can do to contribute to the success of the team is to onboard with intention and care.

Team Organization

Teams need someone to define the interfaces and cadence of work so that they can deliver together. Often the responsibility of team organization falls to a project manager, however the accountability for team organization never leaves the manager. There are many methods and tools for team organization and project management including agile, scrum, lean, Kanban, waterfall and others. The methodology chosen to execute work is flexible however there are several high-level signals key results that are methodology independent that that the manager should be responsible for:

Organizational Maturity The manager is responsible for evaluating process maturity of the team and identifying systematic improvements. Additionally, it is the manager's responsibility to make that maturity known to the rest of the organization, so that expectations are met when sizings, estimates, and projects are delivered. For example, a team that has only delivered proof of concepts in their past should not be expected to deliver a generally available solution without intention guidance. It is up to the manager to know the level of organizational maturity and communicate that properly to the external teams.

Individual Autonomy Staff member autonomy is harder to achieve than just proclaiming that individuals are empowered to make their own decisions. True autonomy requires an environment of clearly identified expectations and feedback which empowers staff members to choose the “what” and “how” of their work within this framework.

Forecasting Managers need to provide accurate forecasts of future work utilizing stable team velocity and known comparisons. Forecasting accuracy increases with organizational maturity, not just time. For example, a team that has gelled and has a history of delivery also needs a repeatable practice of sizing work in order to have all the signals needed to accurately forecast capacity over time.

Reporting The manager must effectively give visibility to the team’s work utilizing recognizable artifacts and clearly communicated milestones to the broader organization. Often the project management methodology will create artifacts and regular ceremonies to make visibility available to others if they know where and when to look. This is not enough, and it is incumbent on the manager to create a push interface such as emailed reports, or executive briefings for this work visibility to truly occur. Said differently: the task of making work visible ends when stakeholders see and understand the progress, not simply when the data is available.

Organizational Impact

This is the final piece of the management picture. Projects which are successfully completed by your team need to be well coordinated with the organization to have a high impact within the company. Whether this is lifecycle management of software or matrixed support agreements the measurable actions for organizational impact will look different for each group. Each manager needs to identify their major indicator for how their team's cross functional impact can be measured. That stated, there are a couple minor activities in this area that are universal regardless of role.

Building peer networks One of the main things that teams rely on their managers to do is to form trustful peer relationships necessary for effective collaboration. Humans naturally organize tribally, and utilizing those tribal instincts is how we form strong communication and trustful relationships with our coworkers. However, the downside of this optimization in the business context is often referred to as silos and is resisted at all costs. Productive silo busting is done not by making every member of one team interact with every member of another team but by providing communication bridges so that members of one department have a trustful communication path to anyone in another department.

Delegation Hand in hand with building peer relationships is delegating consistently and effectively across departments. Invariability as work transitions across organizational boundaries, it will get dropped if intentional delegation is not in place. Intentional delegation is the process of managing handoffs by going beyond organizational boundaries to ensure that communication is received in the same way it was intended.

Although this is just a high-level summary, these core priorities and associated actions should provide the foundation for a high performing people manager. In a following post I’ll break down how to turn this list into OKRs that can be used to assess point in time effectiveness of managers, and their development maturity,

Safeguarding the culture is done through example. As an executive people follow your lead more than your words. If you say no work is expected from the team over the weekend but continue to send the team emails over the weekend, your words will be forgotten in leu of your actions.

Communicating the vision is the most critical and most boring of all roles. It requires a vision for the future to be made digestible, and memorable, then it requires that you repeat it, over and over and OVER. Each member of the team needs to internalize it, which is to interact with it in their head. They need to hear it in different contexts (in meetings, in emails, in 1:1s, and in customer calls). If they are not in the right mindset to hear it the first time, then they need an opportunity to hear it again. Embrace being bored with saying the vision. Embrace that your direct reports feel bored hearing you say it. The possibility that one person on your team doesn't know the vision is too great a cost to pay for your staff's boredom avoidance.

Bringing the money is the sales role, whether internally or externally it is the justifying the value or your group in the context of an achievable future gain. Bringing the money is part of the role of the executive, but an important corollary is that it is not part of the job of your team. Your team needs the ability to focus on delivery without the burden of stress over their liquidity. Instead, once financing has been achieved set a budget and communicate through the budget. For example, rather than saying: “if you spend that much we will be broke.” instead say: “the budget for this quarter is only X.” Putting the stress of the finality of funds on your team only slows them down, without helping you deliver.

There are all manner of other actions which are done in a leadership context that is not role of the executive. Things such as: product delivery, performance management, backlog prioritization, and others. This is not because executives are too important for such trivial tasks; it is because the weight of their title creates unintended messages which can be more damaging than helpful. For example, a CEO making a small change to a single team’s backlog will be interpreted by the organization as the new most important priority for the company when in fact the change may have been small and project specific. The same goes for performance management; a message that would have been timely and appropriate from your direct manager can feel devastating and demoralizing coming from an executive. The role of executives is critical, and it is limited. If done successfully, you will not wear all the hats in the company. Partner with your senior managers and set them up for success. Let them execute in their lane while you execute in yours.

• Honesty: will someone chose to follow through on commitments • Competence: does someone have the skills and bandwidth to follow through on commitments • Communication: does someone truly understand the commitment that they have made?

Trustful relationships professionally are a biproduct of making commitments and keeping them. If relationships are long enough there is the time to build a track record of delivered commitments, however this represents only a tiny fraction of our relationships. For the rest we model our trust based on our interpretation of the three components above.

Honesty

Does someone act with honesty? Are their words and actions consistent regardless of environment? Do they smile when they are upset? The word integrity means to have consistency in your actions and words. If inconsistency is present in others, then you will choose to trust them less when they commit to something even if they have no previous track record as the basis for that lack of trust. It is important to be self-aware, but never underestimate the value of being genuinely vulnerable with others.

Competence

Does someone over commit? Do they lack the skills needed to complete a task? No matter how honest my barista might be, I will not trust them to perform surgery without being convinced of their surgical training and competence first. The same goes for over commitment. This trait does not make someone dishonest, but it can make them untrustworthy. It is OK to drop tasks, but the drop must be communicated beforehand. This is such a simple and important rule that is critical to maintaining trustful relationships.

Communication

Communication is the final key to trust. It is not enough to follow through on commitments as you understand them, you must follow through on the commitments as others understand them. To do this, it is critical to overcommunicate expectations ahead of time. Things that help with this are to sketch solutions ahead of time, turn bullet points into examples, and take the time to describe the finished product before you dig in. Communication is hard and the message is the message received. The responsibility falls to the messenger to see that the message lands correctly.