Warren Shea

Warren Shea’s Notes for Managing Humans by Michael Lopp (Book)

Version: 201703 | Status: Complete

Managing Humans

The Management Quiver

Arrow analogy - Every time you learn something, it’s an arrow in your quiver

1. Don’t be a Prick

Definition of a great manager - Someone whom you can make a connection to no matter where on the organizational chart

2. Managers are not Evil

Pride and panic show people’s behaviour in best and worst case scenarios
Pride - things are going well. Panic - when things are not.
There are evil managers - run from them

7 questions if the manager it looking out for his team

1. Where does the manager come from?
2. How is he/she compensating for his blind spots?
   • Where do they go when they need help?
3. Does your manager speak the language?
   • Managementese - speaking like a manager
4. How does your manager talk to you?
   • One-on-Ones
5. How much action per decision?
   • Pure delegators are screwed
6. Where is your manager in the political food chain?
7. What happens when they lose their shit/during panic?
   • e.g. Layoffs

3. The Rands Test (/11)

Do you have one-on-one meetings? (+1)
Do you have team meeting? (+1)
Do you have status reports? (-1)
Can you say no to your boss? (+1)
Can you explain the strategy of the company to a stranger? (+1)
Can you explain the current state of business? (+1)
Does your manager regularly tell you what he/she is thinking? (+1) Are you buying it? (+1)
Can you explain your career trajectory? (+1) Can your boss? (+1)
Do you have time to be strategic? (+1)
Are you actively killing the grapevine (gossip) ? (+1)

Growing rapidly teaches you how communication breaks down

4. How to Run a meeting

Two useful meetings: Alignment and Creation

A meeting has 2 critical components, an Agenda and a Referee

Keeping people engaged:

• Pull Back
• Silence to reset meeting
• Change scenery

5. The Twinge

A twinge is your experience speaking to you in an unexpected and possibly unstructured way.

A twinge is listening to random stories and quickly tease out a flaw in logic or absence of a critical dependency.

When a story doesn’t feel right, you demand specifics. If the story can’t stand up to the first 3 questions, there’s an issue.

Twinges are built with experience.

6. The Update, the Vent, and the Disaster

• Hold one-on-one’s at the same time
• Always do it
• Make it 30 minutes or longer

Your team doesn’t work for you, you work for them.

“How are you?” The first question.

One-on-ones usually fall into the update (all clear), the vent (something’s up), or the disaster (oh dear…).

The Update:
        if the meat of the conversation doesn’t occur in 15min, then
                • 3 prepared topics
                • Mini performance review
                • My current disaster

The Vent:
        Don’t interrupt it.
        Based on emotion.
        The end of the Vent:
                • It’s done - the end of the vent
                • It’s a rant - the vent becomes cyclical - it’s a vent that wants no help.
        Feels like a speech.

The Disaster:
        Feels like an attack.
        Tips to handling the disaster:
                • The person you’re talking to isn’t him/herself
                • Shut up to defuse the moment because…
                • It’s not about the problem, but the emotional baggage
        Is a result of poor management, when the employee believes it’s the only option to make change

7. The Monday Freakout

The more time doing work over the weekend, the more pissed off you are when Monday arrives.
Freakouts happen on Monday.
Tips to handling a freakout:

• Don’t participate: Listen and nod. Repeat.
• Give the freaker the benefit of the doubt.
• Hammer the freaker with questions - bringing their emotional state to a rational one
• Get (coach?) the freaker to solve their own problems.

A freakout is a management failure.

• There is a problem that needs to be solved.
• Someone believes the best way to get your attention is by freaking out.

8. Lost in translation

Beginners shine brightly with enthusiasm until they fall.
The fall is not the lesson
When communications are down, listen hard, repeat everything, assume nothing

9. Agenda Detection

Discern:

• Typical meeting roles and how meeting participants assume them
• Explanation of what these distinct meeting roles want out of a meeting
• How to use this understanding to get the hell out of the meeting as quickly as possible

Identify the meeting: Informational or conflict resolution meetings
Classify Participants: Players (want something out of the meeting) or Pawns are silent
Identify the players. If there are no players, bail.
Identify Pros and Cons: Pros are getting what they want, Cons are pissed off
Figure out the issue: What do the Cons want to solve?
Give the cons what they want

10. Dissecting the Mandate

This is the way it is. No Q&A. No Collaboration.
Mandate Process: Decide, Deliver, Deliver Again
Decide: Make a decision when debate is no longer productive
Deliver: Poor delivery occurs when a topic has to debate again
Deliver (Again) / Damage Control:
        3 outcomes of the meeting:
                • Yay: You motivated them. But you still need to deliver (again)
                • Boo: You’re a tyrant. For those getting screwed, you need to deliver (again)
                • Yawn: Silent majority.

Two types of mandates:

• Local (driven by you, the manager)
• Foreign (driven elsewhere, likely from above)

11. Information Starvation

People create their own information, if they have none
Managers are information conduits
Aggressive Silence - be quiet and people who have something to say at the tip of their tongue, will (say it).

12. Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence

A good manager is a person who is playing to a strategy and isn’t merely stumbling around squashing fires all day.
Subtlety - humility - not exhibiting power and knowledge and starting at a place where you admit you don’t have all the answers.
Subterfuge - a risk - not following orders, but doing something to meet your goals
Silence - assess -

13. Managementese

All talk, no action. Speaking in generalities, not specifics. Don’t know what they’re saying.
Bottom line - when talking to individuals, talk using a familiar language of a friend.

14. Fred Hates the Off-Site

Offsites - understanding who we are, new direction and/or fewer disasters, or embarking on an epic journey
Master of Ceremonies - responsive for moving the day along and knowing when to stop and pivot.
Taker of Notes - capture the bright ideas, and the right ideas
Unless offsite energy is channeled back and immediately acted upon, an offsite represents a frustrating opportunity to dream, but not to act.

15. A different kind of DNA

Flat organizations - a great way to solve the problem of engineer grow (to not grow into management)
No parade for leaders coming in, if equality is required
DNA - Design n Architecture meeting

• Shines light brightly on issue
• Bring respectable firepower
• It has teeth - if you don’t contribute, you won’t be invited back
• DNA has nothing to do with management and everything to do with leadership
• DNA is achievable and aspirational - everyone will agree they belong there; it’s not a club, it’s an honor

16. An Engineering Mindset

Stay flexible - the only stance to adopt when constant change is the only constant
Stop coding - figure out how to get the team to solve this problem without you coding
Smaller teams/developers because we write less code and more time integrating existing code
Advice for maintaining the engineering mindset:

• Be familiar with the team’s tools, build systems, version control, language
• Be able to draw an architectural diagram describing your product at any time
• Make a small feature
• Write unit tests

If you want to be a good manager, you can stop coding daily but… stay flexible, remember what it means to be an engineer and don’t stop developing.

17. Three Superpowers

The Machine has the Debate - the person with the plan starts with data - lots of data
The machine loves data, loves all options - but when the decision is made, it’s over. There’s no changing of the mind. A good debate results in the truth being vetted but also a consensus around the truth except for:

• If the natives are looking for action, the debate can look like stalling
• If the issue is deeply emotional, the debate is nearly insurmountable
• The debate rarely leads you towards innovation or a leap of faith

The debate rarely leads you towards innovation or a leap of faith

The Jedi Master has the Nudge - all about the health of people
The nudge is the smallest, most viral piece of constructive feedback you can give. The nudge takes time, and lets the person to action the nudge do it because they figured it out themselves.

• The nudge is slow, but more permanent
• A lesson is learned, not told

The Dictator has the Mandate
Mandate is “shut up and go” orders.
The dictator is less effective if the goal is not where it was intended/promised

18. Saying No

“You’re the boss - for now”
Power corrupts and not saying “No” can help worsen the issue.
We operate with the assumption that it’s the managers that make the decisions

19. The Process is the Product

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

You can’t go higher without the base.

• Process defines communication
• A healthy pyramid is where one layer invades another
• 1.0 wants you to think you’re building a product, but the product is only the outcome - a successful 1.0 is measured by the success of the product by endless amounts of decisions, arguments, failures, successes

20. How to Start

• Beginning is a 3-phase commit: you’re fretting about starting, you’re preparing to begin, or you’ve begun
• Procrastination/Lazy is your brain trying to help you begin
• Stress is a creativity buzz-kill: Stress=reaction + survival mode
• One way: find a task such as “what is the smallest piece of research I can do” relative to the project

21. Taking Time to Think

• “I can’t think when I’m busy” - it’s not that you aren’t thinking, you’re reacting.
• You won’t be a successful manager without well developed react instincts.
• “Creative brain” - the source of inspiration. “Reactive brain” - the part that loves it when the sky is falling because it can move so quickly
• The time to kick off deep thinking is after every major release - when every lesson is at the forefront of the team’s mind
• Start with 2 meetings a week: a brainstorm and a prototyping meeting. Make sure there’s time in between, but not enough that people forget the brainstorm meeting
• Things to look for as the weeks pass:
  • Are decisions
    • being made? Yes? Good.
    • revisited? Yes? Good.
    • constantly being revisited? Yes? Bad.
  • Are the players changing? If it’s not going well, change the players up
  • Is it therapy or work? If it’s week 3 on you’re still venting, make changes
  • Ensure the to-do list is growing at the start of the design phase, and shrinking at the end

22. The value of the soak

The soak: Plant the seed of an original thought
Active soaking: activities you direct, and gather information (ask 5 dumb/obvious questions).

• Asking dumb questions is to figure out what’s actually going on
• Reiterate (verbally) what you’re hearing to your team and see if they have nods, or blank stares
• Write it down. Using another part of the brain will expose gaps
• Throw the draft away and write it again.

Passive soaking:

• Stop actively soaking and sleep on it
• Sleep, shower, take a walk - subconscious thinking is a shy ability - it does its best when no one knows it’s there

Soaking is an act of creation: it’s design work, strategy. It’s removing emotion and ignorance and constructing an original solution of something that shows those you work with that you actively care

23. Managing Malcolm events

“Seemingly insignificant events that are intent on screwing you in an unlikely way”
How to avoid it:
Artifacts: keep essential piece of knowledge, identifying the significantly insignificant

• Artifacts should be available for all
• Artifacts should have agreement (from others)
• Artifacts should be accurate

Success is silent, whereas failure is not

24. Capturing Context

Version control is a secret weapon
Commenting is important

25. Trickle Theory

The villain: Impossible tasks
Ways to tackle it:

• Analyze, get data
• Start. Just start - and start to build data through progress
• DO NOT: Create a “to do” list to avoid the Critic. This just avoids conflict.

Individuals tend to be bad at work estimates until they’ve done the work
Tips for boring tasks:

• Just start
• Mix it up

26. When the sky falls

When disaster hits (that may or may not be your fault)

Step 1: The situation in the War Room

• Understand everything you need to know about the current state of that disaster.
• Don’t just start solutioning - a lack of foresight and hyper reactive mode is probably why you’re there.
• Create a War Room full of pizza, coffee, whiteboards, people - the message is clear that things are not working
• On a whiteboard, draw what has occurred, followed by a list of additional research, work, potential actions that is iteratively prioritized

Step 2: The “Bet Your Car” Perspective

• To avoid missing things, vet your model with qualified others (that aren’t directly involved in Step 1)
• To thorough your new plan, and assign ownership
• You, the Directly Responsible Individual, is not to own all the work, but put a proper name to each and every task (and the name shouldn’t be yours)
• “Do you understand all the implications of your plan?” Yes I do. “Would you bet your car on the viability of your plan?” ….Let me take one more pass

Step 3: Constant and Consistent Sky-Propping Pressure

• Communicate often and frequently, your job is also internal relations

Step 0: What, precisely, are you trying to do?

• When you’re in the midst of chaos, take a step back and ask this.

27. Hacking is Important

• “Hackers believe something can always be better”
• The Hackery Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it - often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with status quo.
  • “Done is better than perfect”
  • “Code wins arguments”
  • “Hacker culture is extremely open and meritocratic”
  • Those who create process are about control - they use politics to shape that control and influence communications. Hackers disagree with the first statement (“Done is better than perfect”)
• Reasonable people are scared by the new, the appreciate predictable, profitable, and knowable that comes with well-defined process and like to thank everyone because these people keep trains running on time.
• No one like barbarians because the barbarian strategy is one at odds with civilization - by definition, a barbarian is building on a strategy that is at odds with the majority.

Versions of You

Bored people quit.
Your job is not to figure out how to alienate people by calling them names, it’s to figure out how to include them by taking time to understand what they need and doing your best to give it to them.

28. Bored People Quit

When someone quits, they’re effectively saying “I no longer believe in this company”. What’s worse is that what they were originally thinking was “I’m bored” - and boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.
Techniques to detecting boredom:

1. A change in daily routine (a decrease in productivity, increased snark, unexpected vacations, later arrivals, earlier departures)
2. Ask “Are you bored?” The key is discover boredom before they know it
3. They tell you. And you listen. You listen for “I don’t really know what to do next”

“I’m bored” becomes “I’m bored, why isn’t anyone doing anything about it” becomes “I’m bored, I told my boss and he…did nothing” becomes “I don’t want to work at a place where they don’t care if I’m bored”.

A boredom plan of action:

• Keep an interesting problem squarely in front of them.
• Let them experiment/come up with their own
• Be wary of shit work - they can only take one for the team for so long
• Protect their time - something that accelerates boredom is “get this urgent, unplanned task done” or “make progress on the unmeasurable”
• Aggressively remove noise. Spread noise across the team. **Progress is not measured in interrupt-driven minutes, it’s blocks of delicious, uninterrupted hours.
• Tell them what is going on
• Don’t forget what it’s like to build a thing

29. Bellwethers

Success in an interview is extracting as much information as possible from the candidate
Bellwethers - your go-to set of interviews that you trust. If they give the thumbs down, it’s over

• Technical: Find a technical bully (rather than the smart, awkward interviewer)
• Cultural: Assess cultural fit in the team, and the company
• Vision: Strategic or Tactical? They vet the trajectory of the candidate
  • Strategic hire can push their agenda - engaged in what they’re doing, networking, and will tell people at they’re doing to do it. They piss people off because of their annoying agenda intensity
  • Tactical hire fills a well-defined need. They know their stuff, but that’s all they know. They’re not interested in pushing an agenda, they want to get their work done in relative silence.

A strategic isn’t going to be with your team long because you simply don’t move fast enough. A tactical is going to be happy as long as you keep the work relevant and constant.

Get a team consensus, in person. Get a collective decision. It’s your decision to hire, but you’d be a fool not to follow the lead set by the team.

Be a fool when the hire isn’t a fit for the team

30. The 90-day interview

1. Stay late, show up early
2. Accept every lunch invitation you get
3. Always ask about acronyms
4. Saying something really stupid
5. Have a drink

Advanced moves when you have confidence that, if they go wrong, it won’t permanently damage your still-developing reputation

1. Tell someone what to do (to exert/test your influence)
2. Have an argument (how does this organization value conflict). You’ll find out how this group makes a decision and have a better taste of their passion and velocity
3. Find your inner circle - a short list of people that share your instincts

31. Managing Developers

Note: Replaced all “Nerd” instances with “Developer” “Your job with your developer is to bring calm to their chaos”

1. Developers treasure consistency. When a room of developers goes quiet, it’s their developer rage that arrives when they discover inconsistency.
2. Developers treasure efficiency. They go through piles of information and choose a course of action that requires the least amount of energy - not to be lazy, it’s the joy that in a world full of chaotic and political people with obscure agendas and erratic behavior, your developer can conquer the chaos with logical, efficient predictability

Developers are chasing the two highs:

1. When developers see a knot, they want to unravel it. Mental achievement is the first developer high. The joy of understanding.
2. The second high: Complete knot domination. Why do knots exist? The build a knot-free product. The act of creation.

Until you’ve solved a seemingly impossible problem, it’s hard to understand how far a developer will go to protect his problem-solving focus. The road to either High is a mental state traditionally called the Zone.

Three aspect of The Zone is:

• The almost-constant quest is managing all the crap preventing him from entering the Zone. Meetings, casual useless fly-bys, biological nuisances, that clicking when the AC kicks in - what the developer is doing in the first 15 minutes of getting in the Zone is building focus, and small distractors can destroy it
• **Every second a developer is in the Zone is a second something fucking miraculous can occur
• The cave is simple: Protect the Zone to chase the highs

Negative by-products of developer-ery:
Not-invented-here syndrome: A developer’s default opening position is the built it better than anyone else - which is expensive. It’s more fun to build than to investigate someone else’s crap.
The bitter developer: non team players (when they’ve seen a situation 4 times and seen it play out exactly the same way)
The disinterested or drifting developer: The developer won’t engage - doesn’t want to or can’t.

32. NADD (Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder)

NADDers are amazing multi-taskers but it’s not their fundamental skill - it’s the context switch
Context Switch: In order to focus on something, you need to do things to get in that mental state.
The Context Switch is transparent because of the experience.
NADDers have an amazing ability to focus when they choose to.

Downsides:

• They’re always looking for the next big thing
• They may sound like a know-it-all

33. A Nerd in a Cave (The Zone)

The author’s cave has:

• A internet connected computer
• World Cancelling features (e.g. door or noise-reducing headphones)
• A random collection of comforting nerd knickknacks
• Something to drink
• A well-defined layout
• A view

The Zone: A deeply creative place where inspiration is built
The Place: very similar to the Zone, but not mentally the same

34. Meeting Creatures

Types of people in a meeting

35. Incrementalists and Completionists

• Incrementalists are realists. Incrementalists need vision - they need to define/see a plan/goal. They don’t finish things, no concept of done. They are addicted to action.
• Completionists are dreamers. If you’re going to solve a problem, make sure it’s not being solved again in 3 months. Completionists need action - they have the roadmap but struggle at pushing at it. They are addicted to thought.

36. Organics and Mechanics

Organics - all over the place. Loud, and can tell a joke
Mechanics - move forward methodically/ They gather information and store that information in a manner easiest to find again. They quietly observe, are comfortably predictable, and annoy the hell out of organics.

37. Inwards, Outwards, and Holistics

The vision hierarchy

• Inwards: responsible for a small team working on a single product/technology.
• Holistics: manager of managers, figuring out what is going on everywhere in the organization
• Outwards: VPs, CEOs - vision is focused on the outside world, public perception of the company. It’s not their job to run the company, but they’re accountable for it.

38. Free Electrons

Free Electron: Can do anything when it comes to code
Senior Electrons and Junior Electrons have similar productivity yields but seniors are more politically and socially aware.

39. Rules for the Reorg

40. An unexpected connection

41. Avoiding the Fez

Fez slowly becomes irrelevant and unemployed by being useful for 1 (small), critical thing. They’re SMEs with something that isn’t used frequently. Fez is the personification of career drift.

42. A Glimpse and a Hook / 43. Nailing the Phone Screen / 44. Your Resignation Checklist

How to make a great resume. For reading during/after a resume is made.
How to prepare for the interview.