On Management

These are not a complete system. I have tried to pull threads from my mind one by one, but some knowledge is too subconscious — when I try to recall it deliberately, it does not always come. This article is aimed at first-line (technical) managers — because, at present, all my management experience comes from the first line.

As you can see, I deliberately imitated the Agile Manifesto (note that, just like the Agile Manifesto — while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more) and wrote down a few values I believe in:

• Trust over authority
• Observation over measurement
• Service over management
• Coaching over training
• Leading by example over issuing orders
• Clear rewards and punishments over easygoing harmony

These are the values a manager should adopt toward the team. A manager must manage not only downward but also upward, but upward management is another topic; most of it is the same as how a team member handles upward relationships, so I will write about it separately.

Let’s go through these values one by one.

Trust over authority

First-line managers are often promoted from the most ‘excellent’ individuals on the team. That ‘excellent’ may mean best technically, or strongest overall. The prerequisite for building trust with the team is the work you have done before and the abilities you have demonstrated in various areas. Your team is like a company on the battlefield (if you have seen Band of Brothers). If you are capable and lead from the front, you earn support and trust.

Trust is the great precondition for a manager to build a relationship with the team. Only with mutual trust is there room to operate and to develop chemistry through the friction of working together. As for the manager’s title, it is only a symbol of authority. Using it to command the team is like giving a charge order and then standing at the back of the line saying, ‘Anyone who turns back will be executed on the spot’ — helpless, and a last resort.

Some companies have first-line managers focus solely on people management, or hire dedicated HR managers to run teams. I think this is a big mistake. I even think any management position must be filled by someone with a technical or business background. Without having clawed their way up from the ground floor and without a deep understanding of the technology or business, an HR manager can only issue blind orders and make arbitrary assignments. Worse, what chills the team is that, because the HR manager does not understand, they need one or more technical or business ‘experts’ to assist them — and such an ‘expert’ can paint things in glowing colors and blind them.

Observation over measurement

People with technical backgrounds are especially sensitive to numbers and always want to quantify everything. When I was transferred into a management role, my first conversation with my boss was about the team’s goals and how to measure each person’s work. But my boss advised me not to focus too much on metrics (metrics are still very important!), but to learn to ‘observe’ each person and see what kind of help they need.

I did not understand. The books I had read at the time and my own shallow understanding told me that a manager should learn to ‘measure’ employee performance. So I spent time and effort researching what metrics to use to measure employee performance. To my horror, I found there were no good measurement methods:

• Hours worked is obviously wrong. Who told you that people who work longer hours are better? (Sadly, some managers really do use hours worked as a performance review metric. Sigh.)
• Lines of code per feature? Somewhat related, but you cannot make a decision on that alone.
• Code quality per feature? Also somewhat related, but again not enough on its own.
• Number of bugs fixed? Wait — what counts as ‘fixing’ a bug? Does a workaround count? What if the customer later closes it themselves?
• …

Do not laugh — I really did, naively and foolishly, build a model and a not-so-reliable formula, and even made a little tool with symfony to look at each person’s curve. But if someone’s promotion and advancement were tied to a formula just like that, no matter how I thought about it, it felt wrong.

So I turned to ‘observation’ and continued to seek my boss’s advice. He told me to start from these areas:

• Build personal relationships with each person.
• Have more one-on-ones — formal is fine, but informal is better, like eating together or grabbing coffee.
• Get away from your own desk and go discuss problems with an engineer.
• Watch how the team collaborates: who is willing to help the team, and who is always treated as the ‘expert’ others go to for help.
• …

I did as he said. Gradually, I found that each person in my head was no longer a number but a living human being: A’s family member was sick and in the hospital for days, shuttling between home and company; B was pregnant, her prenatal checkups were unstable, and she was anxious; C wanted to become a manager and hoped for guidance and help; D dreaded meetings with the U.S. team because his English was not good and he lacked confidence…

Looking back now, ‘observe each person, help them, solve problems’ is the best management advice I received. Management deals with people, not machines, inventory, cash flow, or other things that numbers alone can explain. Only by going deep into each person can you clearly understand what is happening and then find a response.

Compared with ‘observation,’ measurement has many problems.

First, an excessive faith in measurement within a team creates a kind of antagonism. From birth to death, we live in an age of measurement everywhere. In the workplace, especially in R&D, one of the most absurd practices is forced ranking with elimination of the bottom performers. It mandates a layoff ratio, forcing many first-line managers to periodically find that proportion of people on their teams to cut (even when those people are not bad). This makes managers superstitious about measurement and creates a subtle competitive atmosphere on the team. But the most terrifying part is that, to some degree, it blocks the flow of information and knowledge, turning relationships that could be mutually supportive into selfish or self-protective ones.

Second, overvaluing measurement leads to ‘policies from above, countermeasures from below.’ Anyone who knows a little quantum mechanics knows Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ — the act of measurement inevitably disturbs the state of the particle being measured, creating uncertainty. This actually applies to management and many other things. Think about how many times each year the App Store has to change its ranking algorithm to prevent gaming, and you can imagine how many problems come from hard-wiring employee performance to a pile of numbers (it applies to sales too — think kickbacks, borrowing from the future, inflating revenue, and so on).

Finally, ‘measurement’ makes you blind to other important things outside the metric. In Harvard’s Positive Psychology course, Dr. Tal once did a thought-provoking experiment: he showed students a picture and asked them to count as many shapes as possible. The picture had triangles, quadrilaterals, and circles making up a school bus with several children sitting inside. The students could roughly count the shapes. But when Tal asked how many children were on the bus, no one could answer. Because no one had asked that question. The questions we ask determine the answers we get; likewise, what we measure determines the data we get. Why are public companies increasingly short-sighted, fond of restructuring (layoffs), stock buybacks, and dividend payouts? Because the metric shareholders and Wall Street use to measure them is earnings per share. To the measurer, the children on the bus do not matter, the employee lacking confidence does not matter, and even the anxious pregnant woman does not matter.

So a first-line manager must constantly pay attention to the team, observe it, communicate more with everyone, build relationships, solve problems, praise directly, and correct without reservation. Then when the annual promotion and raise season arrives, everyone will know where they stand and accept your decisions wholeheartedly.

Service over management

At every weekly meeting, my big boss would constantly talk about ‘service.’ He often compared managers to nannies: they should create as comfortable an environment as possible, take good care of the team, and remove all kinds of obstacles at work. At first I could not understand this. Is being a manager about looking impressive, moving your lips, and managing others as they do the work? How did I become a servant?

I have a friend in sales. A couple of days ago we had dinner together, and I paid attention to his behavior: when entering or leaving the restaurant, he would quickly walk to the door, open it, and wait respectfully for everyone to pass through one by one; at the table, he would wait until everyone was seated before taking his seat, then immediately pour drinks for everyone; after dinner, when we left in my car, he opened the car door and waited until everyone was seated before closing it and sitting down himself. He did not have to do any of this, but over time, the discipline of his profession had made this kind of kindness a habit.

Salespeople manage clients, and managers manage teams. In this respect there is not much difference — both must serve well the people they manage. The former hopes the client will sign an order; the latter hopes the team will complete work efficiently.

To get the team to complete work efficiently, what should a manager do? Issue orders? Not only that. You have to charge ahead and clear away all the problems the team may face. That is what it means to serve around the team, so everyone can work comfortably.

Coaching over training

I said earlier that a first-line manager had better be an outstanding member of this team (or of another first-line team). One reason is that it makes it easier for the team to trust and recognize them; the second reason is that such a manager can coach subordinates.

Coaching here might be hands-on instruction, a couple of illuminating sentences in a one-on-one, a book or article you suggest a report read, or even an email you send. Compared with formal, rigorous training, coaching is informal, random, and improvised.

Coaching is an important part of a team’s continuous growth. It solves a problem immediately, or points the way to solving it. Accumulated piece by piece, these fragments quickly enrich the team’s fighting strength.

I once gave a colleague long-term English coaching. The company offered English training, but I felt that the rambling, empty kind of training did nothing to build people’s ability to discuss technical topics in meetings. We started with the logic and structure of speech. I did not worry about whether her sentences flowed smoothly or her expression was elegant; I cared that the technical topics she raised had clear, rigorous logic. After a long period of weekly one-on-one practice (six months? a year? I cannot remember), she later became quite comfortable discussing technical issues with the U.S. team and did not need me there at all.

Training is important and is an important part of employees’ long-term development (managers should fight for training opportunities for the team). But most training cannot solve the immediate problems at work. For example, if the team does not know how to use git, rather than hiring an outside git trainer, it is better to find someone inside the team or another team who knows it, and teach hand-in-hand, teaching around real problems.

What if you cannot find such a person? The manager needs to learn and master it themselves. If a team lacks a certain capability, and that capability is important, then before someone suitable can be developed to provide it, the manager must be able to cover that capability.

Leading by example over issuing orders

Many things cannot remain mere words. People do not care what you say; they care what you do. My not smoking owes a lot to my father; he worked hard to quit smoking for his children. After I had my own child, one day I casually let slip a curse — ‘grandma’s!’ — and my daughter, barely past one and still nursing, repeated it (at the time she could barely say anything besides ‘grandma’), and proudly said it to me to win my encouragement (we later spent a lot of effort getting her to forget the word). Managing a team is the same. If you say do abc, do not do xyz, do not just say it — act in line with it yourself. A subdued team usually has a subdued manager, even if he says every day that everyone should liven up the atmosphere; a boss who no longer hones his own technical skills will probably get little effect from telling the team to read more and learn new technologies.

A few years ago, at a weekly meeting, I shared a case about ‘leading by example’ with the team — also stolen from the Positive Psychology course. I asked everyone to listen carefully to what I said and then follow me. Step by step, I shaped a rabbit with my hands, and everyone followed along well. Then I said, ‘Put this rabbit on your face’ (while I placed my hand on my chin). Just like in Dr. Tal’s classroom, almost everyone ignored my instruction and instead copied me by putting a hand on their chin. Some hesitated briefly, but in the end they firmly put a hand on their chin.

This is the important difference between ‘saying’ and ‘doing.’

My current boss always takes several books with him on business trips. One day he called me into his office to discuss a project we were working on. Halfway through, he realized I knew less about it than he did. He stopped and asked, ‘Have you read all the project documentation?’ I was mortified and had to tell the truth. He took a stack of printed documents out of his bag, spread them on the table, and said, ‘I have gone through all of these. Mr. DS wrote the best ones; they are worth reading.’ I do not know how I walked out of his office that day. He did not scold me or order me to do anything, but from then on I never dared slack off on work again.

Clear rewards and punishments over easygoing harmony

Management is a process of removing the weeds and keeping the essence; it is like gardening — besides watering and fertilizing, you have to weed — that is, allocate resources where they should go. Managers decide team members’ salaries, bonuses, and promotions. These decisions both let you feel the magic of power and make you frown, because there are too many mouths and too little to go around, and you do not know how to distribute it.

This is why everyday observation, along with timely praise and correction, matters so much. Observation gives you a sense of everyone; measured against the requirements for each person’s level, you know who contributes more and who contributes less. Timely praise and correction in normal times make it clearer to everyone what behaviors you encourage and how they are performing on the team. That way, when promotion and raise season comes, your conversations with team members will not surprise them. Good is good, not-so-good is not-so-good; there should be no fudging here.

I once gave a direct report a raise of nearly 50% in one salary cycle, while someone else on the same team stayed basically flat. That requires you to understand people’s aspirations in normal times and give them reasonable expectations. People want different things. Some want stability, want to do well within their scope, and have no ambition to climb; others want to keep building new things and keep improving. You cannot say which is better (the lack of ambition may be for better work-life balance), because the team needs both. The worst management style is to ignore these aspirations for the sake of everyone’s cozy harmony, average out rewards, and downplay mistakes. The result: those who want to advance do not see the value of their contributions reflected and leave; those who want stability get gradually promoted into a position they cannot handle (remember the Peter Principle?), and eventually are sadly laid off in a reorganization as a model of ‘high pay, low ability.’

These are only the things I can remember to say; management is vast and profound, far beyond what these one, two, three points can express.

I have mentioned in a previous article that when I was about to take on a first-line manager role, my big boss talked with me and said he thought I might become a very good manager, but I lacked life experience and tempering, so inwardly he did not approve of my taking the position then. He went on to say, ‘You are still young, just married, no kids.’ I did not take it seriously at the time. After more than four years in management, I have found that ‘lack of tempering’ really is a manager’s Achilles’ heel. If you have not married and had children, if you do not have a large family to coordinate and manage, you rarely go through things like tolerance, forbearance, persuasion, and leading by example.

So management is not about how many books you have read (though reading some management books is still very important), but about how many things you have been through. No matter how detailed a management book is, it will not break every case down to what to do when an employee is anxious during pregnancy; you only develop a response when you encounter it. More importantly, you have to know that when someone is frowning and work is not going smoothly, it is not because they are stupid; something in their life has changed and demands their attention.

I have said too many serious things; let’s lighten up and give managers a personality — I think a manager should be like Elastigirl in The Incredibles: able to stretch high and low, to be both cute and commanding.