The traditional paradigm of a reporting manager that’s constantly following up with their reports, conducting daily stand-up meetings, weekly 1-1s, and all other forms of intensive supervision, needs to be (mostly) replaced with an asynchronous, self-managing paradigm instead. (View Highlight)
we delegate the review of the work of new employees to mentoring peers. This distributes one of the key functions of management, ensuring the quality of the work, amongst the entire team, and keeps it reasonable by only having senior staff serve as mentors for a single mentee. At the same time, we ensure that mentors take this responsibility seriously by putting them on the hook for the quality of the work shipped by the person they’re mentoring. (View Highlight)
same is true at the executive level. Jason and I are both moonlighting managers as well. Spending the majority of our time pushing the products forward with our direct work on design, programming, copywriting, or whatever. (View Highlight)
But it is to say that these functions of management can be divorced from much of the other routine supervision work that fills the weeks of a manager under the traditional paradigm. And if you do, you can get away with far fewer full-time managers, allowing individual contributors to flourish as managers of one, as they pursue mastery and autonomy under a shared purpose. (View Highlight)