Managing the First Year

Metadata

• Author: alexkgold.space

• Full Title: Managing the First Year

• Document Note: When your team makes a mistake is often tempting to micromanage them and treat them as infants. The truth is that if you are surrounded by professionals is that they might need more context for doing a good job. Management is more creative as it seems, how to structure your team, how to design effective processes, always having an eye on people development and delivery levels. Management is a form of multiplying yourself and your very ultimate objective is to make your team work well. Management is hard and is more a craft than something you can learn. Go to therapy to understand your inner tendencies and patterns. You have to deal with your fears and insecurities, you have the feeling of your technical skills degrade over time.

  Management definition

  For the author management is not a role, is a constellation of roles. The main difficulty, besides a calendar packed of meetings with different people and projects is to change hats from minute to minute:

  • People manager
  • Resource manager
  • Project manager
  • Communications manager
  • Process manager
  • Technical mentor and coach

  Meetings are the main tool of a manager

  From 1-1 meetings, team meetings and project specific ones.

  Managers words carry a lot of power

  You are not a random member of your team anymore

  Resource management is particularly hard

  Mentoring is different for teaching

  Mentoring as manager is more coaching than teaching. Difficult to let people find the time to study and develop while keeping a high speed delivery service

• URL: https://alexkgold.space/mfy.html?utm_campaign=Data_Elixir&utm_source=Data_Elixir_369

Highlights

• I’ve found management most exciting as a form of leverage. (View Highlight)
• Good management is a flywheel generator — it gives the team clarity and helps them feel safe to experiment and grow, resulting in ever-higher levels of collective performance. (View Highlight)
• But it turned out management didn’t work like that. It turned out management was a craft. (View Highlight)
• Unlike data science, where learning more was the answer to a skills gap, my time spent in books didn’t seem to translate directly into being better at my job. As a manager, I found that it wasn’t knowledge I needed, it was the daily practice of doing the work. And in that, I was constantly bumping up against the limits of my bravery and patience (View Highlight)