People Driven Development

PDD: Episode 2 - What's an effective manager?
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Morgan VanDerLeest: [00:00:00] All right. We've got an interesting one today. Dear PDD, I'm an engineering manager at a startup, transitioning from IC a little over a year go We just went through annual reviews and my boss is threatening to put me on a PIP with the feedback that I'm not effective enough and should be adding more value to their team as a manager.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I feel like I do a pretty good job. My team gets work done and we deliver value for the business, but the leveling matrix for ICs is much more detailed than the one for managers. I'm worried I don't even have a good grasp of the areas that I should evaluate myself on. What would you consider an effective manager?

Morgan VanDerLeest: Signed, Ineffectively Managed.

Eddie Flaisler: I think that before we even start talking about it, I want to acknowledge that this is disgraceful. I mean, the fact that the feedback is at the level of "you're ineffective", and that's all there is to it, tells me a lot about the manager giving the feedback. Because, ultimately, You know, concrete situations, concrete guidance, what do you need to [00:01:00] follow?

Eddie Flaisler: Here's an example where he didn't follow that. Here are the results I want to see. And I'm not seeing give the person something to latch on. But anyhow, my frustrations aside, seems like an interesting one. We have a lot to say about effective management. Let's do it.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Cue the intro.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I am Morgan.

Eddie Flaisler: And I am Eddie.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Eddie was my boss.

Eddie Flaisler: Yes.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And this is PDD: People Driven Development.

Eddie Flaisler: So, the first thing I would tackle today is what are the most important aspects of effective management? I feel like to even start answering the question, we really need to break those down. What would you say about that, Morgan?

Morgan VanDerLeest: That's a great question. I think there's a number of competencies here to me. And I think they're not necessarily, you know, like a sliding scale, like you're better at one thing versus something else. But I think being good at a number of areas and especially being adaptable over time, being able to adjust is really important.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So things like, technology versus people. I think you can have a manager who's incredibly good technically and have that carry them a long way or be an incredibly good people manager and have that carry them a long way. The most effective are [00:02:00] those that are really great at both.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So you have a really good grasp of the, systems application, kind of what's under your team's domain, how that interfaces with other areas of the company. And then people having like a really good grasp of relationships, solid communication, being able to talk through difficult circumstances or circumstances where there's something mismatching, some misalignment of expectations that you're trying to navigate and uncover. Those style of people, do really well or tend to be more effective.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Then there's things like being more strategic or more execution or tactical focused. So having that longer term view or that shorter term view. Again, it depends on what the company needs, what the team needs. You may have some folks on the team who are really great at execution and kind of need that more strategic view or vice versa. So they have the great strategic vision and you're really helping to kind of nail them down.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Like, Hey, this is what we committed to. We're working on these things for the next couple of weeks or months. Kind of balancing those things, that strategy and execution.

Morgan VanDerLeest: You have feedback for others and your ability to deliver that well. Can the typical things that you would expect in a one on [00:03:00] one with someone where you need to provide good, clear feedback so that they can improve within their career, but also being able to provide that in a team or a group setting or feedback up in management to the side, to your peers, things like that. Those are all really important competencies for effective management. And then also having a good ability to reflect for yourself and giving yourself feedback. I think that's one thing that is pretty commonly overlooked. But there's no coach who's ever going to be as good as a coach for you as you are objectively looking at your own abilities and your own kind of expertise and focus. And no one's going to be able to direct you in the same way

Eddie Flaisler: 100%.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So I think that's really valuable, but again, you could do a really great job just providing good feedback to others, but you can really get that next level if you're reflecting on yourself. Game changing.

Eddie Flaisler: episode, we talked a little bit about why do you need managers at all? So one thing I always ask myself is what do I expect of this team? What do I need them to achieve? And whatever that may [00:04:00] be, the job of a manager and how I would measure whether a manager is effective or not is: are they able to fill the gaps? Are they able to get the team to a point where what needs to be done is done and the how of doing it is where it needs to be? So I always think about it as an orchestra conductor, right? You prepare the piece and analyze it to understand who needs to do what. You choose the proper composition of people who needs to participate. Sometimes you also engage in hiring activities. You conduct during the show and you rehearse. So, essentially, it's the musicians, it's the players who do the work, but there is so much work that needs to happen behind the scenes by the conductor for this to be successful. It sounds fairly rudimentary compared to the detailed list you provided, but to me, because sometimes a lot of information is difficult to grasp, I start with a very basic question. What does success look like for this [00:05:00] team? Because ultimately that's what would indicate to me if the manager did their job.

Eddie Flaisler: The second aspect, which is also similar to what you mentioned is how does the team show up in terms of time management, in terms of communication with others? In terms of being effective in delivery, in terms of being good with giving, well, nobody's good with giving estimates, but being somewhat reliable with SLAs and communications to enterprise customers or people for whom dates are really important. All that reflects on the manager. Now, I'm not gonna micromanage the activity of the manager day to day or what they're doing, but ultimately, if you are not able to build a team that does that, you did not do your job. So, to me, that's how I define effective. I start from what the team needs. And work back from that

Morgan VanDerLeest: I love that. The way I think about my one sentence, what is effective engineering management? It's that ability to nurture an environment where you reduce [00:06:00] unintended side effects and increase sustainability over the longterm. And what I mean by that is lean into like nurturing the environment. Cause you are not directly doing the work as a manager and you should not be, if you're directly doing a lot of the work, you're an IC. You should be in a different role.

Eddie Flaisler: A lot of the core work as opposed to the support work.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Right. You should be doing work, but the work and the outcomes of the team are not directly and solely due to you.

Eddie Flaisler: Absolutely. Yes.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And the team should be able to function without you. You should have created an environment where you peace out for two weeks and everything's good. And then around unintended side effects. This for me is really a more non technical focus. There's always things in projects that there's some kind of unknown piece, some dependency that was thrown off.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So there's always some kind of side effect that's going to come up in a project. I don't want to brush over that, but from a non technical perspective, if you lack clarity on a project, or there's the two people responsible for it only talk at the beginning and the end, you're going to end up with some weird, unintended side effects of just lacking that clarity, lacking the understanding.

Morgan VanDerLeest: You're going to miss [00:07:00] what the actual objective was. And an effective manager really helps reduce that side effect or those side effects. And then sustainability. If you drive your team into the ground for a project and they're not able to recover quickly, or they leave or they're less productive for a while, you're not effectively managing. How do we do the peak level of. productive output over a sustained period of time. And that means you're probably not at a hundred percent because it's like a marathon or a sprint or something. Whatever kind of sport metaphor you like. It's a short period of time. You recover. You do other things. You can't do this. I love when leaders are like, this is a marathon. We're in the longterm. And then you push people to sprint all the time. It doesn't work like that. You have to have good cycles, recovery, be able to, yes, you need to push sometimes.

Morgan VanDerLeest: But not to the extent where people are burnt out and you need to recognize that early. And so getting that kind of level of sustainability, it's, it's tricky. There's things you got to consider and have good relationship with your team. So, you know, when people are getting to that point. Yeah, if you're seeing people churn through or a lot of attrition and that's definitely a sign of an [00:08:00] effective management to me.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I'd love to talk through some examples of that and kind of maybe where you draw the line in between effective and ineffective management.

Morgan VanDerLeest: What do you think?

Eddie Flaisler: Sure, so I think, we can use the lens of how you're supporting the team and what the team needs. One thing I probably should start with is the technical piece. It really upsets me when a manager who actually does an excellent job is being criticized for not being technical enough for not being low level enough because they have not participated hands on in designing or coding a certain feature. Or because they don't make the design decisions when they have plenty of engineers who are supposed to be growing who can make those decisions. However, a manager for an engineering team does need to be technical. In what senses? One, understanding like the back of your hand, the functional and non functional requirements from the domain you're managing. Because you need to be able to speak to [00:09:00] that. So all the audiences, to all the stakeholders, to all the customers, what happens if you do not understand? You delegate to the engineers. That's not a good use of their time. That's burning them out. You need to understand the design, the architecture of the system you're responsible for, system or systems, because this does exactly the same. If you don't then A you put the burden of communicating about it to other people and B you are in no position to support decision making and make sure we're doing them through the right lenses.

Eddie Flaisler: You know, one of the best examples is the typical engineering tendency to build something from scratch. I don't know if you ever thought about the psychology behind that. To me, that's one of the most interesting topics in engineering management. You always have that person who's going to be like, we have to completely rebuild this using this XYZ technology. Now, I call that code. They don't actually want to just build it for the sake of building it. There are a few [00:10:00] potential reasons. Number one, they're really, really curious about this new technology and they want to get it on their resume.

Eddie Flaisler: Number two they don't understand the current code. They're really frustrated that everything takes a very long time, but instead of acknowledging, which takes a lot of courage, instead of acknowledging saying, look, I'm very experienced, but I have no idea what's going on here.

Eddie Flaisler: I cannot make progress on this. They go and say, let's just rebuild. And of course, there's also the practical aspect of there really are issues that we are not sure how to overcome in the current architecture, or in the way the code is written right now. It can be performance, it can be reliability, scalability, and so on. Now, this is exactly where I expect an engineering manager to step in. Because an engineering manager has a few competencies that are relevant here. A. They are concerned with the growth of their people and also capable of offering that growth. So, I actually am all for considering something like [00:11:00] this for the purpose of challenging your people if you have the bandwidth and if it's also aligned with other goals of the business.

Eddie Flaisler: Number two, maybe there's a middle of the road. Do we need to rewrite everything? Do we need to write part of it? What problem are we solving?

Eddie Flaisler: Number three, cost of delay. What will be the complexity of this, and what will it mean if we do this instead of doing other things. Which honestly, it's actually a very technical question for system design, because knowing the consequences of a system not working and like how much it's going to cost us in damages, we also need to understand the definition of system not working.

Eddie Flaisler: Is it big bugs? Is it small bugs? What is the performance degradation in not working on that thing which we're reprioritizing in order to do this? You need knowledge. You need to be technical. So ineffective management is when we really take the I'm not hands on to the extreme. You don't need to code, you don't need to design, but you need to be [00:12:00] technical.

Morgan VanDerLeest: That courage to admit you don't know, is one of the most important things about being more senior because there is always going to be that kind of stuff and you can fake it. And have all those unintended side effects of oh, shoot, now somebody expects that you actually know this thing instead of saying, okay, hang on. That's actually an area that I'm not comfortable with. I do need to follow up with the team to figure this out or I need to ask for the time to go in and understand this thing. But if you don't have that, if you don't have that communication, relationship, understanding, to feel safe to say, I don't know the thing and to talk through that and to get that buy in, to get that understanding, you're going to be in a world of hurt at some point, we just don't know when. And that's, the kind of unintended side effect that I do not like.

Eddie Flaisler: 100%. And speaking of effective management or ineffective, something that is often, I don't think it's overlooked because people talk about it a lot, but not practiced enough because I'm not sure we always understand what it means to practice it is psychological safety. And the relationship between [00:13:00] psychological safety and burnout. You know, I've spoken to managers in the past, managers and executives. And when we talk about psychological safety, they say, I don't know. I, I try to be very nice, but you know, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a therapist. How do I know what I'm supposed to be doing? And I always say that it's not about what you're supposed to be doing.

Eddie Flaisler: It's what you're supposed to be not doing. so you mentioned acknowledging you don't know.

Eddie Flaisler: It's like when you have a child or with your friend, or with your partner. You set an example by what you do. If you create this environment where, just by modeling it where people don't feel comfortable to acknowledge they made a mistake. To acknowledge they don't know. The amount of stress you're putting all these people create so much burnout because they get depressed. They get scared. They get anxious. They get tired. All these things are real factors that happened to human being. This is not some new age BS, right? It's very, very important. And the second thing, which unfortunately I see quite often, [00:14:00] is an irrelevant sense of urgency. So I completely agree that people should be mindful of the business consequences of not doing something fast enough or well enough, or not responding quickly enough to an incident or not delivering when you said you deliver. But I don't call that a sense of urgency. I call that being a professional. Understanding what is required from the work you do, what is required from what you produce, and meeting those expectations.

Eddie Flaisler: I have just had a conversation the other day with an engineering manager I'm mentoring whose CEO messaged him at 4 a. m. asking about a bug, whether it was solved or not.

Eddie Flaisler: And when the manager woke up and responded, "not yet, we're going to look at it in the morning", the CEO started texting frantically. It was a UI bug where a label was a little bit off.

Eddie Flaisler: No customer was impacted. And in the morning, [00:15:00] the person was given feedback that you don't take the job seriously, your team is lazy. And the question is, what are we trying to achieve by doing this?

Eddie Flaisler: Incidents have tiers for a reason. They have blast radius for a reason. There are so many parameters you can take into account when deciding what's worth your team's panic, what's worth your team's lack of sleep, lack of dinner with their family.

Eddie Flaisler: It's not about putting people before you put the business, which, by the way, I think you should put people before anything else, but fine. The business is very important for you. It's not about that. It's about realizing you're not employing robots, you're employing human beings, and there is a limit to how much trauma you can induce and then be shocked that they burn out. So that's the classic aspect of ineffective management.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I love that you bring that up and I was ready to battle with you against this, the sense of urgency thing, because that's one that I've heard brought up a ton [00:16:00] and it chafes my soul because I think if you treat people like people and like they want to do good work, which basically, everyone that I've ever worked with has wanted to do that and get things into production and out in the world and usable by customers and valuable. People don't want to sit on stuff. And if they're clear about the context around the thing that they're working on, and they have the support to get the thing done and reviewed or feature flagged and out safely folks want to move quickly.

Morgan VanDerLeest: There's very few people that just want to kind of sit back and not do the thing and not have that sense of urgency. But enabling people to have that innate sense of, I want to get this done well and quickly is so much different than this needs to be done yesterday and filling people with that dread. The human brain doesn't work like that. Your brain starts shutting down when it is scared and afraid and things like that happen. I have heard people in the past, like, Oh, I really need somebody to give me that sense of urgency so I can do well. No, you need to [00:17:00] have a little bit better self management and bring it upon yourself and not have this external force needing to be pushed upon you to have that urgency.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I'm glad I didn't have to go on a full out row with you on this.

Eddie Flaisler: Absolutely. I know that in our experience working together, I was always very focused on that sense of urgency. And I don't take that back. What I learned from that experience is to be very clear on what it is I'm looking for. And today I'm able to say that what I was looking for is not more urgency is clarity on what are the expectations from the business and from the stakeholders and professionalism and executing on those.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Yeah. I think that's one of the bits that I wanted to mention is in order to be an effective manager, you're the bridge between leadership, executive, and ICs in the frontline work and alignment with your leadership is key. A hundred percent. Honestly, even if you have poor outcomes, if you are aligned with your leadership and you've communicated and they're aware of what's going on and [00:18:00] you're making adjustments based on what they're expecting you can be an effective enough manager in that way. I think there's a lot of room to grow still and to be generating outcomes that then you're saying, Hey, leadership, look at what we've done.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And this is what we're doing moving forward. That's more senior much better management in my eyes, much more effective management. But if you're not, delivering outcomes and you're not aligned with your leadership, you're in for a hard time.

Eddie Flaisler: One hundred percent. On a completely unrelated topic. I was just thinking about that. Can I bring in an example of ineffective management that I really feel like bringing up, even though it's probably not relevant to our Ineffectively Managed?

Morgan VanDerLeest: Please.

Eddie Flaisler: So I was just thinking about it the other day in the context of something I read. One of the biggest examples that we saw in 2023 and 2024 of ineffective management is hiring because you can and not because you need. And a compliment of that is not knowing not knowing how to terminate properly. So I think I'll start from [00:19:00] hiring. For the longest time when tech has had a lot of money. It was almost the hallmark of a good coveted engineering leader to say, I built the team from five to 500.

Eddie Flaisler: And I've had so many people interview with me. Who presented that. And I said, That's great.

Eddie Flaisler: Can you explain to me what 500 people were doing? Why was that needed? I'm exaggerating 500. I think that in terms of those I interviewed, it was probably more like 150. But sure. Can you explain to me what were these 150 doing? They got stuck. They could not articulate. And what was very interesting that even when I was probing, you realize they never actually took the time to think about that.

Eddie Flaisler: It's not about blanking out. The culture, the atmosphere, the market was, we have money, let's spend it. But the thing is, even if you don't think of the doomsday scenario when you need to let people go, it's so bad. [00:20:00] Because, A, you don't have enough interesting work. So you're creating competition. And then you're creating job insecurity. and then you're creating lack of collaboration. Because people don't know your finances. All they know is that they don't have enough work to do, so they ask, is my job safe? and, it ended up not being, but it can take a very long time. So that's not a healthy place to be in.

Eddie Flaisler: The second thing is, the more people you have, the more difficult it is to manage. The less time you have as an organization to spend on actually building proper infrastructure and processes, which is kind of ridiculous because you have so many people, but all these people require management and support. So then there are more meetings, there are more one on ones, there's more communication going on. All these things cost time and mental effort which you don't spend on improving your own engineering organization.

Eddie Flaisler: The point is you really need to know when to hire, because otherwise you're actually causing damage. [00:21:00] You're overburdening people from your team with onboarding, you're spending funds and so on. In terms of layoffs, I'm not going to go into a layoff workshop here. I will say that this is a perfect example of how communication is so important for effective management. One thing I keep seeing is the executives or the managers not knowing what to say about the termination, make it sound like it was the fault of the people who were let go. There are actually so many more ways to screw this up, but one key thing is to be able to own the fact you had to let people go and it's not like they were not doing their job. We didn't need them. You know, we had several example of leaders claiming that the engineers were stealing from them and it was a waste of money. These people made a choice to leave jobs and come and work for you. Show some

Eddie Flaisler: appreciation.

Eddie Flaisler: We can go on and on. It just reminded me of, [00:22:00] you know, classic ineffective management, not knowing how to hire, not knowing how to terminate properly.

Morgan VanDerLeest: That's what I like to offhand describe my role as a manager is I'm the person who's helping to put context and the story to the data points in the situations that are happening. And that's a great example of yes, I'm hiring two people, four people, whatever, because X, Y, Z, because this area, we're focusing on more in the business and the work that we would like to put on the roadmap is a larger capacity than we're able to handle as a team at the moment. So we need to have a handful of people more to make this happen. Or vice versa, on the layoffs, we hired too much, we made mistakes and we need to own that.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And unfortunately this is how this panned out. But we're committing to doing things better in the future or whatever that needs to look like. But it's the way that you approach that and tell that story on either side and be able to tell the story later on when you're either looking for new work or just chatting in a situation like this, where, how do you handle that?

Morgan VanDerLeest: What is the reasoning why? Can you even back it up? And [00:23:00] if you can't, you probably shouldn't have been doing that.

Eddie Flaisler: 100%.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I'd love to hear what you think some tips are for becoming a more effective manager. So let's say situation like this, not a clear matrix, not a clear understanding of what it means to be an effective manager, maybe not getting the feedback that you need. What are a handful of things that somebody could do or do better? Where should they start?

Eddie Flaisler: I think I'm going to start with something that sounds probably the least, concrete, but I found very helpful over my years managing. Read, educate yourself about engineering management and management in general. There is so much to that science that people don't take the time to investigate and educate themselves about. And even if it's not necessarily relevant to what you're doing right now, it has been my experience that you encounter these situations so quickly. one way or another.

Eddie Flaisler: I want to call out a few books that I really, really like. Dare to Lead, which is [00:24:00] also a podcast by Brene Brown. It's one of my favorite books.

Eddie Flaisler: I like a lot Cultural Innovation, Kevin Oaks. He was a former Microsoft executive. This entire book is about change management, which is such a difficult topic. And I really like how realistic he is. And he doesn't sugarcoat the fact that, sure, you need to invest a lot in communication, but ultimately, sometimes even that's not enough. And you know, people just don't want change. What do you do then? So that's, again, something that I really enjoyed reading. Team Topologies, which is something probably everyone is reading right now, but I'm not sure I see enough people tying it back to concrete problems they need to solve.

Eddie Flaisler: One, thing that I've been struggling with lately is identifying the balance between a static organizational design and the dynamic organization design. Meaning I want to put the right people on the projects that are most high priority for the business. And, you know, things change priorities change, but I also [00:25:00] want people to maintain a sense of identity, a sense of belonging to create knowledge of a certain domain and carry it over.

Eddie Flaisler: These thing are almost orthogonal because either you move them around all the time. Or you keep them doing the same thing.

Eddie Flaisler: No model works forever, right? You always end up paying something. So, I really like Team Topologies because it addresses one of the bigger questions of how culture fits into something as mechanical as organizational design. So, again, books is something that is very, very, very interesting, and educates us. The second thing is being really clear with yourself and with your manager about what is expected from this team. I think sometimes people dive head on into a project or a set of tasks or whatever is expected from the team, And they don't ask themselves.

Eddie Flaisler: Holistically, what is right for this organization? What [00:26:00] is, right for this domain? What is right for the business? What is right for the team right now? And that's where I need a manager. So management is about balancing factors. Is this the right thing to work on right now? Is the team spending their time correctly? Is the way the team is communicating with other people or between themselves? Is that conducive to better relationships? So spending that time getting feedback, not about you, but about what is needed from the team right now, and what is working, what isn't working, can help you identify the gaps. And gap analysis, if you just treat it as a checklist,

Eddie Flaisler: and go about it one by one. You can't be any more effective than that. Because then you just don't miss anything. What's gonna happen? You're gonna encounter this magical expectation that didn't show up. It didn't show up and nobody knew about it. So what can you do? Right. You cannot solve a problem you're unaware of.

Eddie Flaisler: So reading and making sure the problem statement is really, really [00:27:00] well defined for your job is very important.

Eddie Flaisler: The third thing you already mentioned. So I'm not gonna repeat it too much: introspection. There is no such thing. I am an excellent manager. But I have low EQ and I have no idea how what I say or what I do impact other people. That skill needs to be developed. You need to ask yourself how your messages come across. You need to ask yourself, when are you more successful at getting to people? When were you not successful? You need to ask yourself, how is your dynamic with the team helping? And when is it not helping? Because without that, the team will stagnate. You will not see any growth, not in the relationship, not in the trust, not in their ability to deliver. So introspection is really, really important. I guess that's the three I can think of.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I love that. I think a key piece to not just introspection, but getting the feedback you need from the people around you is that environment of psychological safety. You mentioned earlier. And we could dive into a definition there [00:28:00] and whatnot. But to me, it's, it's not.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Being nice is not just people feeling good, but it's feeling the support that you can disagree and bring things up that a less mature environment would hold against you, whether that's a person, a group, whatnot. And the thing is you have smart people working with you. They are very smart.

Morgan VanDerLeest: They are very talented. And the chances are, they probably don't want to speak up about things because they're worried about how that's going to be taken. And you're losing out on so much good feedback and understanding and experience from people, even for folks from like non typical backgrounds. Didn't go through, You know, computer science university that, so much useful knowledge that if we can help break into that is the game changing for the ability of your team to deliver outcomes. Some things that I thought were important also is communicating.

Morgan VanDerLeest: It's writing things down. It's having, you mentioned this, having that understanding of the expectations of you and your team, both what leadership expects, what does the business expect? What do we expect of ourselves over the next month, three months, six [00:29:00] months, a year. Is there misalignment there and calling those things out, making sure that you're aligned with your leadership and what that means.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I love that you mentioned reading. I would love to share a few. of " Engineering Management for the Rest of Us" by Sarah Drasner is amazing. Number of great topics in there. Highly recommend. And then a couple outside of engineering that I found very beneficial for me as a manager, both of David Marquette's books, "Turn the Ship Around" and "Leadership is Language". To think about how you lead, how you manage, how you bring about the best environment and set up for your organization. And really getting the people that are closest to the work, helping to give them the authority to get things done and get things done well, and just the benefits that you gain out of that.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And then, I love " The Coaching Habit" and "The Advice Trap" by Michael Bungay Stanier. I'm sure I butchered his name. Apologies. That's one I'd heard a couple of years back when I was working with a coaching organization and unbelievable the way that changed the way that I do one on ones the way that I do most of my typical meetings.

Morgan VanDerLeest: The questions to ask, how you get deeper information [00:30:00] out of folks and how you get out of your own way of essentially not giving advice anymore. Because it's very tricky to give advice well. And I would argue that most of the time, if you're just giving advice, it's probably wrong and you're not actually hearing the other person you're just wanting to hear yourself speak. But that if you're able to ask good questions and help somebody self discover something or help direct, guide, that all makes sense, but you're doing it in a way that brings them along you. And it's a game changing way to look at how you go about coaching, management, one on ones, teams, et cetera.

So highly recommend those. Reading was a huge shift in my career. When I started kind of reading more. Big difference in what I was able to pull into my day to day work. Highly recommend that as a way to improve.

Eddie Flaisler: Totally. And it also reminded me of the classic, The Effective Manager, which is a very, well, it was an old book. I just found out it had a second edition just a few years ago. And the second edition is Mark Horstman, Kate Brown, and Sarah Sentes. The Effective [00:31:00] Manager Second Edition. I really like the very structured way they have to describing the work of a manager. And I feel like it's an anchor for people who are new to the job to kind of be like, okay, I'm a manager, what do I even do? Sure, they said on the podcast, solve gaps. But how do I even approach the problem? So I think that's a very good book.

Morgan VanDerLeest: The most important thing that I'd recommend for either if you're already an effective manager, or if you're trying to become one is an emphasis on outcomes. It doesn't matter if you're able to say, well, my team did a hundred tickets or a hundred points or whatever you call it last sprint.

Morgan VanDerLeest: It doesn't matter if you understand everything technically and that the people on your team are happy. That's important, but that's not everything. It's your outcomes. If you're able to deliver outcomes to the business you're going to win. You need to be able to communicate about those.

Morgan VanDerLeest: It's very important to have that context, be able to tell the story. Otherwise people might not even know that this outcome even happened. But if you can get the [00:32:00] outcomes, you're going to be in a good spot because that's going to help you with keeping your team challenged and excited. It's going to help you with benefiting your leadership and showing Hey, we've done things.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Look at the things that have happened. Here's the way we can measure those things. Because you'd have outcomes that go against that. And you can get away with either being a little misaligned or even not being as strong technically or as great of a people manager. If you're able to hit outcomes, well, you can always work on improving all these other competencies, if you have a relentless focus on outcomes and delivering outcomes that can make up for not being as technically strong, maybe not being the best communicator in the world, things like that. If you have that emphasis on outcomes, you can help get to those other things and improve those over time. But you're showing real value to your team, to the business, to your leadership. And that makes a big difference.

Eddie Flaisler: 100%. And first of all, showing the value to the team is so important because that's part of showing impact. And helping them build a sense of identity and a sense of achievement and all the things that [00:33:00] may work fun and something that burns you out less. Absolutely, 100%.

Eddie Flaisler: You know, Morgan, when we started the podcast, I went on a rant about the injustice that the manager of Ineffectively Managed did to them by not giving them concrete feedback. So to me, this begs the question, how can organizations create an environment that That supports effective management. I think we can talk a lot about what the individual can do, but definitely the environment needs to be conducive to that.

Eddie Flaisler: What are your thoughts about that?

Morgan VanDerLeest: It's a great question. It's interesting because this is something that's very much in a lot of ways out of Ineffectively Managed's control. They can push on some of these things, help improve in certain ways. But in a big sense, that's more the leadership, the company, more towards senior leadership folks.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I still lean on like a big, and I sound like a broken record, like with us all the time, communication, clarity, transparency. How do you set up an environment where we treat people like adults? We share the best context that we can [00:34:00] so that they are able to make the best decisions that they can. You're clear about things, but in a way that people can hear you.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I think we mentioned previously, if I'm running past you and I yell the most perfect life advice you've ever heard, but you can't hear me because I'm running past you randomly and screaming at the top of my lungs. That wasn't useful to you. I didn't provide you with something that's going to change the way that you look at something.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So it's being able to communicate in a way that people can hear you. Being able to read the room. I've been in situations where leadership may not have communicated something very well. That's fine. That happens. Revisit that. Acknowledge that you said something in a certain way or that it may have been heard in a certain way and say this is where we were intending to get with that.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And we appreciate the feedback that y'all gave to us so that we were aware that this didn't land the way that we thought. That is such a different way to approach something versus leadership's not listening, they're not hearing us. That's how you fix that. You actually respond to the feedback that you're receiving from the team. And you have to keep [00:35:00] doing that. You have to repeat things. You have to do things like that.

Eddie Flaisler: So I can reflect back to you what I've heard. I'm going to be a nerd and say, you just defined it recursively. You said the best way to support a manager in being effective is being an effective manager to that manager. I think you cannot be a good manager if your leadership chain sucks. There needs to be value alignment. You need to feel psychologically safe to provide that psychological safety to people. Right. Things like managing through someone. I have dealt with so many managers, especially new managers, but not only, or rather new managers of managers who just couldn't bring themselves to truly delegate and observe outcomes to the people reporting into them. They had to manage for the person and then the person lost all credibility with their direct reports. Because they came across as [00:36:00] incompetent. Because if I weren't incompetent, my boss wouldn't have to manage through me. And it was more of a control issue on the part of the boss than an actual issue with the manager. So it's really, really important to be a good manager to that manager and set an example. And the second thing is, Kind of related to something I mentioned in the last episode, not everyone has the bandwidth or even the skill set, especially when you talk about frontline management, first time managers, even a little bit middle management.

Eddie Flaisler: Not everyone is positioned to identify and fix systemic issues. I worked with managers who did an exceptional job steering the team, making sure work gets done, making sure people are growing, making sure people are doing well. Awesome.

Eddie Flaisler: They were not positioned to think how to change things that were not working systemically.

Eddie Flaisler: That's not necessarily a bad thing, because in the same way that a manager closes gaps for their engineers, [00:37:00] The manager of the manager closes gaps for them.

Eddie Flaisler: You have more bandwidth for that, or at least you're supposed to.

Eddie Flaisler: You have more skill set for that, or at least you're supposed to.

Eddie Flaisler: If you yourself, as the leader of an organization, cannot create an environment where people are set up for success in doing their job, whether it is psychological safety, Or how quality is treated, or how planning is treated, or what is strategy, or what are your priorities as organization?

Eddie Flaisler: And how do you build trust? If you don't set up all these mechanisms in place, in collaboration with your teams, no manager will be able to do that in a vacuum. And in fact, if they do, they will probably feel very alone, and they will feel like nobody's on their team, they're getting a lot of pushback, and nobody understands their practices. And it's very, very demotivating. So be a good manager to the person you want to be a good manager.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So, so important. This was great. Hopefully we were helpful to [00:38:00] Ineffectively Managed. Lot of things. I'm sure we can dive into more in the future. If you enjoyed this, don't forget to share and subscribe on your podcast player of choice. And if you are facing a tough challenge as an engineering leader, that's left you unsure of what to do, hit us up at peopledrivendevelopment@gmail.com. We're happy to help. Cheers y'all.

Eddie Flaisler: Goodbye.​