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"In many ways, I feel like my job as CEO and Founder is to absorb all of the insane parts of running a business so my team can focus on building, learning and e
by athiercelin 7y ago
"In many ways, I feel like my job as CEO and Founder is to absorb all of the insane parts of running a business so my team can focus on building, learning and enjoying their jobs."
This is spot on. I would extend to senior leadership in general.
- bcrosby95 7y agoOne way I've heard the role of product manager described as is a "shit umbrella".
- arcturus17 7y agoThis touches me on a spiritual level.
- cletus 7y agoThis is applied to managers in general: - Good managers are shit umbrellas - Bad managers are shit funnels
- azhenley 7y agoI need this on a motivational poster or something.
- jbredeche 7y agoI couldn't agree more.
- geebee 7y agobeautiful metaphor. anyway, I quasi-agree, though I've become suspicious of managers who claims to be an umbrella protecting their team from the rain. Half the time, they're really just trying to make sure their team doesn't see the forecast and quit.
- codegeek 7y agoTotally stealing this one.
- trhway 7y agosuch good PM/managers/leaders are very rare. Instead it is usually this way https://cheezburger.com/4626943488/corporate-ladder https://cheezburger.com/4626943488/corporate-ladder , just with even more levels in real life and resulting amplification of the signal.
- metanoia 7y agoUnfortunately, in my experience, I've had my fair share of "shit funnels" or "shit multipliers." That applies to any manager role, really. As a former product manager, I think of it as being at the bottom of a canyon and shit rolling in from both edges of the canyon (business and technical). It's a hard job to do well and keep everyone happy.
- disintegore 7y agoYou are a creative fellow
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tyre 7y agoall leadership, generally. understand enough broader context to set direction, then distill, cut, and communicate what your team needs to know to do the work
- hinkley 7y agoAlas, some seem to be more interested in making sure everyone knows who's in charge and who's a peon in their little fiefdom.
- gumby 7y agoBest description I ever heard: “The job of the manager is to eliminate uncertainty.”
- rb808 7y agoI've heard this too, except it got really annoying to be working crazy hours doing annoying crap while you have a team of devs working 40 hrs working on interesting tech with not much pressure. I burnt out, now I delegate lots of crap work and it works better for me and I think the team as well as they get a wider perspective.
- david_shaw 7y ago> I burnt out, now I delegate lots of crap work and it works better for me and I think the team as well as they get a wider perspective. I think this is an underrated (but very accurate) opinion. While I'm not the founder of a company, I do have the tendency to shield my team from much of the insanity I deal with on a daily basis. I've made active, conscious efforts to stop doing this. When you shield your team from the harder, more hectic parts of the job, several things happen: (1) You burn out. A burned out leader is not an effective one. You're not doing your team any favors by forcing yourself into an impossible position. (2) Your team won't understand the pressures that are driving the business. Having a nice, relaxed work-week is great, but employees should at least be aware of high-pressure situations in the business. (3) Your team will get bored. Great teams like to work on challenging issues, and high-impact engineers like to work on high-impact problems. They want to grow. Exposing people to issues outside of their direct control and comfort zones will actually help make them more satisfied at work, even if it does come with a little added stress. These are issues that I've been working on, personally, for years. The gut reaction of "protecting" teams is often times not the best one for anyone involved.
- cosmodisk 7y agoRegarding 1st point: If you manage people-this is inevitable. I had plenty of situations where you know way more than you can tell anyone,yet you neet to put a face on just so could people carry on working. In most cases it's better for one person to be worried rather than the entire team.
- okr 7y agoAre we talking about business decisions? My experience is, that developers are only interested in taking that risk, if they also get a share in the company and get access to internals. "Your house, your decision, your money. We are just the hired gun to do the carpenting."
- enjo 7y agoI strongly disagree with this. You and everyone in your company are on a journey together, a leader who thinks that it’s their job to curate that journey inevitably fails. People know when you’re stressed or when things are tough... when you try to hide these things or deflect them away you erode trust and ultimately performance. The role of a good leader is contextualize hard information and provide support for the team as they internalize it and then act upon it...
- zerkten 7y ago> provide support for the team I'd be more specific and state that they should be consciously building systems to manage these things, even if it's done manually by them. This provides clarity about what and how things are being done, and let's them more easily scale (or kill) the process. The kill part is important because when you are thinking systematically you're more likely to be able to communicate the details, or other people can observe it and make recommendations. It's hard to kill things that leaders are effectively doing in secret and stealing time and attention from an org.
- hyperbovine 7y ago> You and everyone in your company are on a journey together Perhaps your comment was intended very narrowly, but this strikes me ... so not the way the 99.999% of people who are not in the founder/Valley/HN bubble think about their job. Chances are you employ these people, even at a small startup.