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I consumed a lot of blog posts like this before becoming a manager. It feels satisfying to read vague principles like this: > Facilitate wellbeing > Personal

I consumed a lot of blog posts like this before becoming a manager. It feels satisfying to read vague principles like this: > Facilitate wellbeing > Personal safety, dignity, and wellbeing of every team member are paramount. Team success is only success if team members feel good about it. But then you become an actual manager and realize that these are largely just feel-good aphorisms that don't really help navigate the hard work of being a manager. Don't get me wrong: I think "facilitate wellbeing" and similar tidbits are valid advice. Likewise, a manager who chooses to not facilitate wellbeing would clearly be in the wrong. But when you get into management you realize that the hard work isn't waking up and deciding to facilitate wellbeing. The hard work often involves making unpopular decisions, or telling someone "no" when their pet request wouldn't be in the best interests of the team, or defusing interpersonal conflict among two team members who have been feuding for months. These feel-good blog posts seem rather vacuous after being in the trenches of management for several years. Again, not because the advice is bad or wrong, but because it's just a lot of text around the basics of being a decent human being. Learning how to do the hard things about management or how to make unpopular but necessary decisions is something that you won't learn from the average blog post or LinkedIn post, largely because these function more as personal branding pieces than actual advice. In my experience, the best management advice comes from talking to the best managers you know personally. Online, the most practical management advice comes on smaller forums where people are either anonymous (and therefore less interested in personal brand building) or older and accomplished (and therefore not worried about blowback impacting their career). The type of feel-good blog posts or LinkedIn blurbs that people associate with their personal brand don't really add much value after you've read 5-10 articles saying the exact same aphorisms.

jahbrewski 5y ago
Good feedback here. Do you have any example “smaller forums” that you have found particularly helpful?
- superzadeh 5y ago
  teams at work is a good one: https://bunch.ai/slack-community https://bunch.ai/slack-community
  - reasonabl_human 5y ago
    Is this something you use personally?
ttoinou 5y ago
Thank you for bringing a different opinion. I feel like the "Thats the spirit!" crowd liking this kind of blog posts are employees who don't know what their manager are going through dealing with them
TameAntelope 5y ago
I think "facilitate wellbeing" is more than just a feel-good aphorism, because it really does help when there's a difficult decision on your desk, at least for me. My instinct is to push hard, let "the most correct" idea win, and not really give a shit about how it impacts others. All, as you know, awful, very bad, no good ways of managing. Being reminded that one of my primary jobs is to "facilitate wellbeing" helps keep me grounded. Let someone take the day off even if there's a deadline looming, be cool with a later start date than would be perfect, take that vacation week and really don't plug in, a) for yourself and b) to show that as acceptable behavior for your team to do as well. None of this is how I, naturally, would behave, and I need to be reminded and continually work at doing things like that, for the sake of the health of my team. None of this is theoretical in my view, I see it as specific and practical advice.
- hitekker 5y ago
  What you're speaking of is "Prioritize Wellbeing" which is a worthy belief to hold and to remind ourselves as engineering managers. However, the specific word used by the OP is "Facilitate" which gives managers the leeway to be weak and lazy. A manager can say "I let my team take PTO a few days each quarter, I facilitated their well-being!" while they passively allow their stakeholders to dictate the workload of their engineers, with zero pushback. In practice, "Prioritize" basically means conflict and action, "facilitate" means whatever the manager wants it to mean. Going further: most "principles" like the kind the OP wrote are designed for a manager's self-therapy. Beliefs that justify decisions the manager has already taken, dressed up in nice-looking words, the kind of drivel that influencers peddle on LinkedIn. Whereas real principles that the GP refers to are meant for self-discipline. Beliefs that call into question decisions, and force the manager to really think their next steps through carefully.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    I just don't see how you can read "facilitate wellbeing" and be this upset about it, especially given how you feel about "prioritize wellbeing".
willturman 5y ago
> Again, not because the advice is bad or wrong, but because it's just a lot of text around the basics of being a decent human being. Judging by the trends observed in the Great Resignation [1] and the popularity of forums like /r/antiwork, it seems that the basics of being a decent human being are often being overlooked by management. I took a very different interpretation of what facilitating wellbeing looks like than you - interpreting facilitating wellbeing as being flexible when team members need some time to navigate their personal lives, scheduling project timelines and scoping work to necessitate productive work while alleviating burn-out, providing space for people to discuss ideas or provide feedback in a team setting, allowing for growth or transition into roles they may find more interesting or rewarding. Facilitating wellbeing doesn't conflict with making necessary but perhaps unpopular decisions, or de-prioritizing a pet project or whatever - it's much more basic than that. [1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/interactive-quits-level-by-year.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...
- marcinzm 5y ago
  >it seems that the basics of being a decent human being are often being overlooked by management. People working in tech companies may not realize how un-decent a lot of other companies and their management are.
  - redisman 5y ago
    Tech is hardly a paragon of good management. I can count on two fingers the amount of skilled managers I’ve had in my 15 year career. Both got promoted out of line management very quickly because they were too good. Some have been truly terrible and abusive towards their team.
    - nuancebydefault 5y ago
      This!
- pkaye 5y ago
  There are a lot of shitty employers and employees around and the rest are trying to avoid them by different means.
cjalmeida 5y ago
You would be amazed at the number of managers that largely ignore the "feel-good" part of the job, or even contribute to the workplace being a crappy place to work. Like the author said, actively improving the working environment when possible earns you "currency" and trust into making unpopular decisions easier to swallow.
lbriner 5y ago
You are right but there is something that has to underpin all of this advice and that is openness, honesty and balance. Openness because you should be able to communicate why something might not be possible in unambiguous terms; honesty so people know they can trust you and that you will tell people the truth and not try and avoid it; and balance because you will be prepared to go some distance for an employee for the benefit of the business but this is not unlimited. It can be hard to tell someone they are not performing well but it is much easier with those principles in mind, "I think these are areas that you are not performing well in, if I can help you achieve those then please let me know how, otherwise I need someone who can do this job that you were employed to do".
kemiller 5y ago
I think this is a result of the persistent flawed way most companies look at management. The author points at it when he says that most managers are strong in execution, and that's true — it's viewed as the baseline trait for any manager. But execution and maintaining well-being are fundamentally in tension, and most of the time, execution wins if a choice is forced. I think we need to be splitting the role into ones focused on each of these competencies. This sometimes happens informally as it is, but making it formal would change the hiring patterns and maybe lead to better outcomes for everyone.
vasco 5y ago
This right here is the juice. Generic management advice is like relationship advice. Be honest, care about the other person, respect the other person and so on. But anyone that's been in a relationship knows it's way more about breathing deep twice when you see the dishes not clean or whatever annoys you than the rest of it. Obviously you need to try and be honest, but good outcomes are created first and foremost from adequately dealing with daily situations in a balanced manner. There's no playbook for being a good manager the same way there's no playbook for being a good partner or a good parent. The playbook would have to be too generic or too specific and end up being mostly useless. Best you can get is someone who genuinely tries to improve and listens to you because they seem to care about you. If that takes the form of "how was your weekend" in the beginning of a 1-1 or having your back in a compensation review, that all depends on the situations.
hintymad 5y ago
Similar feeling. These principles somehow do not help me make decisions or build mechanisms for my teams. On the other hand, the principles in the book Turn the Ship Around, the book No Rules Rule, and Amazon's 14 leadership principles helped me a lot because they give clear guidelines on how to make trade-offs. In particular, Turn the Ship Around advocates pursuing excellence instead of minimizing errors. Netflix advocates Freedom and Responsibility. Amazon advocates working backwards (customer obsession) and making two-way door decisions. More importantly, they prescribe a system to balance trade-offs especially when there's conflicting choices. For instance, Turn the Ship Around explores how to make sure everyone delivers yet the leader can fully delegate responsibilities -- it's not surprising that it requires a system.
- nickff 5y ago
  I was a bit skeptical of "Turn the Ship Around" because of its title, and despite all the positive reviews, but it's one of the best management books I've ever read. It's definitely worth a read, even if you're not a manager, as it applies to any team-related activity, and provides a useful toolkit for improving your team, whether you're the leader or not.
  - hintymad 5y ago
    Yeah, the book also passes Taleb's Skin in the Game test: the author is also the practitioner of what he wrote about.
    - kqr 5y ago
      Hm. That's a generous take. Marquet lived the experience once. Now he goes around and lectures people in it instead. I have all respect for Marquet and I agree with most of the things he says about leadership, as well as try to apply it daily myself. But my best reading of Taleb is that the sort of thing Marquet does (potentially get lucky, extract oneself from the situation, and then live off of the one experience), that's the opposite of skin in the game.
      - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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kqr 5y ago
> The hard work often involves making unpopular decisions, or telling someone "no" when their pet request wouldn't be in the best interests of the team I realise I'm just plucking a small point out of a large comment here, but I'd like to drill down into this one a little. My very limited experience is that teams can generally self-manage this sort of thing. You tell them what you're trying to optimise, under what constraints, and lay down some ground rules for equal and fair participation, and then the team can make their own tough decisions and tell each other when they're not acting in the best interest of the team. What am I missing?
- jseban 5y ago
  > My very limited experience is that teams can generally self-manage this sort of thing. My experience is that they can absolutely not self-manage these things, it leads to literally living out lord of the flies in chaotic and dysfunctional teams, that are full of infected conflicts and stalled progress. On the other hand, what exactly is it that gives you the impression that decision making is suddenly not needed? And what makes you believe that a group of people with different goals and interests, should spontaneously just "get along", especially when there's money involved?
- turdnagel 5y ago
  It entirely depends on the dynamics of the team.
- NateEag 5y ago
  I think what you're missing is that most humans are not what Netflix calls "fully-formed adults." If your team consists of mature, kind, focused, skilled, honest, emotionally well-regulated people, then yes, the team can self-organize well. That's very, very unusual, though. I don't think I've personally ever been on a team that consisted solely of such people (and, to be clear, though I strive for those things, I wouldn't say I've got them all nailed down perfectly).
deleted 5y ago
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tootie 5y ago
It also seems like 99% of management advice is about how to manage down. Not topics like how to set expectations with stakeholders, how to fight for budget, how to get your team positioned for highly visible work.
- computerdork 5y ago
  And office politics can be brutal, especially in large organizations - watching out for other teams trying to trap you into unrealistic deadlines, pushing their work on to you, deflecting blame - You want to be a team player and help the company achieve its goals, but there are can be a lot of pitfalls to look out for when others teams depend on you and your team's work.
acjohnson55 5y ago
Author here. I think the lack of specificity is a fair criticism of what I wrote in the piece, but this is also something I was very aware of when I wrote it, which is why this caveat is included: > The management principles below reflect lessons I have learned the hard way. These are things I wish I would have known and internalized when I first became a manager. By keeping this brief, I hope that it will be easily consumed, perhaps at the cost of people being able to fully understand each point. Maybe at some point, this expands into multiple pieces or a short book, but for now, this is what I've produced. It won't be specific enough to be useful to everyone, but hopefully some folks find it helpful. There is no manual to being a good manager. Only ideas you can project into your own approach.
- gmfawcett 5y ago
  Eh, there are literally thousands of manuals on being a good manager. Still I hope people find your contribution helpful!
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    I could have phrased it better, but my point is that no single book on management can reliably make people into good managers, any more than a single book on engineering can make people into good engineers.
    - fuzzfactor 5y ago
      Some people may say some points are common sense, but when you condense your personal perspective it adds the depth of your experience without having to write a book. When managers of unrelated industries come up with some similar preferred practices, that can show fair agreement that it's more likely to be worthwhile. People need to realize there are lots of companies that fail on almost all of the eleven points you have here, and if the right key person were to just take your page to heart and follow it with action it would be like a breath of fresh air across the entire project environment. Like they have never seen.
- wheaties 5y ago
StopDarkPattern 5y ago
Honestly the blog post was really half assed and referenced very little cited sources or material. What does it deserve like a 3/10?
moonhorse 5y ago
True. Recently one of the sales directors at my company threatens the CEO to make him a "co-founder" (which basically means granting him a lot of option), or he will quit. He is responsible for half of our revenue, and he has been empire-building in his org for a while, so that his team answers to him, not the company. If we cut him off, very likely he (and a few key leaders) would deflect to our main competitor with our sales pipeline, and do some real damage. Very brutal situation for the CEO. I can not imagine learning how to handle this in any water-downed advice.

jahbrewski 5y ago

Good feedback here. Do you have any example “smaller forums” that you have found particularly helpful?

superzadeh 5y ago
teams at work is a good one: https://bunch.ai/slack-community https://bunch.ai/slack-community
- reasonabl_human 5y ago
  Is this something you use personally?

ttoinou 5y ago

Thank you for bringing a different opinion. I feel like the "Thats the spirit!" crowd liking this kind of blog posts are employees who don't know what their manager are going through dealing with them

TameAntelope 5y ago

I think "facilitate wellbeing" is more than just a feel-good aphorism, because it really does help when there's a difficult decision on your desk, at least for me. My instinct is to push hard, let "the most correct" idea win, and not really give a shit about how it impacts others. All, as you know, awful, very bad, no good ways of managing. Being reminded that one of my primary jobs is to "facilitate wellbeing" helps keep me grounded. Let someone take the day off even if there's a deadline looming, be cool with a later start date than would be perfect, take that vacation week and really don't plug in, a) for yourself and b) to show that as acceptable behavior for your team to do as well. None of this is how I, naturally, would behave, and I need to be reminded and continually work at doing things like that, for the sake of the health of my team. None of this is theoretical in my view, I see it as specific and practical advice.

hitekker 5y ago
What you're speaking of is "Prioritize Wellbeing" which is a worthy belief to hold and to remind ourselves as engineering managers. However, the specific word used by the OP is "Facilitate" which gives managers the leeway to be weak and lazy. A manager can say "I let my team take PTO a few days each quarter, I facilitated their well-being!" while they passively allow their stakeholders to dictate the workload of their engineers, with zero pushback. In practice, "Prioritize" basically means conflict and action, "facilitate" means whatever the manager wants it to mean. Going further: most "principles" like the kind the OP wrote are designed for a manager's self-therapy. Beliefs that justify decisions the manager has already taken, dressed up in nice-looking words, the kind of drivel that influencers peddle on LinkedIn. Whereas real principles that the GP refers to are meant for self-discipline. Beliefs that call into question decisions, and force the manager to really think their next steps through carefully.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  I just don't see how you can read "facilitate wellbeing" and be this upset about it, especially given how you feel about "prioritize wellbeing".

willturman 5y ago

> Again, not because the advice is bad or wrong, but because it's just a lot of text around the basics of being a decent human being. Judging by the trends observed in the Great Resignation [1] and the popularity of forums like /r/antiwork, it seems that the basics of being a decent human being are often being overlooked by management. I took a very different interpretation of what facilitating wellbeing looks like than you - interpreting facilitating wellbeing as being flexible when team members need some time to navigate their personal lives, scheduling project timelines and scoping work to necessitate productive work while alleviating burn-out, providing space for people to discuss ideas or provide feedback in a team setting, allowing for growth or transition into roles they may find more interesting or rewarding. Facilitating wellbeing doesn't conflict with making necessary but perhaps unpopular decisions, or de-prioritizing a pet project or whatever - it's much more basic than that. [1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/interactive-quits-level-by-year.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...

marcinzm 5y ago
>it seems that the basics of being a decent human being are often being overlooked by management. People working in tech companies may not realize how un-decent a lot of other companies and their management are.
- redisman 5y ago
  Tech is hardly a paragon of good management. I can count on two fingers the amount of skilled managers I’ve had in my 15 year career. Both got promoted out of line management very quickly because they were too good. Some have been truly terrible and abusive towards their team.
  - nuancebydefault 5y ago
    This!
pkaye 5y ago
There are a lot of shitty employers and employees around and the rest are trying to avoid them by different means.

cjalmeida 5y ago

You would be amazed at the number of managers that largely ignore the "feel-good" part of the job, or even contribute to the workplace being a crappy place to work. Like the author said, actively improving the working environment when possible earns you "currency" and trust into making unpopular decisions easier to swallow.

lbriner 5y ago

You are right but there is something that has to underpin all of this advice and that is openness, honesty and balance. Openness because you should be able to communicate why something might not be possible in unambiguous terms; honesty so people know they can trust you and that you will tell people the truth and not try and avoid it; and balance because you will be prepared to go some distance for an employee for the benefit of the business but this is not unlimited. It can be hard to tell someone they are not performing well but it is much easier with those principles in mind, "I think these are areas that you are not performing well in, if I can help you achieve those then please let me know how, otherwise I need someone who can do this job that you were employed to do".

kemiller 5y ago

I think this is a result of the persistent flawed way most companies look at management. The author points at it when he says that most managers are strong in execution, and that's true — it's viewed as the baseline trait for any manager. But execution and maintaining well-being are fundamentally in tension, and most of the time, execution wins if a choice is forced. I think we need to be splitting the role into ones focused on each of these competencies. This sometimes happens informally as it is, but making it formal would change the hiring patterns and maybe lead to better outcomes for everyone.

vasco 5y ago

This right here is the juice. Generic management advice is like relationship advice. Be honest, care about the other person, respect the other person and so on. But anyone that's been in a relationship knows it's way more about breathing deep twice when you see the dishes not clean or whatever annoys you than the rest of it. Obviously you need to try and be honest, but good outcomes are created first and foremost from adequately dealing with daily situations in a balanced manner. There's no playbook for being a good manager the same way there's no playbook for being a good partner or a good parent. The playbook would have to be too generic or too specific and end up being mostly useless. Best you can get is someone who genuinely tries to improve and listens to you because they seem to care about you. If that takes the form of "how was your weekend" in the beginning of a 1-1 or having your back in a compensation review, that all depends on the situations.

hintymad 5y ago

Similar feeling. These principles somehow do not help me make decisions or build mechanisms for my teams. On the other hand, the principles in the book Turn the Ship Around, the book No Rules Rule, and Amazon's 14 leadership principles helped me a lot because they give clear guidelines on how to make trade-offs. In particular, Turn the Ship Around advocates pursuing excellence instead of minimizing errors. Netflix advocates Freedom and Responsibility. Amazon advocates working backwards (customer obsession) and making two-way door decisions. More importantly, they prescribe a system to balance trade-offs especially when there's conflicting choices. For instance, Turn the Ship Around explores how to make sure everyone delivers yet the leader can fully delegate responsibilities -- it's not surprising that it requires a system.

nickff 5y ago
I was a bit skeptical of "Turn the Ship Around" because of its title, and despite all the positive reviews, but it's one of the best management books I've ever read. It's definitely worth a read, even if you're not a manager, as it applies to any team-related activity, and provides a useful toolkit for improving your team, whether you're the leader or not.
- hintymad 5y ago
  Yeah, the book also passes Taleb's Skin in the Game test: the author is also the practitioner of what he wrote about.
  - kqr 5y ago
    Hm. That's a generous take. Marquet lived the experience once. Now he goes around and lectures people in it instead. I have all respect for Marquet and I agree with most of the things he says about leadership, as well as try to apply it daily myself. But my best reading of Taleb is that the sort of thing Marquet does (potentially get lucky, extract oneself from the situation, and then live off of the one experience), that's the opposite of skin in the game.
    - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kqr 5y ago

> The hard work often involves making unpopular decisions, or telling someone "no" when their pet request wouldn't be in the best interests of the team I realise I'm just plucking a small point out of a large comment here, but I'd like to drill down into this one a little. My very limited experience is that teams can generally self-manage this sort of thing. You tell them what you're trying to optimise, under what constraints, and lay down some ground rules for equal and fair participation, and then the team can make their own tough decisions and tell each other when they're not acting in the best interest of the team. What am I missing?

jseban 5y ago
> My very limited experience is that teams can generally self-manage this sort of thing. My experience is that they can absolutely not self-manage these things, it leads to literally living out lord of the flies in chaotic and dysfunctional teams, that are full of infected conflicts and stalled progress. On the other hand, what exactly is it that gives you the impression that decision making is suddenly not needed? And what makes you believe that a group of people with different goals and interests, should spontaneously just "get along", especially when there's money involved?
turdnagel 5y ago
It entirely depends on the dynamics of the team.
NateEag 5y ago
I think what you're missing is that most humans are not what Netflix calls "fully-formed adults." If your team consists of mature, kind, focused, skilled, honest, emotionally well-regulated people, then yes, the team can self-organize well. That's very, very unusual, though. I don't think I've personally ever been on a team that consisted solely of such people (and, to be clear, though I strive for those things, I wouldn't say I've got them all nailed down perfectly).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tootie 5y ago

It also seems like 99% of management advice is about how to manage down. Not topics like how to set expectations with stakeholders, how to fight for budget, how to get your team positioned for highly visible work.

computerdork 5y ago
And office politics can be brutal, especially in large organizations - watching out for other teams trying to trap you into unrealistic deadlines, pushing their work on to you, deflecting blame - You want to be a team player and help the company achieve its goals, but there are can be a lot of pitfalls to look out for when others teams depend on you and your team's work.

acjohnson55 5y ago

Author here. I think the lack of specificity is a fair criticism of what I wrote in the piece, but this is also something I was very aware of when I wrote it, which is why this caveat is included: > The management principles below reflect lessons I have learned the hard way. These are things I wish I would have known and internalized when I first became a manager. By keeping this brief, I hope that it will be easily consumed, perhaps at the cost of people being able to fully understand each point. Maybe at some point, this expands into multiple pieces or a short book, but for now, this is what I've produced. It won't be specific enough to be useful to everyone, but hopefully some folks find it helpful. There is no manual to being a good manager. Only ideas you can project into your own approach.

gmfawcett 5y ago
Eh, there are literally thousands of manuals on being a good manager. Still I hope people find your contribution helpful!
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  I could have phrased it better, but my point is that no single book on management can reliably make people into good managers, any more than a single book on engineering can make people into good engineers.
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    Some people may say some points are common sense, but when you condense your personal perspective it adds the depth of your experience without having to write a book. When managers of unrelated industries come up with some similar preferred practices, that can show fair agreement that it's more likely to be worthwhile. People need to realize there are lots of companies that fail on almost all of the eleven points you have here, and if the right key person were to just take your page to heart and follow it with action it would be like a breath of fresh air across the entire project environment. Like they have never seen.
wheaties 5y ago

StopDarkPattern 5y ago

Honestly the blog post was really half assed and referenced very little cited sources or material. What does it deserve like a 3/10?

moonhorse 5y ago

True. Recently one of the sales directors at my company threatens the CEO to make him a "co-founder" (which basically means granting him a lot of option), or he will quit. He is responsible for half of our revenue, and he has been empire-building in his org for a while, so that his team answers to him, not the company. If we cut him off, very likely he (and a few key leaders) would deflect to our main competitor with our sales pipeline, and do some real damage. Very brutal situation for the CEO. I can not imagine learning how to handle this in any water-downed advice.