Management Thoughts - People
A collection of ideas around people management
The Meta
I believe a people manager’s job is that of the gardener. We help each plant grow happily, and give it a place that makes sense for the whole. I also believe that plants mostly grow by themselves, for the most part. You don’t pull on the stem to make it taller. You see to the soil, the light and the water, you prune what’s hurting the plant and stake what’s leaning, and then you mostly get out of the way and let the growing happen. A manager who thinks they are the one doing the growing is in for a sad season.
Managing people towards conscious happiness
I also believe work is a subset of life, not the other way around. Wanting to do what you’re doing and deriving meaning from it is a blessing, and a rarer one than it should be. So when I manage people the real target isn’t output (output is just the part you can see). The target is the conditions under which good output happens by itself: people who are growing, who feel real ownership, and who know why any of it matters.
Conveniently, that is more or less Dan Pink’s trinity (Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose), which I’ve found to be less a theory of management and more a description of when humans are happy to be busy.
- Mastery is the quiet, durable satisfaction of getting better at something that matters.
- Ladder of Skills. Everyone is somewhere on a ladder, and the job is to know which rung each person is on and hand them the next one (a task that stretches them without snapping them). Too easy and they rot, too hard and they freeze. The sweet spot is the zone of proximal development, borrowed wholesale from how a good tutor works.
- Challenges & Gamification. Growth feels best when it feels like a game you chose to play. Clear goals, quick feedback, the chance to beat your own past self. Not the cynical badges-and-points kind, the kind where the work itself is the level you’re trying to clear.
- Delegation and patience. You can’t grow someone by doing their reps for them. Delegation is just letting people climb, and patience is resisting the urge to grab the stem when they wobble. Letting them do it a bit worse than you would, for a while, is how they eventually do it better than you can.
- Autonomy is the sense that you are an agent, not a tool being operated.
- Delegation, by consequence. Not everything deserves the same caution. I sort decisions by how reversible they are (two-way doors vs one-way doors). If a choice is cheap to undo, hand it over completely and let people learn by walking through the door, and save your worry for the ones that don’t swing back. Treating every door as one-way is a good way to accidentally teach learned helplessness.
- Collaboration. Autonomy isn’t isolation. The aim is people who can choose to depend on each other, not people who have to be routed through me.
- Strategic thinking / self-effectiveness. The most autonomous person is the one who can manage themselves, so the long game is making myself a little more unnecessary every quarter.
- Purpose is the part no spreadsheet catches.
- Intrinsic motivation. The strongest fuel is the kind that doesn’t run out when the incentive is removed. Mostly my job is to not extinguish it, to keep people away from the meaningless grind, the theatre, and the thousand small indignities that quietly turn a vocation into a job.
- Optimal attitudes. A team takes its weather from how its people regard the work and each other, so I try to model something close to unconditional positive regard (assume good faith, default to encouragement). Attitudes, happily, can be adopted.
- What are we affecting, and why. Purpose is just the honest answer to “who is better off because we did this, and do we actually believe it?”, asked often and meant.
The gardener doesn’t get to take credit for the bloom. But a good one can quietly take credit for the garden.