January 17, 2018 at 14:05How to kill a techie in team lead
In IT, line managers and team leaders are traditionally recruited from the best engineers. Their work now is completely different: to manage people and interact with other teams and organizations. The initial message “I know better how to” often leads to the combination of two extremes in one leader at the same time: the absence of delegation and total control. Both that and another at all does not leave neither time, nor forces for management. Alexander Trofimov from Kaspersky Lab will talk about how to cope with all this and what other obstacles may be encountered on the path of the newly-minted leader, based on his own experience and personally stuffed bumps.
The publication is based on the decoding of the report of Alexander Trofimov with HighLoad ++ 2017
About the speaker
Alexander Trofimov,
Head of the department at Kaspersky Lab. In the “other”, engineering life was a system administrator, security consultant, technical support officer, Microsoft MVP, and a speaker at technical conferences.
Now, in addition to leadership, she is interested in topics of self-development, personal productivity and management.
I have been working at Kaspersky Lab for ten years, I have been managing divisions for six years, and I am slowly starting to understand what kind of pain does happen in our life.
I used to be a good engineer, I had Microsoft MVP for 7 years, but then everything changed. How has it changed? I’ll talk about this now.
You may not be able to directly take advantage of my experience, but, nevertheless, the patterns that I will talk about are quite common, I see them both among my colleagues and subordinates. And I recommend at least trying to apply what I’ll talk about - it will be useful and at least show that it is possible to fight this scourge.
So we have become leaders. What has changed?
The picture, I think, is clear to everyone. Absolutely vulgar symbol. "We are responsible for those who have tamed."
The most important thing that happened: you ceased to be directly responsible for the system - you began to be responsible for people. These people are not you at all, they are somehow doing something there. In my own way. Not the way you love, not the way you want. And you are responsible for this whole mess. For people, for systems. These are not empty words, you not only got some weekly reports, the opportunity to punish or award with a prize, a salary, but also other wonderful things.
I was once at a training, and the insight, as they say now, really came to me there. I was pushed from this responsibility.
You have pencils and pens, you have a notebook, and whoever wants to, can try training with me now. The bottom line is as follows. Today I will portray your leader. I get a task - a certain picture. Well, let's say we are a design agency. I tell you in simple terms what you and I need to do, and you are trying to do it.
If you want to practice, take a blank sheet and pen. Now we will draw. I will say what exactly, and you will sketch. Quickly, because the deadline is, as usual, yesterday. Once again: we draw quickly, simply. No perfection needed. So let's go.
We draw two vertical intersecting ovals, so that in the middle they have nothing.
Draw as you understood how you understood.
In each oval we put a thick dot, such a big black circle. We draw a semicircle above them. From each of the ovals from above, draw along the arc to the side. Above each arc we place 3 triangles. And now, from the lower edge of our semicircle, which we drew, on each side we draw a small arc, but convex inside the entire drawing. From both edges of this arc we draw still down the arc so that they intersect below.
Now, you are smiling, but you need to draw something - otherwise there will be no prize.
We connect those places where they intersect in a semicircle that is convex downward, and below this semicircle we make two groups of three small interlocking ovals.
I saw the original image, so it's hard for me to ruin it a lot. According to my own description, I drew this:
We will consider this an ideal, because this is what the leader drew. Who did better? Please show. Wow, you're better than me, better than a leader. I will take a picture later. Excellent. We needed to draw this:
Funny huh? It was funny for us at this training. True. And it was a great training. The coach was no worse, and most likely better than me, but then he asked us a question. That is, not for us, but for this wonderful leader: “Guys, did your team work well? Did you work well as a team? After all, there are options - there are cobras, I don’t know there, something very beautiful. Attention, the second question: will we give you a prize? ” Opinions are divided. In this part of the hall, I see, apparently, still an engineer, and there I see the Chief Executive Officer. In between is an unhappy manager who doesn't really know, because he sees his team, which really worked well. He understands that he is a handshake, that is, I’m a handshake, sorry, guys, except for one person who painted an owl better than me, but I won’t give you a prize. And this feeling of responsibility should actually pass, you should understand that it’s like in that old joke: your workplace is your mouth, you have closed your mouth, your workplace has been removed. And if you use this place incorrectly, then your people and your company suffer.
Actually, all this is good, but what else has changed?
The amount of information has changed. So I personally love Guiness beer, or imagine something else - craft is fashionable now. And it’s very good when you have a personal personal tap and a mug. Here tap is your mail. I do not know how many letters an engineer receives? Five, twenty a day? Well, another fifteen hundred from the robots - but it's all uninteresting. As a result, five to twenty letters a day. Occasionally he will be called to some meeting. And everything's good. There is one personal tap from which information is poured, there is his head, that is, a circle in which he pours. He becomes a leader. Beer is getting really, really big.
It's good. It's very nice. But there is a problem - these tapas do not close, and the mug is still one. Over time, it becomes a little bigger - it stretches. Nevertheless, she’s all the same alone, and the tapes are already 9-10-15 - someone as lucky. Some are lucky, and they still have three or four tapas - but this is still very much, it is very difficult to digest it yourself, but at first it is necessary. And this, in principle, is possible, but there are ambushes on the way.
Today I will talk only about two of them. Why about them? In fact, simply because it was a pain for me, I got into it in full measure and I froze through these two ambushes. And today I’ll tell you how.
Ambush number one: "I know the way!" Who in our industry, at least in those companies that I have observed, are appointed managers? Usually the best engineers. What's good with an engineer? He has good engineering work - he knows best how to do it. But all of these handshakes are actually worse than this engineer, they know how to do it, they squint more, work slower, they have to explain for a long time, in the end. And it turns out a wonderful picture: “Vasya, you’re a handshake, let’s bring me some coffee, and right now I’ll do it all for you quickly.” And, in principle, if the team is not very large, it works for a while. We turn into such octopus octopuses, we do everything for our entire team, for all eight or five people.
Some manage to do it for 12 people. And it seems that everything is fine, but in fact it is not that way.
I saw an engineer who became such a manager. Wonderful guy, well, let it be, say, Poluekt Poluektovich. A good, cheerful, soul of any company, completely open, an excellent engineer. He came to lead one of our divisions and really began to do everything for them. There were more than 10 people, he really had time to do everything for them - on duty, monitoring, repairing, setting up something. He did everything except managerial work. The result is logical - the reputation of his group is lower than the plinth, his personal reputation is also very shaky.
The end of the story in this case is good - he found the strength in himself, returned to the engineers (this is possible with us, this is not punishable for us) and now he works, is happy, one of the best and most talented engineers of the third line of our system administrators. He receives a salary, probably more than he received when he was a leader (by the way, we also have such a thing), and I am happy. And I am happy that he is on our team and is no longer engaged in leadership, because his experience has been enriched, he is an excellent engineer who understands the problems of business, but at the same time he does what he likes.
What to do? Here I am forced to step back a bit from my canons, because I tried to draw terracotta warriors, and I got a crowd of militant gopniks -
so the picture will be stock, like this:
I was immediately given a large team, there were eight people in it. Eight people are not 100 taxi drivers, it’s really difficult to manage them, these are high-level engineers who know a lot and know how. At that time, in terms of knowledge, I covered, in principle, 90% of their fields, but I simply could not work for them. Yes, I had other schools and problems, but, nevertheless, I did not try to work for them. And that was happiness. And what about those who are not so lucky as me?
Now there will be an extremely pixelated video, I hope that it will still be with the voice, but, if anything, there is an interlinear. Let's watch it for 40 seconds ( playback will start just from the desired fragment ):
This video gives a very simple recipe - just don’t do it, stop doing it if someone is doing it. Is anyone even trying to do the work for their subordinates? Yes, there are many of us ... Stop it! Stop doing it. You are doing someone else's work, you are robbing Indians from Bangladesh.
How to do it? I understand that there is a problem - we do not trust these people, because they have not yet earned our trust, we worked with them as engineers, we saw how they shook hands, and here we are the leaders.
Option number 1, for example - do everything for them with their hands.
For example, I know which line needs to be corrected in the config. I say: “Vasya open the config, no, not Notepad, open it, please, Visual Studio, because it is xml'ny. Vasya, no, not this config. Here, thank you, well done. Correct the line. Not this line. Not this constant. Not 30, but 25 ”...
Total two bonuses. First, he will gradually learn. Secondly, you will make sure over time that he does not shake hands or shakes hands within acceptable limits, and cease to control him so tightly. But stopping this behavior is absolutely necessary. Where you cannot teach a person to do his work, and you do your own, something is wrong and something needs to be fixed. I don’t say the magic words “dismissal”, “loss of bonus” or anything else, but there is a problem that needs to be fixed. She must be found.
Well, the last option is to bring the size of your unit to 15 people. Then you will have no choice but to leave them alone. Well, or quit.
This raises the logical question: what are we now doing as managers, since we stopped editing configs, writing code, and I don’t know what else we do there as engineers?
Well, sometimes we load servers - it happens too, and we have to make sure that people get an owl. At least that. Ideally, better.
This is our most important work, which is why we can’t be distracted by going down and working for people. You have a lot of them, let them work, let them breathe out.
Ambush No. 2 is a ring of omnipotence, I call it that.
We got power. For someone, it is formal - it is the head of a group or department. Someone has a semi-formal one - it is often said that a team leader is a person who leads people, but cannot lead them. It doesn’t matter, we have power. They gave it to us, it is confirmed by our authority (as former techies), it is confirmed by our leadership, which came and said: “So, Fedya now leads you, Fedya gives you tasks, Fedya evaluates you.” And the temptation to use this power is great, because we can really control, within the framework of these eight working hours, a lot of what our people are doing.
In fact, this may even be good, because when you first became a leader (we repeat - we are only good techies, we are not good leaders yet, we don’t know what the whole group is, what obligations it has, patterns work, we can’t see it from the position of an ordinary engineer), we loop over all the information, begin to analyze it.
I will tell the story of my personal almost fakap. It really happened to me. Why I say that these are all personal experiences. I will not cry, do not expect.
I became a team leader about six years ago. The first thing I did, as I just said, was to drive completely all the flows of information, generally everything, not a single meeting was held without me, not a single meeting on any new project, even in writing, was held without me, all the correspondence of my people at work went through me. I repeat - this is probably normal. I saw other engineers who did the same when they became leaders. It helped me. After a while I went into this whole system, I realized what was going on, I started to figure it out.
What have I done yet? I started all my people - by that time there were already 10 people - 10 people began to issue a task for the day. To each: "Petya, you have five tasks a day today - such and such, such and such." I evaluated them according to the complexity of work with them, everything was fine, they managed, with difficulty, but managed to do it. I worked 12 hours a day. I came home at ten in the evening, we met with a colleague in Skype For Business (then it was Lync): “Hello, Vanya, hello, Sasha” ... And we started to recruit these ten people these tasks. That is, we flew the entire backlog, looked that more priority. The last thing I did - I made a tight schedule for visits from 10:00 to 6:30.
This is my personal, let's say, birth injury. I hope none of you have this, but nonetheless, I did. Unfortunately, I still had certain prerequisites for this. I'll tell you - it works. The performance of the guys, the group as a whole increased by 30-40 percent. I measured it, I'm a manager, I measure everything.
But there were problems. The people began to be a little dissatisfied with life, they were already preparing to lynch me. Worse still, people began to ponder slowly, but would they quit? And here, by the way, few people quit at all - that’s right, a minute of advertising.
As a result, I had to do something with this, because there was a real danger that the team would just fall apart - people were tired, they were frustrated, could not explore something new, because they were busy doing my tasks for the day, they came to 10:00 and left at 18:30.
What to do? From what I have said, it is obvious that control must be removed.
We take control. And here, I believe that any normal person should immediately have a question - here, let’s say, let them come when they want, they won’t come at all. Or they will come so apart that they will not communicate with each other, there will be no transfer of information within the unit. Or they will come so sooner or later that other people who need them will not be able to find them. And for all this, I just get on the head. Letting them choose tasks - then they will not work at all. It's true? Or, as an option, they will choose the simplest thing - something that could not be done. And still I will get on the head. In general, we get such a picture.
Whoever has no such doubts about their people at all, raise your hand. One, two ... Guys, I envy you. I envy you because I have not been so mature.
In all of this, in your life, at least somehow, the last has a role: if your guys do it, you’ll get a head. That’s right, it’s good, it should be so, but even this is not really interesting. A little later I’ll tell you how I came to the conclusion that I still decided to remove all this, but the main thing is that control should be removed.
How much to shoot it is also an interesting question. Just saying, "Guys, do what you want," will also fail. Some kind of control is necessary and, most funny, everyone needs their own control. I will not delve into this jungle, because this can be discussed separately for a few more hours or days. There is, for example, the theory of situational leadership by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard - if anyone has not heard, google it. If there is such a problem, read, an interesting thing, and it seems to work. For me, at least for sure.
How dare I let go of control? Well, I had several events, as I said. I began to slowly understand that due to the fact that I looped over the entire flow of information about what was happening, I learned how to live and process it somehow with this flow of information, because I already had not 5-12 letters day, and 300 letters a day, and somehow I live normally with this.
Secondly, I went through the so-called 360 review. This is a tool that everyone hates. Who knows what that is? Almost everyone knows. Who hates it? - This is the next question. Why? The answers are: “everything is wrong”, “it’s very difficult to get information from everyone”, but this is still such a procedural question ... And why, by the way, is it difficult? Nobody wants to speak badly, nobody wants to tell the truth, everyone will be next in the opposite direction.
There is an opinion that it is better to collect feedback live, but these are two not mutually exclusive tools. Live feedback must collect. But for some it’s just hard to do it, because, again, guys, we are better introverts. Who are the best engineers? Introverts. Go chat? I sat at the console for ten years. What did you tell me to do? To chat? With the director? Hello hello director, goodbye director. All right, absolutely perfect, but just not always possible.
And again - this tool is often used incorrectly. It is used to evaluate a person, raise or lower his salary, dismiss / punish / reward. This tool is not for this. This is an employee development tool. The first time I was offered it by our HR'ry. I went through it and suddenly realized what it was. The second time I ordered it myself. I didn’t order anymore, because the situation has changed a little, but if I have many subordinates again, I will order it again, because it’s a tool that, if applied correctly and correctly explained to everyone, what it is like a feedback tool, which tells you what your reputation is among your subordinates, colleagues and the leader.
By the way, with the leader - yes, there anonymity generally works to its full potential, I agree, but there are no problems. For some reason, some leaders find it easier to check the test and write something there than to tell you in person. At 360 I received a completely constructive response from my supervisor, but sometimes it’s almost impossible to get live feedback from him. Now it’s better, but still bad.
And this tool showed that I am the last bastard. So simple. At least among many of my counterparties in life there was an opinion that this is so. Actually, no, I'm a good guy - you see everything. But the reputation was like that. She was not catastrophic, she was somewhere two or three in some places. This is bad, but not horror-horror. And this revealed to me that the guys do not treat me very well.
Secondly, of course, books. The first book - it was "Drive" by Daniel Pink - was advised to me by the coach in the framework of the same 360. From there I drew an idea that was completely not obvious to myself then (thanks to those people who previously raised their hand that they absolutely trust their people), that if you trust people and let them do the work, they will do it. Yes, there are all sorts of nuances, but basically they like to work very much, they like it when they have work, when they can work, when they can come in the morning and dig deeper into something on the server, write code, write an application, fix it attachment. They love it, it inspires them, and they will do it if they are not touched.
The second book - Lesha Pimenov recommended it to me - is Patrick Lensioni "Five vices of the team." I don’t remember a damn thing from it, except that trust is the main thing in the team. People must be trusted. And after that I was somehow let go, I relaxed, began to have fun.
I told people: “Firstly, here is the backlog, here are the high-level tasks. I'm not interested in what you will do. Please, this one should be ready for this date. I will occasionally ask: are you, Vasya, doing this task or not? Because it is important to me, and I need to report to the management that we won’t take it, but I won’t figure out how you do it, what you do with it there - your problems, can do nothing, then last night I do not mind if this will work. If this does not work, we will talk with you, we will draw conclusions and there we will further understand. If this works, I'm generally happy. Not my headache, how you do it. ”
The second thing I said: “Guys, I understand your desire for a free schedule. Head. Because I am hurt by the army, it is difficult for me to understand this with my heart. Let’s do this: I have such-such-such-and-such problems (I stated them earlier - lack of communication in the group, lack of communication with colleagues and so on). Let's come up with a solution. ” We sat a couple of hours, really came up with a solution. We said the following - we have a free schedule, eight hours a day, and this is not discussed (we signed up for it when we got to work), and from 12 a.m. to 4 p.m. we should all be here. All.
What happened?
At some point in time, I became a lark and I think: “Now I will come to work at eight in the morning and work alone calmly.” Where there! I now come to work at eight in the morning, and four people are already sitting there. I sometimes come to work at eight in the evening - I forgot something - they are sitting there. My work day essentially expanded by four hours. That is, the coverage of working hours by the unit increased by four hours. Instead of working worse, they began to work better. Bastards (emoticon).
In addition to this, as I already said, well, one person resigned from the unit that I directly supervised and returned three months later. Now, of these, two people went abroad, the dollar has become twice as expensive, this dumps us a little.
What helps us in all of this? Firstly, it helps to listen. I have already said: your working body is your mouth. The mouth was closed - the workplace was removed. But the main thing is to listen. For me it was a 360 review, when I heard the opinion of colleagues and the opinion of subordinates. For you, it could be something else.
It helps a lot, for example, to have such a Pavlik Morozov ... No, not an informer and not an informant - these are bad words in our culture ... A person who will tell you completely uncomplicatedly what is happening in the unit. This happened to me. I had a wonderful custom - once a week to hold a planning meeting, that is, I gather all 14 people, put them in one office, and they begin to report who made what for the week. The tool is really chic in itself, because it allows you to generally be in the know about everything. This is the very beginning of my, so to speak, managerial career.
After a while, this one comes up to me, now let’s be Chetvertekt Chetvertektovich, and he is such a direct guy, very good, honest, but direct in general, just like a stick, and says: “Your people planes, let's say, demotivate, people are upset.” Of course, I immediately fired him, what should I do? Ha, only one person realized that this was a joke. Of course, I haven’t fired anyone yet and am not going to. I went to my people whom I have known for a long time. By that time, I had been working in the company for many years, I had those people with whom I started working with subordinates. I came to them, I said: “Guys, anyway, there is such information. This is true?" - "Yes it is". I sat, scratched my turnip, what should I do, and canceled the planning meetings. I found another way to do this, to be in control. But the person who tells you what is happening right at that moment, when this happens, more than once a year, when you go through 360, and right now I came, issued a new decree “I command you to do this with my royal grace,” and he immediately comes after this solo performance and says: “Sasha, made nonsense, let's roll back. " This is generally a priceless thing. Feedback is always good.
What else helps? As I said, stop doing everything for them. Let them do their job. It is their job to work, their job is to edit configs, write code, fix errors, twist tails to databases. This is no longer your job. Stop doing other people's work, stop taking their bread. You, in the end, in a year, in two, in three, will start to do this work worse than they do, which means you will shake more than they do, and it’s better not to bring to this shame. Take away your rights, put the account in the safe and do not touch it.
Well, the last one, probably. This is what I said about control - we do not control every step they take, we, instead of controlling every step, control ourselves so that we transmit the information correctly (everyone remembered the owl or who got what happened). Our task is to convey the information correctly, we control that they understand us correctly. And by the way, every time they misunderstood us, who is to blame? Blame the one who spoke. Talking head. And we control the result we have reached. Then, in principle, these mistakes that have occurred to me (you probably also happen, for some), they will be a little less, a little less critical, it will be easier for you to cope with the consequences.
Friends, if the topic of managing development teams is more relevant for you than ever, we are sure that at our February conference TeamLeadConf 2018 you will find a lot of interesting and useful things. The program already has about 40 reports!
By the way, on the conference website we posted videos of ten of the most interesting last year's performances. Plus, for all Khabrovsk citizens, we have a HabrTeamLead2018 promo code that gives 11% discount.
The publication is based on the decoding of the report of Alexander Trofimov with HighLoad ++ 2017
About the speaker
Alexander Trofimov,
Head of the department at Kaspersky Lab. In the “other”, engineering life was a system administrator, security consultant, technical support officer, Microsoft MVP, and a speaker at technical conferences.
Now, in addition to leadership, she is interested in topics of self-development, personal productivity and management.
I have been working at Kaspersky Lab for ten years, I have been managing divisions for six years, and I am slowly starting to understand what kind of pain does happen in our life.
I used to be a good engineer, I had Microsoft MVP for 7 years, but then everything changed. How has it changed? I’ll talk about this now.
You may not be able to directly take advantage of my experience, but, nevertheless, the patterns that I will talk about are quite common, I see them both among my colleagues and subordinates. And I recommend at least trying to apply what I’ll talk about - it will be useful and at least show that it is possible to fight this scourge.
So we have become leaders. What has changed?
The picture, I think, is clear to everyone. Absolutely vulgar symbol. "We are responsible for those who have tamed."
The most important thing that happened: you ceased to be directly responsible for the system - you began to be responsible for people. These people are not you at all, they are somehow doing something there. In my own way. Not the way you love, not the way you want. And you are responsible for this whole mess. For people, for systems. These are not empty words, you not only got some weekly reports, the opportunity to punish or award with a prize, a salary, but also other wonderful things.
I was once at a training, and the insight, as they say now, really came to me there. I was pushed from this responsibility.
You have pencils and pens, you have a notebook, and whoever wants to, can try training with me now. The bottom line is as follows. Today I will portray your leader. I get a task - a certain picture. Well, let's say we are a design agency. I tell you in simple terms what you and I need to do, and you are trying to do it.
If you want to practice, take a blank sheet and pen. Now we will draw. I will say what exactly, and you will sketch. Quickly, because the deadline is, as usual, yesterday. Once again: we draw quickly, simply. No perfection needed. So let's go.
We draw two vertical intersecting ovals, so that in the middle they have nothing.
Draw as you understood how you understood.
In each oval we put a thick dot, such a big black circle. We draw a semicircle above them. From each of the ovals from above, draw along the arc to the side. Above each arc we place 3 triangles. And now, from the lower edge of our semicircle, which we drew, on each side we draw a small arc, but convex inside the entire drawing. From both edges of this arc we draw still down the arc so that they intersect below.
Now, you are smiling, but you need to draw something - otherwise there will be no prize.
We connect those places where they intersect in a semicircle that is convex downward, and below this semicircle we make two groups of three small interlocking ovals.
I saw the original image, so it's hard for me to ruin it a lot. According to my own description, I drew this:
We will consider this an ideal, because this is what the leader drew. Who did better? Please show. Wow, you're better than me, better than a leader. I will take a picture later. Excellent. We needed to draw this:
Funny huh? It was funny for us at this training. True. And it was a great training. The coach was no worse, and most likely better than me, but then he asked us a question. That is, not for us, but for this wonderful leader: “Guys, did your team work well? Did you work well as a team? After all, there are options - there are cobras, I don’t know there, something very beautiful. Attention, the second question: will we give you a prize? ” Opinions are divided. In this part of the hall, I see, apparently, still an engineer, and there I see the Chief Executive Officer. In between is an unhappy manager who doesn't really know, because he sees his team, which really worked well. He understands that he is a handshake, that is, I’m a handshake, sorry, guys, except for one person who painted an owl better than me, but I won’t give you a prize. And this feeling of responsibility should actually pass, you should understand that it’s like in that old joke: your workplace is your mouth, you have closed your mouth, your workplace has been removed. And if you use this place incorrectly, then your people and your company suffer.
Actually, all this is good, but what else has changed?
The amount of information has changed. So I personally love Guiness beer, or imagine something else - craft is fashionable now. And it’s very good when you have a personal personal tap and a mug. Here tap is your mail. I do not know how many letters an engineer receives? Five, twenty a day? Well, another fifteen hundred from the robots - but it's all uninteresting. As a result, five to twenty letters a day. Occasionally he will be called to some meeting. And everything's good. There is one personal tap from which information is poured, there is his head, that is, a circle in which he pours. He becomes a leader. Beer is getting really, really big.
It's good. It's very nice. But there is a problem - these tapas do not close, and the mug is still one. Over time, it becomes a little bigger - it stretches. Nevertheless, she’s all the same alone, and the tapes are already 9-10-15 - someone as lucky. Some are lucky, and they still have three or four tapas - but this is still very much, it is very difficult to digest it yourself, but at first it is necessary. And this, in principle, is possible, but there are ambushes on the way.
Today I will talk only about two of them. Why about them? In fact, simply because it was a pain for me, I got into it in full measure and I froze through these two ambushes. And today I’ll tell you how.
Ambush number one: "I know the way!" Who in our industry, at least in those companies that I have observed, are appointed managers? Usually the best engineers. What's good with an engineer? He has good engineering work - he knows best how to do it. But all of these handshakes are actually worse than this engineer, they know how to do it, they squint more, work slower, they have to explain for a long time, in the end. And it turns out a wonderful picture: “Vasya, you’re a handshake, let’s bring me some coffee, and right now I’ll do it all for you quickly.” And, in principle, if the team is not very large, it works for a while. We turn into such octopus octopuses, we do everything for our entire team, for all eight or five people.
Some manage to do it for 12 people. And it seems that everything is fine, but in fact it is not that way.
I saw an engineer who became such a manager. Wonderful guy, well, let it be, say, Poluekt Poluektovich. A good, cheerful, soul of any company, completely open, an excellent engineer. He came to lead one of our divisions and really began to do everything for them. There were more than 10 people, he really had time to do everything for them - on duty, monitoring, repairing, setting up something. He did everything except managerial work. The result is logical - the reputation of his group is lower than the plinth, his personal reputation is also very shaky.
The end of the story in this case is good - he found the strength in himself, returned to the engineers (this is possible with us, this is not punishable for us) and now he works, is happy, one of the best and most talented engineers of the third line of our system administrators. He receives a salary, probably more than he received when he was a leader (by the way, we also have such a thing), and I am happy. And I am happy that he is on our team and is no longer engaged in leadership, because his experience has been enriched, he is an excellent engineer who understands the problems of business, but at the same time he does what he likes.
What to do? Here I am forced to step back a bit from my canons, because I tried to draw terracotta warriors, and I got a crowd of militant gopniks -
so the picture will be stock, like this:
I was immediately given a large team, there were eight people in it. Eight people are not 100 taxi drivers, it’s really difficult to manage them, these are high-level engineers who know a lot and know how. At that time, in terms of knowledge, I covered, in principle, 90% of their fields, but I simply could not work for them. Yes, I had other schools and problems, but, nevertheless, I did not try to work for them. And that was happiness. And what about those who are not so lucky as me?
Now there will be an extremely pixelated video, I hope that it will still be with the voice, but, if anything, there is an interlinear. Let's watch it for 40 seconds ( playback will start just from the desired fragment ):
This video gives a very simple recipe - just don’t do it, stop doing it if someone is doing it. Is anyone even trying to do the work for their subordinates? Yes, there are many of us ... Stop it! Stop doing it. You are doing someone else's work, you are robbing Indians from Bangladesh.
How to do it? I understand that there is a problem - we do not trust these people, because they have not yet earned our trust, we worked with them as engineers, we saw how they shook hands, and here we are the leaders.
Option number 1, for example - do everything for them with their hands.
For example, I know which line needs to be corrected in the config. I say: “Vasya open the config, no, not Notepad, open it, please, Visual Studio, because it is xml'ny. Vasya, no, not this config. Here, thank you, well done. Correct the line. Not this line. Not this constant. Not 30, but 25 ”...
Total two bonuses. First, he will gradually learn. Secondly, you will make sure over time that he does not shake hands or shakes hands within acceptable limits, and cease to control him so tightly. But stopping this behavior is absolutely necessary. Where you cannot teach a person to do his work, and you do your own, something is wrong and something needs to be fixed. I don’t say the magic words “dismissal”, “loss of bonus” or anything else, but there is a problem that needs to be fixed. She must be found.
Well, the last option is to bring the size of your unit to 15 people. Then you will have no choice but to leave them alone. Well, or quit.
This raises the logical question: what are we now doing as managers, since we stopped editing configs, writing code, and I don’t know what else we do there as engineers?
Well, sometimes we load servers - it happens too, and we have to make sure that people get an owl. At least that. Ideally, better.
This is our most important work, which is why we can’t be distracted by going down and working for people. You have a lot of them, let them work, let them breathe out.
Ambush No. 2 is a ring of omnipotence, I call it that.
We got power. For someone, it is formal - it is the head of a group or department. Someone has a semi-formal one - it is often said that a team leader is a person who leads people, but cannot lead them. It doesn’t matter, we have power. They gave it to us, it is confirmed by our authority (as former techies), it is confirmed by our leadership, which came and said: “So, Fedya now leads you, Fedya gives you tasks, Fedya evaluates you.” And the temptation to use this power is great, because we can really control, within the framework of these eight working hours, a lot of what our people are doing.
In fact, this may even be good, because when you first became a leader (we repeat - we are only good techies, we are not good leaders yet, we don’t know what the whole group is, what obligations it has, patterns work, we can’t see it from the position of an ordinary engineer), we loop over all the information, begin to analyze it.
I will tell the story of my personal almost fakap. It really happened to me. Why I say that these are all personal experiences. I will not cry, do not expect.
I became a team leader about six years ago. The first thing I did, as I just said, was to drive completely all the flows of information, generally everything, not a single meeting was held without me, not a single meeting on any new project, even in writing, was held without me, all the correspondence of my people at work went through me. I repeat - this is probably normal. I saw other engineers who did the same when they became leaders. It helped me. After a while I went into this whole system, I realized what was going on, I started to figure it out.
What have I done yet? I started all my people - by that time there were already 10 people - 10 people began to issue a task for the day. To each: "Petya, you have five tasks a day today - such and such, such and such." I evaluated them according to the complexity of work with them, everything was fine, they managed, with difficulty, but managed to do it. I worked 12 hours a day. I came home at ten in the evening, we met with a colleague in Skype For Business (then it was Lync): “Hello, Vanya, hello, Sasha” ... And we started to recruit these ten people these tasks. That is, we flew the entire backlog, looked that more priority. The last thing I did - I made a tight schedule for visits from 10:00 to 6:30.
This is my personal, let's say, birth injury. I hope none of you have this, but nonetheless, I did. Unfortunately, I still had certain prerequisites for this. I'll tell you - it works. The performance of the guys, the group as a whole increased by 30-40 percent. I measured it, I'm a manager, I measure everything.
But there were problems. The people began to be a little dissatisfied with life, they were already preparing to lynch me. Worse still, people began to ponder slowly, but would they quit? And here, by the way, few people quit at all - that’s right, a minute of advertising.
As a result, I had to do something with this, because there was a real danger that the team would just fall apart - people were tired, they were frustrated, could not explore something new, because they were busy doing my tasks for the day, they came to 10:00 and left at 18:30.
What to do? From what I have said, it is obvious that control must be removed.
We take control. And here, I believe that any normal person should immediately have a question - here, let’s say, let them come when they want, they won’t come at all. Or they will come so apart that they will not communicate with each other, there will be no transfer of information within the unit. Or they will come so sooner or later that other people who need them will not be able to find them. And for all this, I just get on the head. Letting them choose tasks - then they will not work at all. It's true? Or, as an option, they will choose the simplest thing - something that could not be done. And still I will get on the head. In general, we get such a picture.
Whoever has no such doubts about their people at all, raise your hand. One, two ... Guys, I envy you. I envy you because I have not been so mature.
In all of this, in your life, at least somehow, the last has a role: if your guys do it, you’ll get a head. That’s right, it’s good, it should be so, but even this is not really interesting. A little later I’ll tell you how I came to the conclusion that I still decided to remove all this, but the main thing is that control should be removed.
How much to shoot it is also an interesting question. Just saying, "Guys, do what you want," will also fail. Some kind of control is necessary and, most funny, everyone needs their own control. I will not delve into this jungle, because this can be discussed separately for a few more hours or days. There is, for example, the theory of situational leadership by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard - if anyone has not heard, google it. If there is such a problem, read, an interesting thing, and it seems to work. For me, at least for sure.
How dare I let go of control? Well, I had several events, as I said. I began to slowly understand that due to the fact that I looped over the entire flow of information about what was happening, I learned how to live and process it somehow with this flow of information, because I already had not 5-12 letters day, and 300 letters a day, and somehow I live normally with this.
Secondly, I went through the so-called 360 review. This is a tool that everyone hates. Who knows what that is? Almost everyone knows. Who hates it? - This is the next question. Why? The answers are: “everything is wrong”, “it’s very difficult to get information from everyone”, but this is still such a procedural question ... And why, by the way, is it difficult? Nobody wants to speak badly, nobody wants to tell the truth, everyone will be next in the opposite direction.
There is an opinion that it is better to collect feedback live, but these are two not mutually exclusive tools. Live feedback must collect. But for some it’s just hard to do it, because, again, guys, we are better introverts. Who are the best engineers? Introverts. Go chat? I sat at the console for ten years. What did you tell me to do? To chat? With the director? Hello hello director, goodbye director. All right, absolutely perfect, but just not always possible.
And again - this tool is often used incorrectly. It is used to evaluate a person, raise or lower his salary, dismiss / punish / reward. This tool is not for this. This is an employee development tool. The first time I was offered it by our HR'ry. I went through it and suddenly realized what it was. The second time I ordered it myself. I didn’t order anymore, because the situation has changed a little, but if I have many subordinates again, I will order it again, because it’s a tool that, if applied correctly and correctly explained to everyone, what it is like a feedback tool, which tells you what your reputation is among your subordinates, colleagues and the leader.
By the way, with the leader - yes, there anonymity generally works to its full potential, I agree, but there are no problems. For some reason, some leaders find it easier to check the test and write something there than to tell you in person. At 360 I received a completely constructive response from my supervisor, but sometimes it’s almost impossible to get live feedback from him. Now it’s better, but still bad.
And this tool showed that I am the last bastard. So simple. At least among many of my counterparties in life there was an opinion that this is so. Actually, no, I'm a good guy - you see everything. But the reputation was like that. She was not catastrophic, she was somewhere two or three in some places. This is bad, but not horror-horror. And this revealed to me that the guys do not treat me very well.
Secondly, of course, books. The first book - it was "Drive" by Daniel Pink - was advised to me by the coach in the framework of the same 360. From there I drew an idea that was completely not obvious to myself then (thanks to those people who previously raised their hand that they absolutely trust their people), that if you trust people and let them do the work, they will do it. Yes, there are all sorts of nuances, but basically they like to work very much, they like it when they have work, when they can work, when they can come in the morning and dig deeper into something on the server, write code, write an application, fix it attachment. They love it, it inspires them, and they will do it if they are not touched.
The second book - Lesha Pimenov recommended it to me - is Patrick Lensioni "Five vices of the team." I don’t remember a damn thing from it, except that trust is the main thing in the team. People must be trusted. And after that I was somehow let go, I relaxed, began to have fun.
I told people: “Firstly, here is the backlog, here are the high-level tasks. I'm not interested in what you will do. Please, this one should be ready for this date. I will occasionally ask: are you, Vasya, doing this task or not? Because it is important to me, and I need to report to the management that we won’t take it, but I won’t figure out how you do it, what you do with it there - your problems, can do nothing, then last night I do not mind if this will work. If this does not work, we will talk with you, we will draw conclusions and there we will further understand. If this works, I'm generally happy. Not my headache, how you do it. ”
The second thing I said: “Guys, I understand your desire for a free schedule. Head. Because I am hurt by the army, it is difficult for me to understand this with my heart. Let’s do this: I have such-such-such-and-such problems (I stated them earlier - lack of communication in the group, lack of communication with colleagues and so on). Let's come up with a solution. ” We sat a couple of hours, really came up with a solution. We said the following - we have a free schedule, eight hours a day, and this is not discussed (we signed up for it when we got to work), and from 12 a.m. to 4 p.m. we should all be here. All.
What happened?
At some point in time, I became a lark and I think: “Now I will come to work at eight in the morning and work alone calmly.” Where there! I now come to work at eight in the morning, and four people are already sitting there. I sometimes come to work at eight in the evening - I forgot something - they are sitting there. My work day essentially expanded by four hours. That is, the coverage of working hours by the unit increased by four hours. Instead of working worse, they began to work better. Bastards (emoticon).
In addition to this, as I already said, well, one person resigned from the unit that I directly supervised and returned three months later. Now, of these, two people went abroad, the dollar has become twice as expensive, this dumps us a little.
What helps us in all of this? Firstly, it helps to listen. I have already said: your working body is your mouth. The mouth was closed - the workplace was removed. But the main thing is to listen. For me it was a 360 review, when I heard the opinion of colleagues and the opinion of subordinates. For you, it could be something else.
It helps a lot, for example, to have such a Pavlik Morozov ... No, not an informer and not an informant - these are bad words in our culture ... A person who will tell you completely uncomplicatedly what is happening in the unit. This happened to me. I had a wonderful custom - once a week to hold a planning meeting, that is, I gather all 14 people, put them in one office, and they begin to report who made what for the week. The tool is really chic in itself, because it allows you to generally be in the know about everything. This is the very beginning of my, so to speak, managerial career.
After a while, this one comes up to me, now let’s be Chetvertekt Chetvertektovich, and he is such a direct guy, very good, honest, but direct in general, just like a stick, and says: “Your people planes, let's say, demotivate, people are upset.” Of course, I immediately fired him, what should I do? Ha, only one person realized that this was a joke. Of course, I haven’t fired anyone yet and am not going to. I went to my people whom I have known for a long time. By that time, I had been working in the company for many years, I had those people with whom I started working with subordinates. I came to them, I said: “Guys, anyway, there is such information. This is true?" - "Yes it is". I sat, scratched my turnip, what should I do, and canceled the planning meetings. I found another way to do this, to be in control. But the person who tells you what is happening right at that moment, when this happens, more than once a year, when you go through 360, and right now I came, issued a new decree “I command you to do this with my royal grace,” and he immediately comes after this solo performance and says: “Sasha, made nonsense, let's roll back. " This is generally a priceless thing. Feedback is always good.
What else helps? As I said, stop doing everything for them. Let them do their job. It is their job to work, their job is to edit configs, write code, fix errors, twist tails to databases. This is no longer your job. Stop doing other people's work, stop taking their bread. You, in the end, in a year, in two, in three, will start to do this work worse than they do, which means you will shake more than they do, and it’s better not to bring to this shame. Take away your rights, put the account in the safe and do not touch it.
Well, the last one, probably. This is what I said about control - we do not control every step they take, we, instead of controlling every step, control ourselves so that we transmit the information correctly (everyone remembered the owl or who got what happened). Our task is to convey the information correctly, we control that they understand us correctly. And by the way, every time they misunderstood us, who is to blame? Blame the one who spoke. Talking head. And we control the result we have reached. Then, in principle, these mistakes that have occurred to me (you probably also happen, for some), they will be a little less, a little less critical, it will be easier for you to cope with the consequences.
Friends, if the topic of managing development teams is more relevant for you than ever, we are sure that at our February conference TeamLeadConf 2018 you will find a lot of interesting and useful things. The program already has about 40 reports!
By the way, on the conference website we posted videos of ten of the most interesting last year's performances. Plus, for all Khabrovsk citizens, we have a HabrTeamLead2018 promo code that gives 11% discount.