Manager README for people working with Magnus Hedemark, currently Senior Director Hybrid Cloud Engineering at Gap Inc..
People are not resources. We're messy, imperfect, full of deviations from the mythological "normal". This README is an effort to help people to understand what to expect when working with me, to understand my strengths and weaknesses, and my expectations of others.
- I'm originally from the Philadelphia area. But I have no interest in sports.
- I'm married. I have kids. I also have dogs, fish, and many other pets.
- Someday I'm likely to abruptly leave tech and start writing full-time, like Charles Bukowski did. I don't think that day is soon, so we have time to get to know each other and do great things.
- I'm an INFP-T personality type. It's scary how spot-on most of this article is (note that it is multiple pages long).
- I'm part of the LGBTQ+ community, I'm a trans-inclusive feminist, and actively anti-racist.
- I'm Hard of Hearing, Autistic & ADHD. That combination means I should be wearing hearing aids but I find it difficult to wear them. I have to work hard in meetings to hear what people are saying, and find it hard to pay attention to folks who talk too fast and/or for too long without leaving room for dialog. It's really really hard to work with folks who join zoom calls without any kind of headset, and who use their built-in microphones on their laptops (which really aren't very good).
I wasn't always a manager. In fact, in the span of my long career, I've been a Systems Engineer most of the time. At some point along the way, I had a great leader pull me aside and encourage me to try this path. They mentored me and helped me to get up to speed quickly. I'm really enjoying it. But I remember where I came from.
One of my leadership mentors said that a Manager's job boils down to two things:
- Block unnecessary bullshit that's rolling downhill.
- Rain down opportunity.
Me? I think it's not quite that simple. But those two things are very important to me. Some other things that are important to me include:
- You and I have the same expectation of what your role is here. But that role develops as you develop, so we'll continue to have that conversation as long as we work together. Maybe longer.
- You have a clear understanding of how I think you're doing in your role. If you're doing something well, you'll hear about it. If there's an area where I think you can do better, we'll talk about ways that might happen. My own boss does the same thing with me.
- We'll have frequent dialogs about your career path, and exploring opportunities to mature on that path. You should have a pretty good idea of where you're going.
- You'll get a greater understanding of the big picture that you're a part of, and why your contributions are important. The Goal should be well-understood and you'll get sick of hearing about it.
I could expound, but it'd be best to start with The Agile Manifesto and, too often overlooked, The 12 Principles behind it.
TL;DR - Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
I want to be able to visualize the flow of our work in one place. You'll hear me say "source of truth" a lot. I want one source of truth for our work. I'm not going to be dogmatic about what tool to use, but I will be a nag about keeping it up to date.
I'm allergic to waste. That link has seven common wastes in software engineering. There is an eighth that some will call out, and I'm one of them: latent potential. If we're not leveraging a person's talents fully, it bugs me. If we're using a tool but not as well as we could, it bugs me. If our process is inefficient, it bugs me.
WIP limits (work in progress) is a big deal to me. I place a higher value on delivering outcomes than the appearance of being busy. If I see 4+ kanban cards in progress with your name on all of them, we've got a problem. You only have two hands. How many plates can you really effectively spin at once? Ideally, I want to see you start a task to finish it. And I'll give you air cover to protect your WIP.
I'm proud of my past accomplishments, but I don't cling to them. We find new ways to do things all the time. It's ok to tear good things down to build better things. If we don't disrupt ourselves internally, someone else will disrupt us externally.
We're going to have a regular cadence of 1:1 meetings. This is where we develop you and your career path. I like to be able to see people during 1:1 conversations, so please plan to have your webcam turned on if we're not in the same location.
- I'm getting great feedback about your contributions from our downstream customers.
- I'm getting great feedback from outside of the team about how great our team is to work with.
- I'm getting great feedback from inside of the team about how important your contributions were to our shared victory.
- You're regularly finding and eliminating waste.
- You're elevating your own skills.
- You're elevating the people around you.
- Continuous improvement (kaizen!) ... This can take many forms. Improving the team and its processes, improving others (as a mentor), and improving yourself through a cycle of internal inspection and adaptation.
- Coming to me with solutions that get us closer to our goal... faster, better, cheaper.
- I don't want to be taken by surprise by my boss or peers. If there's bad news coming that involves you, I'd really rather hear it from you first.
- I subscribe to the No Asshole Rule. I don't care how brilliant you are, if you're bringing colleagues down with this sort of behavior, we've got a problem.
- Low integrity. Don't lie to me. Don't embellish. Don't omit the truth. Don't break a commitment you made. I trust my team by default. If you break my trust, that's a hard place to come back from.
- If you're optimizing for your own success at the cost of others around you.
- Lack of curiosity. Lazy thinking.
- I am Autistic. I am not "a person with autism". When I mention this, people tend to say really insensitive stuff in response. Here's a helpful list of things to never say to an autistic person. I'm "normal". But my brain works very differently in some ways from most people. Sometimes this is a tremendous asset. Sometimes, though, it can make it really challenging to have tough conversations. Work with me. I'm trying. Most of the time, the only "tell" will be eccentricity from social norms.
- I am also ADHD. Presentations and long monologs are not something I have the attention span to get much from. I get a lot more out of active dialog, leaving room for back and forth exchange of ideas.
- I am hard of hearing. I may wear hearing aids when we meet in person (but because I'm also Autistic, I find them difficult to endure). I wear a headset when we talk on the phone. I use technology to hear you to the best of my ability. But technology can only do so much. If you're talking to me through a speakerphone from across the room, or through the mic built into your laptop, you're probably hard to understand. If you are mumbling, speaking quietly, speaking very quickly, and/or have a really strong accent, I'm probably having a hard time understanding what you're saying. And what you're saying is important, so please speak like you want to be heard. Enunciate. Project. Use the headset that the company provided you with.
- IM is my favored medium for lower latency first contact. As a rule, I ignore non-informative IM's like "hi" or "wake up". If you want to talk to me about something, start right out with "Magnus, do you have a minute to chat about ______?" Or if you want to tell me something, just tell me. When I can answer, I will. But when I'm in meetings, I'm focusing on the meeting and not on IM.
- My calendar is usually booked days in advance, with back to back conversations. Please don't be upset with me when I don't have a free minute to chat about something. You may need to get on my calendar. Our department Executive Assistant can help navigate my calendar or move things around for you to make room if there is time sensitivity.
- My direct reports and peers have my mobile number and can interrupt me for urgent matters. SMS is preferred.
- If there's a real emergency, shoot me a PagerDuty incident. My mobile is often in a Do Not Disturb state (ADHD, remember?) and PagerDuty will cut through that.
- Email is a good way to reach me where a lot of latency is OK. I'll check it a few times per day. But I don't check it after work or on weekends, and neither should you!
- But I also get over 1,000 emails per day. I skim. And that skimming process means that I miss some emails. If you don't hear from me, I'm not ignoring you; I just didn't catch your signal in all the noise.
- If I'm in the office and you see me with headphones or a headset on, Do Not Disturb. Send an IM or email instead. In fact, that's generally a good rule for anyone in any office, I'd think.
- And definitel please do not approach me from behind or touch me to get my attention. I have PTSD and that's likely to be triggering.
- Don't forget the team chat room! The team is empowered to solve many of its own challenges together. Don't be surprised if I hit you back with "take it to the team and tell me what you come up with together".
- I love memes. I love animated GIFs.
- I have a really, really short attention span for being lectured to or talked at. If you're saying you have a question and it comes with a 5+ minute back story, you've lost my attention. It's best to be direct, to the point, and make room for some frequent clarifying back and forth dialog to get to common understanding.
- I can be super passionate about things. That intensity can put people back. I'm excited, and I want us to do amazing things together. Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
- I can be so focused on the Goal, sometimes I'm not as on top of other things as I need to be.
- Sometimes I'm oblivious to people feeling badly about some of the transformation I'm pushing or how hard I'm pushing it. I don't pick up on non-verbal cues. You've got to talk to me about it before I'll ever know.
- I get frustrated easily by bureaucracy. I'm working on better emotional responses to this. But I'm also working on destroying needless bureaucracies. Sorry (not sorry).
This README was inspired by other Manager README's that came before mine, including: