Vision: As a leader, I believe in building a team that is always moving forward and learning. I don’t care if we fall down. Getting back up and learning from our mistakes is what matters.
Who I am:
- I am not the authoritarian boss. I do not want to micro manage anyone. It's not a good use of your time or my time.
- I value creating the right solution. This means data and consensus. If you don’t have data to backup your solution, expect a lot of questions from me.
- Realize that I relentlessly study problems put before me. I tend to take other ideas and make it mine.
- It is my belief that a Manager may or may not be a Leader. I believe that there can be many leaders within our organization.
- I am quiet by nature. I will purposely choose my words during a discussion. I may not be set to verbose but I am very invested in both you as an employee as well as my team as a whole
- I generally believe people are good at heart and have a (good) reason for making the decisions they do. My default is that there is positive intent for all involved
What you can expect:
My job as a people person is #1, my technical part is secondary. As a people person I am working to bring in new talent and providing challenging work and retaining those within my organization.
I feel feedback is essential, feedback is crucial for our success Three dimensions are required for people to give you feedback
- Safety should be high (no fear of retaliation)
- Effort should be low (no rebuttals)
- Benefit should be high (positive results). Let me know if I don’t do well on any of these three.
I value candor and transparency and will let you know any data I know as soon as I can. If you have a question, ask me.
Trust but verify. I trust my staff to make important decisions. However, I am expected to and will ask questions though to ensure you have thought it through. If I sense a problem, I will probe further and further. As you demonstrate you are doing this on your own, you can expect me to ask fewer questions
I will not throw the members of my team under the bus. I expect you to do the same with your co-workers. We will all win together as we will all lose together.
I am currently advocating a shift from “hero firefighter” culture shift to a “build awesome fire suppression systems” culture. In other words, a DevOps transformation.
My order of urgency in regards to communication is
- Face to face -> phone -> text -> e-mail -> instant messenger
- Please use the apropriate level of urgency when communicating with me
If you want to talk - Let’s talk.
- Get a hold of me via face to face/email/Google Chat/phone and I’ll evict something from my calendar
What I expect from you:
First and foremost, we need to remember that in whatever role we are in, we are taking care of the customer. They are the reason we have jobs. This can be a external or internal customer, it does not matter.
You are a Directly Responsible Individual I hired you because of your skills and experience. I am not here to tell you how to do your job. This does not mean that you are responsible for knowing everything. It's my job to mentor you or find the right resource to provide mentoring. When you need help, I expect you to ask for it.
Your Career is yours. You know best at how you want to grow. I can provide the feedback and provide growth and learning opportunities. At the end of the day, it is your career, it is up to you to take those opportunities and run with them. With that being said, your success is my success, so I will go out of my way to make you successfull.
If you need training I expect you to ask for it. You should never shy away from leveling up your skills. If you want to learn about an application, a system, or how to manage people, I will support you. I will find time to insure that you can attack the opportunities, but you need to find those opportunities
My views on 1 on 1s
- 1 on 1s are for you. You set the agenda, what’s bugging you? What’s going well?
- 1 on 1s are not for status updates, unless you want status updates
Work/life balance is important to me. I’ve told my employees that I’m a selfish boss. Meaning I’d much rather have my employees working 100% for me while they are working. Humans come first. It is my belief that happy, productive, and engaged humans build fantastic things.
We are continually learning and moving forward. We don’t do anything “because we’ve always done it that way.” No cargo culting.
I want to shift from our team from “hero firefighter” culture shift to a “build awesome fire suppression systems” culture.
Quotes that I live by
- Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to keep things Simple - Richard Branson
- The problem will always scale to the solution - Allan Yarborough
- Do it well, Do it RIGHT - Mike Holms
- What are we building for? - Me
- What problem are we are trying to solve? - Me
- Don't try to solve a human problem with technology. - Me
- If you can't monitor and measure, you can't improve. - /u/bald_cyclist from reddit
- Nines don't matter if the customer is unhappy - Charity Majors
- *Strive for Simplicity, that being said, Simplicity does not equate to Easy" - Sean Bales/Paul Bellotti/Chris Hardy
- Those who tell the Stories rule Society - Plato
If you are unhappy, please let me know. I know that at times I have felt that my managers are Omniscience. I am not, almost painfully so. Until you tell me what is wrong, I may not know.