The First Principles of Management
Overview
There are many terrible managers.
I posit most of the terrible managers would become good managers, if they had good training. If they had some mentoring. If they knew the first principles of Management and Leadership.
We're continuing our journey into First Principles and we've landed on Management. Specifically management in corporate software development.
When deducing the First Principles of a domain, the domain's definition is a good place to start.
management: the process of dealing with or controlling things or people
Having worked as a corporate software developer, it's easy to see that this definition is missing management's purpose. The purpose of a manager is to maximize productivity. So we know management deals with process and people and our experience tells us management deals with productivity too.
What First Principles can we formulate from this?
Management is the discipline of maximizing the productivity of your process.
Leadership is the discipline of maximizing the productivity of your people.
I bet when you read that it gave you an a-ha moment.
That's how I felt when this idea came to me. Of course!
Fraternal Twins
It's important to realize that managers have to practice both leadership and management. But why? Because in their day to day they deal with both process and people. So you need a model that captures both of those. If you don't, you'll be a terrible manager forever.
It's also important to note that your process doesn't judge you as a manager. It can't talk back to you. Your people, however, will judge you. People can and will say you're a terrible manager. Prioritize your leadership at the same level as your management or be judged harshly. (If you don't prioritize management, the company goes out of business. So don't get it twisted)
Therefore Leadership and Management are siblings. They're fraternal twins. One male and one female. You should be able to tell which is which.
In our management model, we have 4 key concepts: management, leadership, process, and people. I'll briefly go into these.
Management and Process
The goal of a company is to produce some sort of output. It could be a product or a service but at the end of the day you have to produce something of value or you go out of business. This is where process comes in.
What's a process?
A business process is basically a series of steps that a company follows to get work done or to make a product.
For example in tech you have
- Standups which are daily status
- Planning/sprints what are we doing in the next 2 weeks
- Stories/tasks the team has to complete
- Deployment that gets the output to the customer
- Cross team meetings & coordination
- Production Issues where something went wrong
- And many more
Most managers that I've encountered, even the terrible ones, are pretty good and managing the overall process. There's a near unlimited number of books and courses on management so I'm not going to go into details now.
Leadership and People
Managing people is tricky. No company I've worked at trained their managers. So new managers copied what they saw other managers doing or what they saw in a movie. A bunch of mimics replaying scenes from their favorite war movie. A weird alpha dog, army general archetype. Barking orders and not allowing their decisions to be questioned or criticized.
This is disastrous.
Most managers need help with their leadership.
The solution for managers to be awesome at Leadership sounds beta, but it's the most alpha dog attitude there is. It also generates huge productivity gains from your people. What's the secret to being a manager, a good leader?
Simple.
Practice Advocacy Management.
I'll talk about this more in a future article. But for now, imagine there's a person out there and he's your biggest advocate. He wants you to not only achieve your dreams but exceed them. This is how you lead your teams to their maximum level of productivity.
How do I know it works besides the fact I practiced it for years? Are you still imagining your biggest advocate? What are they saying to you? Would you be willing to give your best every day, if your biggest advocate was cheering you on?
I bet you would. I know I would. And I know people do. I saw it first hand.
Start doing this with your direct reports. They will stop thinking you're a terrible manager within a few weeks.
Conclusion
Drilling down to the First Principles gives you fertile soil to explore domains like management. Don't be afraid throw away everything you know and start at the bottom and build up.
Imagine implementing the Leadership technique I wrote about. This is only obvious after we've got to the first principles.
Solve process problems with Management skills.
Solve people problems with Leadership skills.
References
This continues the first principles series. Before reading this, make sure you're familiar with the definition of First Principles. Read the initial article in one of these places