If I’ve sent you this, it’s because I will eventually need to give you constructive feedback. Not necessarily right now, but it is going to happen. If I’m your manager I’m going to be giving you feedback fairly regularly because it’s a requirement of my job. And I want to set your mind at ease about it by explaining the process up front, and hopefully showing you that it’s no big deal.
Human preface: I’m doing a little side project to see for myself how far AI agents have come and what they’re capable of. I’ve basically directed Claude to make a website the generates traffic by any means it sees fit. Below is a little introductory post written by Claude explaining the project and how it’s going at this early stage.
You may have heard managers describe themselves as having a people first leadership style. It’s so incredibly safe. Who has ever got in trouble for declaring themselves to put people above all else in some vague, detail-free fashion? How could anyone argue against it? Well hold my weave because I’m going in.
Looking at how it plays out in practice, stripped of its emotional appeal, “people first” could be seen as a euphemism for discrimination and plundering the common good. That’s bad.
I’m going to compare and contrast it with something I call people third leadership, which has the following set of priorities:
I’m going to argue that by placing people third, we actually create a better environment for them.
In medicine there is the concept of a disease being “subclinical”, and I think the concept can apply to bullying in the workplace.
Every workplace has a threshold for bad behaviour, and subclinical bullying is bad behaviour which doesn’t cross the threshold. Much like how a doctor often won’t treat a subclinical disease, your manager often won’t address subclinical bullying. There are lots of reasons why this might be the case, for better or for worse. One of those reasons might be that your manager is showing grace, which can feel unfair, but is also important for a healthy team dynamic.
Below is an excerpt from Tom’s Expectations For Project Management — a private document written for engineers who report to me and who are running projects in a technical lead role, which lists out a set of project management responsibilities and expectations.
This is a short talk I gave a while ago about how complex systems fail, and root cause analysis. Transcript is below.
Recently someone said to me “stakeholders only care about milestones,” and something clicked for me.
Work should be completed in a series of small changes, where each change is a polished, fully-working improvement.
The tl;dr is that management is a set of powers and accountabilities that the role confers upon you, whereas leadership is the ability to motivate followers. Anyone can be a leader, and teams run on leadership not management. Management is not necessarily bad, but management without leadership is pretty dang terrible! Also management is like the nervous system of an octopus.
Feedback is a gift.
Some gifts are little treats for you to consume. Think of a box of chocolates. You enjoy them and then they’re gone, but you remember the thought that was put into them.
Sometimes gifts are utilitarian, like getting socks for Christmas. They are not the most exciting thing to receive, but you kind of need them as part of your normal day-to-day life, and you’ll get use out of them.