Management by walking around

Part 3 in a series on managing programmers

The third installment in this series is about something I learned well before I got into management. In fact, it’s probably the reason why I got into management at all:

Get up out of your chair.

As geeks we’d rather just sit there. Sit in our chairs and send yet another email and hope enough folks read it. We spend a whole hour crafting a brilliant treatise on an Important Topic and assume that our written words alone are motivating enough to get people to do what we need them to do. And we hope (in vain) that people will read our words carefully, reflect deeply, and return the favor by drafting a well-written response of their own.

But when it comes to managing people email simply doesn’t work as well as we wish it did. It’s often the wrong tool entirely. You know this as well as I do. People simply don’t read your emails carefully. Or they miss it entirely. Or the message gets to them too late. Or too soon. And even when they do read your email, people can almost always manage to misinterpret the tone of your message and you end up spending even more time clarifying and apologizing and re-iterating. Et cetera.

In my experience, the only thing that does work is to do something that is entirely unnatural for most in the world of high tech: Get up out of your chair and practice some “MBWA“. MBWA stands for “management by walking around“. It means you go and walk over to somebody and actually engage in conversation. Talk to them. Talk first about the weather or their kids or whatever they’re working on at the moment. Then transition the conversation to what you need to talk about, or just drop in your request casually at the end. And sometimes, just like magic, you learn things without even having to prod. It goes like this:

Tammy sitting reading email. Manager enters, stage right.

Manager: “Hey, Tammy. What’s new?”
Tammy: “Just reading the latest missive from the client. They’re being a little less insane than usual today.”
Manager: “Nice! Always good when sanity prevails, eh?”
Tammy: “Yeah, absolutely. We can use a little bit of a break after yesterday’s server issues.”
Manager: “Wow, really? I must have missed that somehow. We had server issues yesterday?”
Tammy: “Yeah. It turns out the new audit trail feature caused our logs to fill up and we ran out of disk space.”
Manager: “Ouch! But yeah, that makes sense. You’ve got it fixed now though, right?”
Tammy: “Yep. We’re purging logs every 30 days now.”
Manager: “Good deal. Client seems happy?”
Tammy: “Sure. They seemed to like that we responded so quickly.”
Manager: “Excellent. Thanks for jumping in there!”

Manager exits, stage left. Elapsed time: 45 seconds.

3 reasons why MBWA can make you more effective

• It’s faster. Yes, it is. You might think you don’t have time to get up from your desk and actually go through the hassle of walking over, interrupting the person in the middle of their Facebooking, and actually talking about what needs to get done. But in the same 5 minutes it would have taken you to write an email you’re able to not only make the request but respond to questions immediately.
• It builds relationships. Being face-to-face with someone puts you in a position to tailor your message to the individual and respond immediately to questions in a way that is most effective for that person. Moreover, engaging people one-on-one helps build the relationship — you learn more about each other. This learning is the foundation of trust, and having trust means your conversations will end up getting faster and more effective over time, especially during a crisis or when speed is of the essence. And having more face-to-face conversations also ends up making it easier for the other person to interpret your “tone” when you only send email or IMs.
• It helps you learn and know more. As a manager you deal in information, and you’re missing out on at least 50% of the data feed if you’re not there in person. As I’ve already said, actually getting up and talking to other human beings seems counter-intuitive and at least somewhat stressful to most of us in technology. And here’s the thing: Most of our team naturally tends to avoid the face-to-face conversation as well. Yet the example above shows that it’s through the quick face-to-face interactions that we’re able to learn much, much more about what’s actually going on in our organization. Your team member may be too busy fighting a fire to send a detailed email, and maybe he’s not the type to swing by and chat either. But being there allows you to sense and prod and follow hunches, all of which end up providing you with more information, making you more effective.

So don’t just sit there in your corner office typing on the computer. As a manager your job is all about making everybody more effective by getting the right information to and from the right people at the right time. You just can’t do that with email alone. As my good friend and colleague Derek Olson likes to say: “The weeds are waist high. Sometimes you just need to stand up to see over them.”

How to get an “A+” on your performance review

My advice on how to get an awesome grade at your next performance review is to simply follow Rands’ advice:

@rands, 1/11/2010: “Be productive, be fantastically clever when necessary, speak truth to power, hit your dates, and don’t ship crap.”

By the way, if you’re a programmer or a manager of programmers and you’re not reading everything that Michael Lopp, a.k.a. Rands in Repose has to say, you’re missing out big time.

What do you think?

Part 1 in a series on managing programmers

If I have any management secret, it’s this: Every now and then, when one of my team members asks for my opinion, I try to pause and answer with one simple question:

What do you think?

I’ve been managing programmers for over five years now. That’s a long time in internet years, and I’m to the point where I don’t think it would be too out of line for me to start sharing some of the tips, tricks, and techniques that I’ve learned about how to manage software developers and engineering types.

The first management tip I’m sharing dates back to the very first day on the job as a manager. I’d been working with my fellow web developers in a small-but-growing shop, building a couple of fairly substantial applications used by the collections and law enforcement industries. Then one day my boss took me out to lunch for my annual review and I got promoted.

On the drive back to work I realized that I was suddenly in a position where I would be managing some of the folks who’d hired me. I had deep respect for every single one of these people. All of them were wicked smart. Most had engineering or science degrees of some sort (easily trumping my history degree), and many of them had more practical experience developing web applications than I did. I’d already learned a ton from each of them during my time with the company, and I knew I still had lots left to learn.

And that’s when it hit me. Before I’d read a single book or blog post or listened to a single podcast on how to manage software developers I realized that the one thing I couldn’t lose was input and feedback from the folks on my team. In that respect nothing had changed. Being in management hadn’t magically conveyed any special abilities or secret knowledge. Just because my title had changed didn’t mean that they had nothing to teach me or that that I no longer had anything to learn from them.

So I from that moment forward I made it my practice to try to pause and ask this question at least once a day. “What do you think?”

I didn’t have all the answers at the time. And that hasn’t changed in five years. And, in fact, the key realization was that as a manager it’s actually not my job to have all the answers. My job is to work with my team to find the best answer to a given problem.

As managers of knowledge workers it helps if we start by recognizing that our teammates have probably already come up with at least one or two answers on their own. Programmers, engineers, and scientists are problem solvers by nature. It’s what they do. So I try to get behind this. In fact, I specifically try to use my role power as a manager to encourage and support this whenever possible.

Moreover, we can use this one simple question to make it clear that we’re not just merely curious or playing to their egos, but that we expect our teammates to come to us having already thought through the problem, and to have a possible solution or two in mind.

In my experience, asking “what do you think?” helps accomplish three things:

1. It empowers team members by letting them know that I will actively solicit their ideas.
2. It sets the expectation that team members should have already thought through the problem themselves.
3. It demonstrates that I care more about finding the right solution than about being the one who came up with the solution.

In five years I’ve read plenty of books and articles and blogs about management in general and managing knowledge workers in particular. But I still come back to what I learned on my first day of management. “What do you think?” is a specific, practical technique that flips the power structure on its head and helps me demand the best that my team can bring.

So every now and again stop to ask your team what they think. You and your team will be better for it.