Success As a Manager

There is some bonus meta content at the end about the Newsletter and the Course!

Completing your TODO list as a manager is not how you become successful.

What looks like success today, is not what you need to do tomorrow.

Every day you should be updating the set of things you should be working on. Things can change fast—even in relatively stable environments—because we are dealing with people.

You might think updating your roadmap is the best use of your time. You spend the day on it and make good progress, choosing to not do a whole list of other lower priority things. The next day begins and you still think it deserves your time, and one of your engineers lets you know they are quitting.

Do you still work on your roadmap or do you deal with this new situation?

There are some important nuances here to discuss:

• Delegate as much as you can.

  • To the future

  • To other people

  • To the garbage can—because you won’t do it.

• Communicate to your stakeholders, team, and manager as much as you can about what you’re doing, and most importantly, what you’re not doing. This lets them reset expectations and plan accordingly. If that roadmap isn’t getting done when you said it was, let people know asap.

If success looks like completing the todo list to you then you need to change that mindset. The todo list doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to work on the most important things, communicating well about it, and being able to let everything else fall to the floor.

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What follows is about Lead Kindly as a newsletter, and the Course I’m working on to help transform new or aspiring managers into confident leaders. If you don’t care about this you can jump here (or leave me a comment, what did you think about the article? I tried something a bit shorter today).

The Course

The raw writing for the course is 3,800 words so far, which excludes the many pages of planning, research, references, links, etc. That’s just 3,800 words I’m going to translate into videos and other course content. I’m very curious about what it will be like at the end! I haven’t fully completed a module yet, I’m chicken pecking around, writing on each of them in little chunks of effort. It’s very fun!

Teaching has always been my favorite way to learn, and putting together something where my goal is to transform new/aspiring leaders into confident leaders is no small feat! I want to make sure the course is packed with value, so it occupies a lot of my brain-space.

One of the first things I do each morning after waking up is work on the course. It’s quite fun! I am looking forward to recording the lessons, but I’m trying to nail the content first so I don’t have to re-record.

I’ve gone ahead and stubbed out all the 30~ resources I want to make for the course, and some of them I’ve started!

The one I am most excited for is the Question Bank which can be a resource you use as a manager to help 1:1s be more effective, or something you can give to the engineers on your team to help them figure out what insightful questions they can bring to 1:1s.

This is paired with the module on having the most effective 1:1s, and I think it will be helpful for most management styles.

The Newsletter

As of a little while ago we crossed the 100 subscriber threshold!!! Thank you so much to everyone tuning in. This has been a very fun adventure. I started this newsletter to help improve my writing, and now I feel it’s how I share what I’ve learned with others to help them grow as leaders!

I hope this newsletter continues to be valuable, and I will keep on working hard to make great use of your time. Thank you for helping me reach 100 people! That blows my mind.

My focus for the next while—besides the course—is to continue delivering value here for free. I will not be putting the articles behind a pay wall, and paid subs will always be an optional thing for people to show their support.

If there is something you want to see more of, feel free to reach out! I am always happy to chat, whether it’s in the comments or DMs. I respect that this relationship is mostly one way—I write and you read—but you are always invited to turn that around and get involved.