Chapter 10. The Line Manager Manifesto

This chapter covers

• Principles of leadership from a line manager’s perspective
• Working with teams suffering from a lack of good leadership
• Working with individuals suffering from indifferent leadership

If you’re a line manager, maybe some of the things in the Team Leader Manifesto in chapter 1 didn’t make sense to you. You don’t exactly have a “team.” Your team might be spread out, providing services to multiple unrelated projects (particularly in a matrix organization, where your direct lead isn’t your hiring manager) or even multiple customers (if your employees are consultants).

Does that mean that now all you get to do is “push paper” and sign budgets? When I became a director I hoped not, but in the beginning that’s exactly what happened.

In a large organization, you may feel torn away from doing “real” things that matter to people. Instead, you’re thrown into a mountain of paperwork, SAP software, and other hazardous materials that’ll make you twitch in disgust for hours as they suck your life away.

You feel compelled away from doing what’s best for your team and toward doing what’s best for the company’s procedure police (to your dismay, you see how money is wasted on meaningless labor that brings nothing to the bottom line but lower numbers).

No, that’s not what line managers were meant to do.

Your work as a line manager can be good for the company’s bottom line, and good for your general state of mind, as long as you set goals that aren’t specifically software-or budget-oriented, but instead are people-oriented.

I think the best line managers are engaged in what their employees are doing, even if they aren’t in close physical proximity, and they can help by being coaches as much as being direct technical leads. It requires a bit of a mindset readjustment.

Following is an adjusted version of the Team Leader Manifesto for line managers.

The Line Manager Manifesto

For us as line managers, the goal and the way we measure our success is the overall long-term growth in skills of self-organization and self-sufficiency in each employee under our management. The rest is paperwork.

To that end:

• We accept that what each employee needs from us changes continuously based on the team they’re currently in, the current project they’re serving, and the current tech lead they might have. Those circumstances, coupled with the employee’s skills for handling the current reality of work, mean that we, as managers, embrace a continuously changing leadership style for each employee, rather than a one-style-fits-all-employees approach.
• We believe in challenging ourselves and our employees to always improve; therefore:
  • We coach our employees to think about and help create slack time to allow them to learn by gradual practice.
  • We embrace taking risks over staying safe and coach our employees to do the same.
  • We provide “air cover” when appropriate to create an environment where they can learn and experiment without fear.
  • We circulate our employees throughout varying types of tasks as much as possible, to assist them in learning skills from across the entire organization (instead of keeping them in their comfort zone in the same project or task for years).
• We believe our core practice is leading people, not wielding machines, therefore:
  • We embrace spending at least 50% of our time communicating with our employees, face to face or as close to that as possible.
  • We embrace treating software problems as people problems, and this is what we coach our employees and leads to consider when they’re stuck. It’s also what we discuss with our managers when things get out of control and there’s panic in the air.
  • We learn people skills and communication techniques in order to manage up and down, and make sure our employees do the same.

Survival mode

Let’s consider how the Line Manager Manifesto applies to projects, teams, and individuals in survival mode.

Projects in survival mode

A project that involves a couple of your employees could be in survival mode, while another project with other employees you manage could be self-organizing.

At the project level, there’s little you can do because you usually don’t control the project as a whole. Team leads at the project level will have more influence changing behaviors, cultures, and practices; they should mold their leadership style accordingly based on the current mode they find their own teams in, and within the project’s context.

But, as a higher-level manager, you usually have more access to the higher-level project leadership, which means you can help elaborate and influence what messages and forces act on the project.

For example, if you know that teams are measured on a metric that encourages “bad behavior” (such as measuring lines of code produced per day), you can talk to the project leadership during a meeting and explain why that metric should be abolished in favor of something that encourages better quality, maintainability, or whatever currently ails the project.

Teams in survival mode

You sometimes don’t control a team either, although often line managers are also responsible for a specific team or group with some specific function in a project. If you do control a team, you can read this book mostly from the standpoint of a team lead. If you don’t, read on.

Teams within projects can have their own mode of operation that’s disconnected from the project’s state. Ultimately this is an anti-pattern, as teams should be operating with a view to the entire project, not solely based on what’s going on within the team; but that’s a separate discussion.

From a line manager’s point of view, there’s little you can do to control a team’s behavior, because that type of work is designated for team leads. But you can offer advice and assistance to team leads, or alert them to specific things that might be hard to see from within the team’s structure. For example, a team can be in survival mode if multiple projects or managers demand things from the team at the same time, and the team becomes overcommitted.

Sometimes a friendly word with a team leader you have a rapport with can be enough to start discussing “what can we do about this,” which might lead to a collaboration—they on their team’s side and you on the leadership side—to bring an end to a particularly bad situation at work.

Individuals in survival mode

The individuals you manage could be in their own private mode. Some of your employees could be in survival mode that’s unrelated to their current assigned project or team. For example, maybe they’re new to the company and are still struggling with performing simple duties such as time management, travel expenses, and so on, and need help figuring things out. That’s simple.

A more serious problem happens when individuals you manage are in a team where the team lead doesn’t stay tuned to the team modes. Your employees might need the team lead to coach them, challenge them, or provide command-and-control prescriptions on what to do next.

That, sadly, happens often. If the team lead doesn’t help the team grow, line managers should be there for their employees—to encourage growth, provide challenge, and give guidance when they’re lost, even in the context of a specific project, team issues, or otherwise.

I believe line managers are the last line of defense against individuals being left in a vacuum by their current team or project leadership. They shouldn’t have to fend for themselves; the line manager can and should step in.

Providing help as a line manager or director can be more difficult than as a team lead, because you might not know what’s going on in a specific project or team if you work in a matrix-style organization. Frequent one-on-ones with your employees are the key to discovering what personal or team mode they’re in, and helping them grow to become self-organizing.

A team leader who’s out of touch with the team is an anti-pattern I’ve seen in many matrix-style organizations, where the people who control your schedule aren’t the people who control your paycheck or can hire and fire you. It’s not the anti-pattern itself but a systematic environment force that can lead to the following behavior: between a line manager who feels that it’s the team lead’s job to take care of the people in their team, and the team lead’s perception that any major issues should be handled by the line manager, nobody takes responsibility and rescues an employee who doesn’t know what they should do next, feels overwhelmed with the amount of work, or doesn’t know how to build quality into their tasks.

If the team lead neglects this duty, the line manager has to catch it, and vice versa. Many line managers believe it’s fully the team lead’s job to take care of such “growth” matters, or that they as line managers aren’t expected to.

Sharing responsibilities is caring: team leads and managers

Everyone thinks they’re right, and at the same time everyone should take responsibility. I heard someone refer to this as “200% responsibility.”

This question arises: if both the team lead and the line manager take the same responsibility—to grow the individuals on their team and the team as a whole—won’t everyone be stepping on everyone else’s toes? The way to avoid that is to split the workload:

• Team leads can grow their teams in matters related to technical, team, or project matters.
• Line managers can grow their employees in matters related to everything else, such as personal growth in the company, working on multiple diverse projects to increase total skills from a company standpoint, and so on.

Learning mode

Next, how does the Line Manager Manifesto apply to projects, teams, and individuals in learning mode?

Projects in learning mode

Your employees could be involved in a project that’s in learning mode. This is a great opportunity for them to learn, grow, and make progress. There should be nothing for you to do other than sit back, listen, and watch as they learn and master new skills.

Sometimes a project will be in flux, barely out of survival mode but not quite in learning mode. Team managers have gained more slack time, but they aren’t using it for learning new skills. This could be another case for you as a manger to fill the vacuum that team leads may not wish or know how to do, and put your people into challenging situations that deal with something related to their project.

You can also use your greater leverage powers as a manager to talk to your fellow managers who are involved with the project and discuss the idea of growing the project teams’ skills. Who knows, maybe you’re not the only one in that room who has read this book!

Teams in learning mode

The situation for a team is much the same as for a project.

Individuals in learning mode

Again, share the responsibility of building skills with team leads, which allows you to focus on skills that are higher-level and might benefit many projects or teams, while the team lead might choose to focus on skills the team needs at this moment.

It’s important not to burden the individual with too many challenges at the same time! One challenge at a time is usually more than enough. In fact, if you pile on two or three challenges at the same time for a person, you might build a wall too tall to climb, and that person might leave thinking you have something against them personally; coordination is the key here.

Self-organization mode

Finally, what about line managers and projects, teams, and individuals in self-organization mode?

Self-organizing projects and teams

You shouldn’t interfere, because everything seems to be going pretty well!

Self-organizing individuals

Make sure to take on the role of a coach/facilitator, and ask the person where they want to go next in terms of their career and skills path. Only if you feel they’ve turned back into learning or survival mode does it make sense to become a coach/dictator and “tell” them what to do.

Other burning questions

• Are managers leaders? I’m a manager; is it possible my tech lead should be reading this book, not me? Answer: Yes, managers are (or should be) leaders. They surely have the potential to be, but many don’t take it, and the organization suffers for it. Yes, you should read this book.
• There are some things I can’t delegate or challenge other people to do (signing off on purchase orders, budget requests, time reporting sign-off, signing off on cost-center-related work, and so on). I can’t grow folks to do my job, can I? Answer: There’s a great deal you can do. You can’t get them to sign things, but you can instead
  • Have them be there when you’re going over things like budgets or important decisions to create understanding of the thinking process.
  • Have them join important (and mundane) meetings you attend as a fly on the wall or apprentice, to understand how the sausage gets made and start working on their organizational (a.k.a. political) muscles, meeting more people and seeing what life is like outside their own work category. Do you get the idea? If they can’t do it, they can at least see you do it and study it up close.

Here’s the awful truth I found when I got into director-level jobs: if you’re a director, it’s likely you’ve noticed that things are chaotic, to say the least, and everyone around you seems to be winging it as much as you, while keeping a straight face to appear that they know what they’re doing.

You’re better off trying a new way you believe will work instead of mindlessly following the crowd. If the crowd were headed in the right direction, then any current negative situation could’ve been avoided completely. At the very least, show initiative to try new things. High-level managers secretly yearn for the mid-level manager who will get them out of the current messes they’re in charge of, while they take credit. This is your chance to do something that might make a dent in corporate culture and help team leads and individuals make the most of their time in your company, therefore delivering more and better value.

Next up

The remainder of this book presents notes written by other leaders, like you, and by some consultants I trust. I hope the overview of elastic leadership principles, the three team phases, and leadership styles and techniques will be helpful for you down the road. Enjoy the notes!

Summary

• Line managers can follow an adjusted version of the Team Leader Manifesto, focusing on engaging with their employees and influencing management and leaders.
• Projects and teams in survival mode that are lacking adequate team leadership can benefit greatly from the attention of proactive line managers.
• Individuals in survival mode who are lacking adequate team leadership need rescuing by a line manager who’s willing to accept responsibility for encouraging their growth and development.
• Projects, teams, and individuals in learning mode can benefit from cooperation between the team lead and the line manager.