
as a…
Manager/Leader
These are a collection of management-focused ideas of mine that describe my methodologies and values as a manager/leader/director. I also keep a repository of development and leadership/management-centric quotes. I use that in slideshow mode as my work computer’s screensaver.
I do as much professional development as possible, as well as speak, guest lecture, and teach whenever the opportunity arises.
Key Responsibilities
- Staff management: hiring, Interviewing, training, mentoring, growth planning, performance reviews
- Liaise with other departments on combined initiatives and roadmaps
- Vendor relationship management: selection, coordination, communications
- Product management: planning, scoping, and executing university-wide offerings
- Maintain code quality through code reviews and pull requests.
- Knowledge sharing / training
- Collaborate with project managers, designers, and content strategists to produce project timelines, budgets, and scopes of work.
- Maintain morale and collaboration by organizing team outings, lunches, activities.
Methodology
- A large factor of success is process & consistency
- Champion for continuous improvement, learning, knowledge sharing
- Minimizing project blockers & pauses
- Being a “player-coach” has many benefits
- Upstream/proactive work over downstream/reactive work
Humanity & Culture
- The importance of emotional labor & “soft” skills
- Transparency by default, along with honesty & vulnerability
- The benefits of downtime & team building
- Performance reviews should be more than once per year (optimally 360 reviews)
- Team members should have an opportunity to review their managers
- On Professionalism in 2020
Operations & Performance
- The power of keeping lists
- On feedback & input: who to listen to and who to ignore
- How to keep internal initiatives a priority
- Components of successful meetings
Team Dynamics
- Hire people who are smarter than you
- Interviews are a two-way street
- Managers should be a heat shield, not a sh*t umbrella
- Trust and micromanagement are mutually exclusive