Developer Tea

Implicit to Explicit: Management Systems

Episode Summary

In the last couple of episodes we've been talking about how to move certain implicit systems to become more explicit. Personal ways of thinking and mechanisms that help us get through our day by going into auto-pilot. Today we're talking about implicit systems that managers use and how we can develop more explicit systems.

Episode Notes

In our last episode we talked about taking implicit or automatic processes and making them more explicit, bringing them to a slower thought process. If you're a manager at a company, this episode is for you. Today we're digging into implicit and explicit management systems.

We'll cover some systems that you can effect and how they can create a more positive working experience for you as a manager and your team.

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Episode Transcription

In the last couple of episodes, we've talked a bit about how to move certain implicit systems to be more explicit. And most of these have been for yourself. There's personal systems, personal ways of thinking, personal kind of mechanisms that we generally set to implicit auto-pilot mode. In today's episode, we want to talk about some more implicit systems that could be explicit, could be more helpful if they were explicit, but from the perspective of a manager. Some of the things that you do as a manager, and some of the ways that we operate on a team, what are some things that we do implicitly most often that we could make more explicit? My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal in the show is to help driven developers find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. If you're a manager, then you know that there are a lot of things that take your attention. And so you're very prone to only go to the things that are demanding the most attention. This is an easy kind of equation, a human equation. It's the kind of inspiration for the phrase that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The things that demand our attention the most are the things that get our attention the most. And as it turns out, some of the things that demand our attention the most could be prevented or otherwise treated could be affected by paying attention to things that are not necessarily immediately demanding our attention. And this is kind of the heart of what it means to be a good manager. And it's the heart of what it means to take these implicit systems and make them more explicit. So what does this mean? Well, imagine that you have team members and they're all complaining about the number of meetings that you have. And so you try to attack that problem by lowering the number of meetings that you have rather than thinking about the systems that are creating those meetings. What are the reasons, the underlying reasons that you have a lot of meetings? And we're not going to try to tackle any specific types of problems like too many meetings in this episode, but instead talk about some of the systems that you can affect that have probably a positive effect on many of these kinds of responsive systems that we end up creating like tons of meetings. So the first system that I want to talk about is one that is actually perhaps the source of much of the conflict that we have with our teammates. And that is the system of common behaviors. In other words, imagine that you have a team of people and they all come from different backgrounds. When are those people working? How many hours are they going to work today or this week or in the average week? And what are the common types of things that they're going to do in that job? The problem is that we have these implicit systems typically by way of titling, someone having a particular job title, we expect that by defining their roles and responsibilities up front in a job description, that we've kind of done that duty, that we've figured out what that person is supposed to do from here until some unknown point in the future. The truth is on the job, those things change. Our job descriptions are only a shadow of what ends up happening in real life. And the expectations that we have from each other, they shift, they shift over time, but they also shift from day to day. And many times the source of conflict between two people is simply mismanaged expectations. And mismanaged expectations are not just about one person saying they expect something and the other person hearing something different. Most of the time they're about nobody saying anything at all, those implicit expectations. So as a manager, part of your job is to make expectations explicit, make them clear. Now this doesn't mean that you walk in on day one and you list out your demands. Instead, take the time to work through with your direct reports, what those responsibilities and expectations should be. What is someone with this job and based on our job description that we kind of agreed on in the beginning, what would we expect this week or this month? Being as detailed as possible with your expectations is one of the best ways to help your direct reports have clarity on what they're supposed to be doing in a given day. We're going to take a quick break and talk about today's sponsor, Stackbit. Static sites and Jamstack are growing fast and Brennan developers already know that. They're fast, they're secure. And as a developer, you get full control over the markup and the design without all the hassle of managing servers. But convincing clients to go static hasn't been quite so easy. How will they manage their content? This is really the big question. Where is the CMS? Mainstream adoption of Jamstack in a commercial context really relies on this issue, on solving this issue. So this is where Stackbit comes in. Stackbit lets you build and deploy a full Jamstack site with a static site generator and a headless CMS in just a few clicks. You can already choose from about a dozen pre-built themes for Hugo, Jekyll and Gatsby, and connect a forestry, Netlify CMS, Contentful, and pretty much anything that you're probably using, and Stackbit just released custom themes. This means you can import your own themes built on any static site generator, including the ones we've already discussed, plus grid sum, viewpress, and others. Just add a single Stackbit.jamwell file and define your content models and your themes ready to connect to any headless CMS. Stackbit allows you to test the strengths and weaknesses of the popular headless CMS quickly and explore which one is the right fit for your client or project. Last of all, the source code for your sites you provisioned through Stackbit are stored right back in your own Git repo. So you can continue to design and develop locally without compromising your normal workflow. Head over to Stackbit.com slash Developer Teato get started today and let us know what you think. So, I hope that you've enjoyed today's episode of Stackbit.com slash Developer Teaall one word. So hopefully today's episode doesn't come as a surprise to you. Hopefully it makes sense that having a shared expectation for behavior as a manager, that that would be helpful to your direct reports. Now just having unclear expectations would be harmful. But another piece of the puzzle that we often ignore, we allow it to be implicit, is the idea that things are going well, that your direct report has done something good, that they've done something worth noticing, or that they've just done their job. They've met expectations. When we rely on an implicit system for this, we expect that other people are kind of self-sufficient, and they can feel good on their own, and that they know when they're doing good work, and that we don't really need to remind them, that when things are kind of at status quo level, when nothing is exceptionally good, that there's no reason to call it out. The truth is, most of us are working hard on a regular basis to at least maintain status quo, to meet expectations is already an accomplishment, and making your appreciation of this explicit is incredibly important for managers. And here's the reason why. We all fall prey to something called negativity bias. This idea is that by default, we're going to assume or be highly tuned in to negative things. And so if the only things that we talk about are the exceptionally good things, then on a regular basis, on the average day, we fill in the blanks. And because of the negativity bias, we fill them in with negative things. This makes us kind of believe that meeting the status quo, or just simply meeting expectations, is never good enough. This can be an incredibly stressful environment for your direct reports to work in. Now, some people have many different mechanisms of feedback, and this isn't universally true that everyone fills in the blanks with equally negative things. Some people are able to kind of combat that with different forms of feedback that they set up themselves. Maybe they have their own feedback loops, or maybe they have a lot of experience, so they feel confident in the work they're doing. But often, especially for engineering managers, there is a big gap. There is a lot of uncertainty in the work that we do. And so making your appreciation known explicitly and genuinely on a regular basis can totally change the mindset of your engineers. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope this was helpful to both managers and those who are being managed, those direct reports, engineers out there, who are hoping to help create good systems on your teams. Hopefully you can use some of these thoughts to take some of those implicit systems and make them more explicit. Thank you so much to today's sponsor Stackbit, head over to Stackbit.com slash Developer Teato get started today. Thank you again for listening. Today's episode wouldn't be possible without SPEC.FM and a wonderful producer, Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Bye.