Management Thoughts - People

The Meta

I believe a people manager’s job is that of the gardener. We help each plant grow happily, and give it a place that makes sense for the whole. I also believe that plants mostly grow by themselves, for the most part. You don’t pull on the stem to make it taller. You see to the soil, the light and the water, you prune what’s hurting the plant and stake what’s leaning, and then you mostly get out of the way and let the growing happen. A manager who thinks they are the one doing the growing is in for a sad season.

Managing people towards conscious happiness

I also believe work is a subset of life, not the other way around. Wanting to do what you’re doing and deriving meaning from it is a blessing, and a rarer one than it should be. When I manage people, I focus on the conditions that produce good work: people who are growing, who feel real ownership, and who know why any of it matters. Output is evidence of those conditions, not the whole goal.

Dan Pink calls those conditions Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose. His trinity matches what I have seen when humans are happy to be busy.

1. Mastery is the satisfaction of getting better at something that matters.
   • Ladder of Skills. Everyone is somewhere on a ladder, and the job is to know which rung each person is on and hand them the next one (a task that stretches them without snapping them). Too easy and they rot, too hard and they freeze. The sweet spot is the zone of proximal development, borrowed wholesale from how a good tutor works.
   • A game worth the candle. Growth feels best when it feels like a game you chose to play: clear goals, quick feedback and the chance to beat your own past self. I mean the work itself becoming the level you’re trying to clear, rather than badges and points bolted on top.
   • Delegation and patience. You can’t grow someone by doing their reps for them. Delegation gives people room to climb; patience keeps me from grabbing the stem when they wobble. Letting them do it a bit worse than you would, for a while, is how they eventually do it better than you can.
2. Autonomy is the sense that you still control how you work.
   • Which doors swing back. Not everything deserves the same caution. I sort decisions by how reversible they are (two-way doors vs one-way doors). If a choice is cheap to undo, hand it over completely and let people learn by walking through the door, and save your worry for the ones that don’t swing back. Treating every door as one-way is a good way to accidentally teach learned helplessness.
   • Collaboration. Autonomy leaves room for chosen dependence and direct collaboration, without routing every decision through me.
   • Working myself out of a job. The most autonomous person is the one who can manage themselves, so the long game is making myself a little more unnecessary every quarter.
3. Purpose gives people a reason to care about the work.
   • The fire I didn’t light. Intrinsic motivation lasts after the incentive is removed. Mostly my job is not to extinguish it: keep people away from the meaningless grind, the theatre, and the thousand small indignities that wear the meaning out of a vocation until it feels like a job.
   • A team has weather. A team takes its weather from how its people regard the work and each other, so I try to model something close to unconditional positive regard (assume good faith, default to encouragement). Attitudes, happily, can be adopted.
   • What are we affecting, and why. I ask “who is better off because we did this, and do we actually believe it?” often, and mean it.

The gardener doesn’t get to take credit for the bloom. They can take some credit for the soil, light, and room that made it possible.