Managers eat alone

When I was at Apple Computer I worked for Bruce Cleveland, most recently an executive at the former Siebel. He used the phrase in the title of this entry to describe the fact that when you become a manager, you can no longer be familiar with your employees. When I worked at Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy talked about a higher standard his managers needed to have both inside and outside Sun.

Here are some basics to think about:

• Your words are words of authority
• Stick with requirements
• You will be doing their performance reviews
• Your jokes might be taken personally

If you join a hallway discussion as a manager, many employees will take your words as direction. You might think you are only having a casual discussion and it might trigger a massive design change or schedule change before you know it. Make it clear that your team should continue on their plans. Make sure they know they are empowered to think and make decisions for themselves. Changes should be explicit, well thought out and not ad-hoc.

If you try and do your employee's jobs they will feel micromanaged and ineffective. As a manager, drive your agenda through requirements and not implementation. Implementation is your employee's job. Implementation is why they are in their jobs. You need to allow them creativity and provide them opportunities to think and grow so they can become bigger contributors later in their careers helping both you and your company or even the industry.

Remember that at sometime during the year you will write a performance review for your employees. If you and they behave as if you are only buddies, it can be a rude awakening. Familiarity can be misleading. It can make you slow to do the portion or your job where you have to be both critical and constructive. It is better to make the boundaries clear. You are their boss and will do the job in a professional and business-like manner. If you do not, you may be forced to change the relationship into a business-like one abruptly and that can turn the friendship sour.

Things you can say or discuss with a peer are trickier as a manager. If you tease an employee, they may consider it to be official criticism. If you gossip, it may be consider prejudiced or invasive. If you inquire, your employees may feel obligated to talk and feel uncomfortable. In both this and the previous paragraph it is easy to go too far and not be compassionate or human. The important thing is to be aware and unassuming.

Take your position thoughtfully and your employees will more likely take you with respect.

More later ...

How can you build camaraderie in your company?

We all want to work together well, right? While a good technical or business debate is essential in any endeavor, I believe companies accomplish more when employees work together well.

Here are some basics:

• Be clear about company and group direction
• Foster open dialog
• Respect
• Create shared experiences

It is hard to work together if you cannot agree on company direction or there are misunderstandings about company direction. Everyone in the company should be able to articulate the direction of the company -- maybe even make it a game at a company/group meeting taking turns saying the company direction and voting for the person(s) who does the best job at saying it. Clearly any divisiveness within your ranks will undermine camaraderie. Allow time for people to provide input, make timely decisions and get everyone to commit (even if they disagree). You should manage people who cannot commit appropriately.

You need to make sure people feel like they are part of the team. If employees have issues, good ideas or just information, they need ways to make them known. They need to feel that information will not be punished. You need to promote people sharing information and not keeping it close to the vest. Treat your employees like adults. Entrust them and charge them with keeping that trust. Encourage them to trust their fellow employees. Problems should be just things you solve together. Do not wait for your employees to come to you, you must engage them.

You must respect your team and you and your team must respect the rest of the company. Cynicism and sarcasm should be replaced by encouragement and suggestions and real problem solving. Set expectations with your team on respect and hold them accountable. Without respect, there is no camaraderie.

Finally, you must create shared experiences. These range from brainstorming some challenge, to working late together, to sharing meals. Shared experiences and shared challenges and ultimately shared accomplishments really make a team into a team. Acknowledge these events. Try and engage people who hang at the edges of these kind of groups (e.g. asking everyone's opinion in a room about some topic or decision).

Shared experiences are best when shared broadly. If one part of team has to work late to complete a project, it can help to have everyone work late including marketing and customer support. Clearly you have to balance this with people's schedules, when other employees had to last put in extra time, etc. The point is that it is good to find first-hand ways to understand what others are doing and to support them in any way possible including mere presence.

Set your intentions in this area and you can make a huge difference.

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How can you make positive changes in your organization?

Are you missing schedules? Do your engineers behave badly? Do you have poor quality in your products? Are you experiencing a lot of attrition? Are you having a hard time hiring? Do you want more innovation in your team?

It does not matter what kind of problems you are facing or changes you want to make, you can employ some of the same techniques to effect change. Here are some of the basics:

• Make sure both you and your employees understand why you want to make a change.
• Create a plan and declare your intentions.
• Allocate time each day or week to focus on the change including status, techniques, issues and successes.
• Figure out how to measure improvement and then measure it.
• Recognize success.

If your team understands the rationale for change, it will be easier for your team to adopt change. They do not have to agree with the rationale but they have to understand it. Make sure how this benefits the company and ultimately how it benefits them. Do not minimize this step. Take the time to have a discussion, acknowledge their viewpoints. This is where you build teamwork. This is where you get to say "we are all in this together". There is where motivation begins.

Make your intentions very clear. Do not be ambiguous. Solicit your team's help in creating a plan. Do not make it a choice thing. When you have a plan say "we are going to do x and and y and z ...". Make it a priority. Legitimize the time and don't assume your team can take on an important initiative without some tradeoffs.

The way you get something done is to spend some of your team's collective focus on it. Allocate time at each staff meeting to talk about the change or if it is a critical issue, meet each day. The act of taking time, speaking about it aloud has an effect.


If you do not measure something, you cannot improve it. Or at the every least, you cannot tell. There are lots of tools available to measure things that you might not think to be measurable. Industry tools like Six Sigma (TM) concentrate on techniques to measure things. It is easy to stop measuring along the way so pay attention and keep at it.

Finally, it is important to recognize success. Positive reinforcement. Rewards through remuneration or praise are important and will incent your employees to work on the next change you want to make.

So, go out and break some glass!

More later ...