>> Hello! Can you hear me OK? How much coffee
did we have? How much beer? [laughter] >> All right, hi, everybody, my name is Michael
Lopp. I'm the VP of engineering at Slack. It's lovely to talk at the lead dev in New
York. I've never done it here, I've done it in London. It's really nice to be here, there's
a lot less jetlag. I love the title of this piece which is lead dev. How many engineers
are in the audience right now? All right. Kind of makes sense. All right. Designers?
Designer. One guy here in the middle right now.
[laughter] >> OK. Lawyers? Any lawyers here?
[laughter] I like when the lawyers don't want to raise
their hand. It's this guy up here, it's like, I'm a lawyer. Program managers? Product Manager
types, are you here? All right, all right, OK, it's a friendly audience. How many managers
are here? >> Uh-huh, how many leaders? It's a trick
question. Everybody should raise their hand. Leadership comes from everywhere. OK, last
question and then I swear I'm going to give a talk. How many extroverts are here. Keep
your hands up, I know it's easy for, you no problem.
[laughter] >> All right. Extroverts? I'm going to blow
your mind. Introverts, raise your hands. Isn't that fascinating? Somebody needs to write
a book on this. I ask this question every time I do a talk around the world and it's
like the majority of introverts so it's like ...
>> For you, all y'all who are manager for all y'all who aspire to be managers, I'm not
sure why you'd want to be that. I'm warning you right now, this is not a fun talk. All
the laughing is done. It's going to be a little bit painful, I'm going to take us through
a process and you're going to go oh, oh, oh, geez, that's awful and then I'll bring you
back a little bit. So what we're going to do is I need you to put on the mind set. Whether
you've been a manager or you are thinking about being a manager or you've led before,
you've felt this sort of burden of like, well, this is me and now I've gotta to do the thing.
I want you to go back to the moment where somebody said, you're the manager. I'm going
to tell you how I discover I was a manager super-quick just to get you all warmed up
here. I was working at Netscape. How many people remember Netscape. OK, whew, I'm not
that old. Tony walks into my cube, because cubes were a thing back then, it was taupe
and awful. And he's like, can you look after Harry and Jen and Frank. And look after? Kind
of do one-on-one. That sounds like a basic human sort of tanging care of things, I can
do that. I go to Tony, I say, we're really buried because we're going crazy and this
internet thing seems like it's going to turn out well, maybe. And could I get another person
and Tony is like, you're a manager, open a rack and I'm like Tony, what's a rack, man?
He'd made me a manager. I said there's no more laughing. Now there's officially no more
laughing. >> This is again, whether you've been a manager
or not, this should be valuable. I have some bad news for you, I'm going to explain how
your good intention, well trained instincts are going to erode your credibility, that
managers are these power-hungry jerks making all the authority making all these calls with
woefully incomplete data. Sounds like fun, right? This is a cautionary tale full of hard-earned
advice. I've synthesized all of the horrible decisions that I've made as a manager into
one cascading shit shit. Every bad decision, one after another and I like to call it the
new manager death spiral. OK. So leer's the thing. This is a worst-case scenario. This
is many different stories synthesized together. It contains every single leadership mistake
put into this horrible cascading horrible mess. It is unlikely you're going to perform
the death spiral this completely because I guarantee because I count heads as they nod,
you perform parts of it, you probably already have.
It starts with a single affirmation. It starts with a single affirmation. You Tony walks
in your office, Julia walks in your office, someone has a conversation with you and they
pass on this thing, it's a hat and on this hat it says, "boss." It's not really a hat.
It's a metaphor, work with me. So what happens is you get this hat and it says boss on it
and you feel. You have this new authority. I'm not sure what it is, because 60% of managers
have zero training. That's a whole other talk. But it starts with a feeling and it's a good
feeling, because you wanted this. I wanted to grow. Management looks interesting to me,
I can have more authority, I can do things at scale. It's awesome, but it starts with
this line which says, read your hat, it says I can do it, I'm the boss. It's awesome.
And then you make a bad decision and this is all bad decisions. You sign up for all
the things. Because what are you doing? It's the same thing you did as an individual contributor,
you want to make a good impression. You want to prove yourself so you sign up for all the
things. Get a check in the win column. This approach has worked well for you as an individual
contributor, because the service area is just you and you have a good sense of what you
can and can't do, hopefully. So of course signing up for all the things is going to
work for the team because I've got all these people. This is where the spiral begins because
the initial thought, actually the initial affirmation is, I can do it all myself, because
I'm the boss. This is your first failure mode. As an engineer,
and the majority of you are engineers, you are used to having complete visibility and
total ownership of the things you build. this is delicious. It worked well for you as an
individual contributor, you are instinctively reluctant to delegate your work to others
because it represents this unfamiliar loss of power. I will know less things. That seems
bad. I'm used to knowing all of the things. So compounding your poor judgment is your
belief that you are the best person to do this thing, whatever it is, because you've
done it before as an individual. Which is actually true. Thes problem is in your enthusiastic
effort to prove yourself, you've signed up for far more work that you can possibly do
yourself and also you're discovering quickly that this is fundamentally different work.
This is the work of many versus the work of one. This leads to our first failure mode.
The quality of your work drops, you miss deadlines, drop commitments, half-completed work passed
off as done. This is bad. And the final product is usually subpar and
you can see it in your eyes as you deliver it but you're work so hard and trying to make
first impression and you discover something powerful. Your job is no longer just to get
things done. Your job as a manager, as a leader, is to do things at scale. That thing you did
well individually you now have to do it n times. This is normally as a sensible person,
human being with good judgment, you would ask for help. But you don't!
[laughter] Which you're giggling about, but most people
don't, because it represents like some sort of sense of I'm out of control. I'm in control,
I'm the boss. You don't ask for help. Ask for help, by the way. But you don't do this
because this is the new manager death spiral, we have to go all the way down, and you update
your mantra, you say: I can do it all myself. I am in control, because I'm the boss. The
spiral is picking up a little bit of speed now, because you can see the glimmer of your
failure in their eyes, you can see it. They don't have to say anything.
You know -- you're like, hey, by the way, this is totally an A piece of work, and you're
looking at them and you know what B looks like, or C looks like, they don't have to
say a thing, because you're a people person, you're a manager, you're reading the room.
I can do it all myself, I'm in control, I got this, because I'm the boss. Reminder:
Every bad decision together: Every bad decision together. This is what I like to think of
you get into the state which I like to call the ineptitude of fake delegation. The first
admission to your job, good job you, of reality, you begin to delegate the smaller, less important
things that don't actually matter. Fake delegation is giving them the work but neither giving
them full control or context, because you'll give it to them when they need it.
They don't need it right now. You're the boss. I got it, I'm in control, I will solve this
myself. You tell them the barest of what they need to know, and it goes back to that first
thing that delight of knowing all the things and how the system works and that's joy of
like having that sense of control over the thing that you want to build, so you don't
give them the things you think they need to know. Just like you, they start to fail because
they feel they don't have the authority to change the situation or change the course
of the project or they don't understand some fundamental context of what's going on.
So they were pointed in the wrong direction from the first day. They are not on the manager
death spiral, so they do the right thing and they bring this to your attention. They tell
you: Manager, leader, please help. This is where it gets super-painful because
you're going to keep on doing the wrong thing. Have I beaten this into you yet? , I think
I have. We didn't understand that this portion of
the project was more important, so we started over here which in hindsight was the most
important place to start. You think, but do not say, because you're
on the death spiral, duh! It was obviously the wrong place to start. If I were running
this project, we wouldn't be in this situation. You're right, you probably did know how this
played out because you had some experience, let's say. You're right that if you're hands
on running this project, your prior experience, knowledge, wisdom would have improved execution.
You were so wrong because a strategy of not building trust through successful delegation
is one of the greatest accelerants to the new manager death spiral.
So what you do, and I know this is bad, but we're on the death spiral, is you remind yourself
of your thing. I can do it all myself, I'm in control, I'm the boss.
You can't appear weak. Changing strategy is an admission of failure that I don't know
how to do thing. You give the barest of corrective advice and you tell them something that you
should never, ever say: Oh, I don't think I have ever said this before. There are lots
of ways of saying this without saying this. You can indicate your unhappiness, you can
be a threat by the words that you say, and your team can hear this. They know the consequences
are high. They know their job is at risk and you don't even have to say it. They can sense
it. Whew! Told you it was bad. Every time I do
this talk I get so depressed. Your team leaves this horrible interaction with the following
impression: They are failing, you're mad for some reason, inflexible, unwilling to listen
to their opinions, their advice, their cries for help. This is the point of the spiral
where they stop talking to you, and they start talking to each other.
There's only one slide in this entire deck that you need to know. This is the only one.
Take a picture of it. Write it down. This is the only thing that matters in this entire
deck: As a leader, your job is to aggressively delegate. I've been thinking about leadership
for a good long time and this is the thing. And it sounds so simple. It's one, two, three,
four, five -- 6 words. I can't count. Engineer. Six words. Your job is to aggressively delegate.
It's counter, it's not the moves that got you from an IC to a manager. It's counter
to what you believe, but this is the start of becoming a good leader. There is work that
you are guaranteed that's going to show up on your plate that you can get an A on every
single time. You're going to look at it oh, my God, release process, that's my jam, I
can totally do this. I should run this whole thing, I'm the release process guru! And of
course if you give it to someone else who does not have your enthusiasm and whatever
it is that got you those A's those first few times they're going to probably get a B. I'm
arguing that a B is awesome. Let me tell you why. A B is killing it for a first try. A
B, above average. That's not even the win. Let me tell you what the win is: They get
to learn. They get to learn. I've never done this before. This is amazing. Release process,
release plans, I'm not sure what we're calling it, sounds awesome. You the manager get to
coach them from a B to an A. You are demonstrating trust by giving them work that is scary to
them, and you know, and they know, is beyond their means. I know you can do this. I'm gonna
help you with this. That's amazing. That social construct is incredibly
important to we as managers. We, we, are going to figure this out together.
This is how you start building trust in teams. God, it felt pretty good, but it gets worse.
But here we go, but you don't do that because you're on the new manager death spiral. I
like how the laughs go from hahaha! To heh-heh-heh, is it going to get worse? You don't delegate
to them, they ask for help and you give incredibly bad advice, you don't, so you fail. So since
you aren't listening, this team starts talking to each other and other teams, they are trying
to do a very human thing, self-correct, get themselves out of this hole and perhaps they
might, but this is a death spiral, so they don't, they fail. This is unfortunate because
they had all the data. You collectively had all the data to be successful and just needed
a leadership nudge from you to point from here to here, but since it was clear you didn't
want to hear it, since they didn't share it and the project failed. Gets super-bad now,
and once demoralized, everyone feels like they failed, because the project didn't succeed,
but since no one is truly communicating, all sorts of opinions start to become facts.
Nature abhors a vacuum. I have this meeting once every quarter for the last 15 years,
and this meeting still happens and I say this onstage to people, and it still happens. Julia
walks into my office and she says, hey, so, this is all hypothetical, people, hey, Leah
was out last week for a one-on-one and Julia is total hypothetical. The real Julia is amazing.
She works for me. Julia, this hypothetical person is amazing and she comes in and says,
hey, Leah was out last week so she canceled our one-on-one and this week it hasn't been
rescheduled yet, so it's been like a week and a half, so Julia, who has absolutely no
right to say what she's about to say, says the following things. She says, I'm pretty
sure I'm going to be fired. No, absolutely not. One meeting rescheduled, happened when
Leah was sick, so she didn't reschedule. This is what human beings do when they see absence
of information. They just pour in the worst fear, the things they're scared of the most
and they turn them into reality. And in our new manager death spiral, opinions start to
become facts, you tell yourself the story that you might not have had the right people
on the team, which they know immediately and perhaps shuffling people around, a reorg,
they'll do better the next time. They think you failed because you were busy withholding
information of the. True, being proud, yeah, and not listening. When I see this happening
in other place, this is where politics kicks in, and you can smell it immediately, pause
there's all of this weird stuff traveling around the organism. So congratulations. Good
job. Demoralization of the team, you and your team have not only failed at the task at hand
but you've also irreparably harmed your relationship. And someone you trust a lot, you believe the
words that she says, comes to you and she tells you what the team is saying about you.
And it's bad. It's toxic. And you hear it and you trust this person and you go whoa!
And you think, at the very bottom of the death spiral, this is not me. Gets me every time.
This isn't me. Who are they talking about? Who is this horrible human being? You're right,
it's not who you are. You are exactly, precisely, the opposite of a leader in this moment.
We're at the bottom. Here's your prize. teacup pigs. All right, teacup pigs and here's a
teacup pig chaser. [laughter] All right. all right, this goes up from here.
You probably heard this about ten times today, I'm sure that everyone is saying this, because
it's true: Management is not a promotion. You're not being promoted. You get promoted
when you're successful in your current job. And management is a totally different job.
Promotion is equal parts recognition and reward for doing things that you know how to do in
your current job. In many companies, the expectation is that if you're performing at the higher
level for a period of time, you are promoted. If this is your first time, if you're going
into management for the first time, you are effectively starting over.
It's a brand new gig. Yes, the context of your company, the domain that you choose to
be in is napping over, but you have an entirely different skillset. Management is a career
restart, and it's baffling to me, because I ask almost every time, I didn't ask this
time, but I'm guessing it's probably consistent: New manager managers one to three years in,
how much has your company invested in, other than going to this conference, and the answer
is about 60% of the folks have had no training. Does this not concern you a little bit that
your best and your brightest folks you're promoting into management to do a job they're
not able to do, taking care of folks who are looking for those folks to automatically know
how to be a good manager. This is insane. This is one of the curses of tech is we're
growing so quickly, we're promoting from within, we're not necessarily building great managers.
This is whew. The new manager death spiral is not real.
It is an unrealistic and deliberate construction to make some points. It is unlikely that you'll
perform each of these steps. In this spiral it's equally likely that as I speak, because
I see this, the heads nod, they're like, oh, I did that, yup, I did that. They didn't call
it that, but that's exactly what I did. Whether you perform these steps, the lessons are the
same and lessons that I wish someone had taken a time as a new manager to tell me: Here are
three. There are many others. Let others change your mind. There are more
of them than you. The size of their network is collectively larger than yours, so it stands
to reason they have information. Listen to that information and let others change your
perspective and your decisions and show them that they did that. This is when I tell a
story about a former boss of mine who worked at an Apple company. Sorry, a fruit company.
Whoops! [laughter] >> I was going to anonymize. That went well.
The last thing I worked at was the Apple store, the last thing I did was release the Apple
store on the phone and the person we were talking about cared about one thing in terms
of what we were reviewing and that was the icon. Some $7 billion store and the thing
we were worried about was the icon. Different story. Reviews of a product at Apple are pretty
prescriptive: You bring in high-level. I can tell you it's a crap ton of work to do one
of those, let alone the nine that we were required to bring in. We brought in nine.
And we sat down and the person walked in, and he looked at it, and he said something,
and I'm going to exactly what he did, as quickly as he did it. I'm going to do it again because
you don't believe me. I'm going to do it again. "these are all crap."
Then we proceeded to have a big long a debate, we talked about the shopping cart and color
and all these other things and we came back two more times it nine other icons each time.
Three times total and the last time we were a little tired of all of the artwork and the
debate, so we put two icons from the first one in the third one.
[laughter] >> You know where this story is going.
[laughter] Walked in, he's like, oh, my God. It's three.
Three is perfect. And I'd given this talk other times and people raise their hands and
say, is that good leadership? What I learned after the fact is this person had an opinion
about what he wanted and he let the debate, that we had form his opinion. He didn't tell
us this, but he should have told us this, that he says I now have a defensible opinion
about why No. 3 is a thing. And I was like, oh, cool, we went through a process. It wasn't
just a design dictator thing. You want your team to know that they can tell you things
and you want your team to understand that you're willing to adapt, that you're listening,
and that you'll change based on their advice. Two others: Almost done. it is the path of
least resistance to build a team of humans who will agree with you. This diversity thing
that we're working on right now, this social base thing is just a base layer. Different
humans bringing in their perspectives and their lessons and their wisdoms, things you
will disagree with, things you will not understand are going to make your product, your service,
whatever it is you're building better. The more ideas get better with eyeballs. You're
going to have tense conversations and you're building a culture where those tense conversations
can occur. We can have it out and we can be okay, and come out the other side and say
we're OK. You're going to have these debates but I want you to learn how to have these
debates, to understand different perspectives. Ideas do not get better with agreement. Ideas
gather their strengths with healthy discord and that means finding and hiring humans who
represent the widest perspective and experience and then build a safe place for them to have
those debates. This is the same slide from before, but it's
the deal. This is the thing to remember. Delegate more than comfortable. It's I think my number
one observation about new managers, especially in engineering, is they miss building things.
That's what they're protecting, they want to build things with our hands. That was the
thing they love, so giving things away, oh, I wanna build that with my hands! The complete
delegation of work to someone else is a vote of confidence in their ability, which is one
of the essential ways to start building trust in a team, letting go of doing the hands-on
work is tricky and a nonobvious win, but you build yourself by building others.
That's your job now. This is the thing that you're working on.
This, the thing that I think about teams and when they're healthy or not. Teams that are
high-trust are teams that I think are productive and happier. The role of management is already
set up with preexisting potential anxious, they know you're the boss. It doesn't need
to be on the hat. You gauge their performance and set their comp, that is intimidating set
of responsibilities. The burden is on you to prove that you deserve those responsibilities
and you do that by building trust, by listen ones on ones every week no matter what. Remember
that you have disproportionate access to information. So repeating over and over again it's going
to be kind of boring, but remember, you have all the evidence, you've got to get it out
there. Delegating, giving constructive, healthy feedback. Receiving feedback. It's long list.
There are books on the topic. Start small. Start with something really small. Look at
each action you take, and ask yourself as a manager or as a future manager or as a leader,
ask yourself each act that you're taking, am I building or eroding trust with this thing
that I'm doing, with this DM that I'm sending, with this email that I'm sending, with this
thing that I'm saying at a meeting. Pass yourself through that lens each time you ask something.
This a trust building move or a trust eroding move and you know the difference. If you're
doing this with work you can avoid the new manager death spiral. Remember, you build
yourself by building others, and I am so on time it's amazing. >> Thank you very much.
[applause]
