Back to School - Management 101
If you stick around in the same career long enough, chances are that they'll expect you to promote through the ranks and eventually move into management. While it has been a decade since I have had to manage anybody by myself, I used to manage shops and people in the military. One of the things that the military prizes above everything else is training, and another is management skills, so of course at number three in the list of things the military cares about is management training. Everyone gets it eventually even if everyone doesn't always 'get it,' Here's the quick and dirty management process that I learned to handle direct reports when I started collecting them.
Step 0 - Know what you need to do and what you need to do it. There's a reason they promote senior developers to development managers - they know how to do the job they're expecting the folks they manage to do. This means that a manager can help guide more junior folks along the path to success, and get them the resources they need to execute.
Step 1 - Set Expectations. When setting out a task, it's tempting to just point the managee at the finish line and say "go." It's easy, it's fast, and it doesn't take a lot of thought or time. In fact, many seasoned employees who are manager candidates are at the point where all they need is a direction and a starting pistol shot. However, many more junior employees are not telepathic. When setting expectations:
Start by explaining what and why of the task. The why is important because it's easy to take for granted, but without understanding why things are done a certain way, that certain way may not be followed.
Explain requirements around time and milestones to prevent schedule slip.
Wrap it up by explaining what "good" is. Teachers had scoring rubrics, developers have acceptance criteria.
Explain the yardstick that you'll be measuring against and let them borrow it from time to time.
Step 2 - Enable your follower. There's entire textbooks and courses about enabling your follower to do the best job that they can, but that's your job as a manager. If you aren't working to set your employees up for success, you are failing. This doesn't mean doing their jobs for them or micromanaging, but it means making sure they have the requisite knowledge, run-books, tooling, and encouragement to get the job done. Here's a wonderful resource about how willingness to accomplish a task can actually decrease with competence and as employees progress and gain more skills, they may need more encouragement to complete new tasks. https://fastercapital.com/topics/the-four-levels-of-follower-maturity.html
As a quick recap:
Enthusiastic Beginner - someone who is excited about getting started and learning. They need lots of guidance but are pretty enthusiastic about getting started. Be a coach here, light motivation but lots of training.
Disillusioned Learner - After wrapping their arms around what they don’t know, finishing their journey might seem intimidating. They might be reluctant to start or finish tasks that they should know how to do. This is when a cheerleader is needed. Help them master their basic skills and build confidence in their abilities.
Capable but Cautious Contributor - Here, someone has pushed past the beginner phase and is skilled enough to accomplish tasks unsupervised, but they don’t. Often times they feel like they need permission to make a risky decision. This level follower needs a Mentor, someone who can walk them through thought processes, decisions, and pump them up to accomplish the task.
Self-reliant achiever - This is the highest level follower. Someone that you can point at the finish line and say “go,” and they’ll achieve it. This isn’t the permanent resting place of every employee though, as they move into new areas (like management), they may revert back to earlier stages of learning and confidence and need a change in management style to match.
Step 3 - Measure and Provide Feedback. The worst feedback a manager can recieve is "I had no idea I wasn't doing a good job." It's important to provide constant, honest feedback about how the employee is progressing in the task. Giving quick bits of feedback beyond "this is great" is vital for making sure that requirements are being met and that "done" meets the definition of done. When giving feedback, there's a couple of different approaches and these vary based on the task at hand. There's modeling where you fix a mistake "like this" which may work for simple fixes that are difficult to describe. There's also reminding them of the rubric that they need to meet and expecting them to fix it. Just don't give a single fix at a time, get all the feedback ready and then provide it back in a private, 1 on 1 session.
Step 4 - Profit! Now you know what to do if you're suddenly expected to manage a direct report. I also find that this technique is hugely helpful when training security champions as they looks to security experts as a manager of sorts when learning how to do their champion roles.
There's always more words to spend on a topic like this one, but I've hit my budget for now. Stay secure, and never forget the humans.