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One CEO described them as ‘the indispensable document for the modern manager’. One celebrated author on actually being a modern manager said they were ‘self-serving’ and that those who used them should ‘get the fuck over yourselves’.
So it’s not a question with a simple yes/no answer.
If you haven’t heard about the Manager README, it’s a document created by a manager for a team member to explain some things they think would be useful to know before they start working together. In theory they sound like a great idea. In practice, they have a few problems you should be aware of before putting pen to paper.
To much fanfare, in March 2019, Google announced Stadia, it’s cross-platform cloud gaming service, and the development of its own game studio to produce exclusive titles. Fast forward two years, Google announced last month that it was closing down the studio, laying off 150 game developers.
Last week Wired magazine publisheda piece telling the story of the layoffs, and the failure of the game studio. Whilst the article is interesting as a take on Google’s gaming strategy, for those looking (yes, that’s us management nerds) it also contains various insights for managers on the difficulties of integrating different cultures, communicating layoffs, and managing in a downturn.
Although Stadia was a strategic failure, various sources told Wired about some of the ways the company struggled to integrate game developers into Google’s ways of working. It’s a timely reminder if you’re a manager trying to hire a different profile of person that you may have to change the way you do things.
You may have heard about the communications myth of the shit sandwich. This is the idea that you should wrap bad news in bits of good news in order to make it easier to swallow. This has variously been found to be, well, total shit. Employees would far rather you were just honest with them. Which makes the way the layoffs were announced all the more extraordinary.
On 27 January, Phil Harrison, head of the division, had emailed Stadia employees claiming:
“Great progress building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong line up of Stadia exclusive games.”
Yet only five days later on 1 February he was announcing the job losses.
When he was confronted by the frustration and confusion of Stadia employees in a call on 4 February, Harrison admitted that he knew about the impending layoffs when he sent his original email. It’s hard to understand why on earth he sent it. Was the dopamine shot of team goodwill really worth all the pain and confusion to come? We won’t sugarcoat it Phil, this seems to have been a shocking failure of leadership.
The initial reporting suggests these events will go down as a strategic failure. Google committed to producing capital-intensive, complex content in a sector it didn’t fully understand, and decided to cut its losses when the going got tough. In that strategic context, some layoffs should be expected. If you’re a manager in that team, what can you really do?
Your options are limited, but with some planning and perception hopefully you can at least manage expectations. When downturns hit, companies often retrench to core, profitable business lines. Managing a team in a new venture, even within a corporate as well-capitalised as Google, always comes with some element of this risk. In April 2020, that’s exactly what happened. Google instituted a hiring freeze which crippled Stadia, but kept hiring elsewhere “in a small number of strategic areas”.
If you manage a team that’s in a non-core area, particularly in a downturn, you should consider redoubling your efforts to know your company and understand the impact of wider strategic decisions on your team. Even if you can’t affect the direction, you can hopefully learn any relevant news early, manage expectations and avoid any emails like Paul Harrison’s.
We’re big fans of anything which helps simplify complex decisions for managers. So it was a delight to find this helpful mental model from the engineering team at Orderbird, a German fintech company, for when a team member approaches you with a request for some training budget.
Now, we’re assuming that the request is somewhat reasonable. It’s not wildly expensive or irrelevant. But it is a big enough outlay in terms of time or money that it’s not a no-brainer. A decision has to be taken. Furthermore, there’s the nagging voice which says, ‘What if we invest in this person and then they just leave.’
The article breaks down the decision into four options:
It then looks at the pros and cons of each option:
As you can see, the place you definitely want to be is B, and the place you definitely don’t want to be is C. However, what is perhaps most interesting is that A also has a positive outcome. Only the options where you don’t invest in training have solely negative outcomes.
So when someone approaches you with a training request, and you’re unsure about investing in them, in general, it pays to offer the training.
We rarely talk about the ‘power’ of managers.
Part of this is because it might sound faintly absurd. We tend to associate power with great political or business leaders, not the boss you see every day on Zoom being pestered by their cat. It’s also a word which has connotations of overbearance and domination. Not management styles which are currently in vogue.
But it might also be that as managers, we don’t want to confront our actual influence. The job is hard enough as it is without thinking about all the ways we could be exerting our power (both consciously and unconsciously).
A recent article by Amy Newell, Senior Director of Engineering at Wistia, is a really useful counterpoint. Think you don’t have much power? She points out that:
“...You have some measure of direct power over the working conditions, career growth, and livelihood of everyone reporting to you (and all the folks in your reporting structure). You can promote people, you can give them raises, you can provide them with a safe, inclusive workplace, and you can offer them juicy opportunities. You can also fire them, dismiss their needs, stifle their career growth, or contribute directly or indirectly to an unsafe workplace by violating their personal boundaries or allowing others to do so. You can deploy your power responsibly, or you can pretend it isn’t there and end up using it in hurtful or irresponsible ways.”
Rather than be intimidated by this, she argues that as managers we should:
We’d maybe go even further. Whilst you should be wary of the potential negative impact of your influence, the great opportunity of management is to use your position to benefit others.
Sometimes the greatest failure of managers to appreciate their power is in the opportunity cost to their teams of their reluctance to use it to the team’s benefit, than any direct harm caused.
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