Hi 👋 nice to meet you.
This document has two main reasons to exist:
- The creation has helped me to identify and refine my thoughts and values.
- It helps you to understand me better and help us to work together.
As an Engineering Manager, I am here to ensure our team is happy, productive and focused on what matters the most for our business.
- I'm helping you to reach your goals, grow your skills and advance your career following the GROWTH mindset.
- I'm making sure that we have what we need in order to deliver our commitments by removing roadblocks (or enabling you to do that) and aligning priorities.
- I'm an Engineer as well and try to support our developments as often as I can.
Trust and honesty. Trust is the foundation of every relationship. Let's be honest and share success and failure stories.
Self reflection. Self reflection is an important part of growth. You’ll miss opportunities without it.
Open failure culture. Everybody does mistakes. Do them but learn from it.
TLDR; Very few things are more important than talking to you if you want to talk to me. If you need to talk, let’s talk.
Heard a rumour? Need clarification on something? Blocked? I’d love to hear as soon as possible. Come by my (virtual) desk, shoot me a Slack message, we don’t need to wait for our next scheduled 1:1.
Feel free to put something in my calendar, don’t feel like you need to ask first. Is my calendar full? Send me a message and I’ll very likely be able to move something around.
It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
- Steve Jobs
You’re very good at your job. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. If it feels like I’m questioning you it’s because I’m either: a) Trying to gather context. b) Trying to be a rubber duck. c) Trying to water and grow your ideas.
You’ll let me know if you can’t do your job. One of my main responsibilities is ensuring that you’re set up for success. Occasionally things slip through the cracks and I won’t know I’m letting you down.
You feel safe debating with me. I find that ideas improve by being examined from all angles. If it sounds like I’m disagreeing I’m most likely just playing devil’s advocate. This does rely on us being able to have a safe debate.
Provide context. Most of my day is spent collecting, filtering and sharing context/information from across other projects, domains, and product lines. I’ll try to push information to you as much as I can but feel free to ask about anything else.
Cheer. Do good and talk about it. If you're not a person who self-promotes, please let me do it for you. Tell me when things go well, share the things which make you proud, and I'll cheer/share appropriately.
Sponsor. Find growth opportunties to show and grow your skills.
Other. Please let me know how else I can help.
Do amazing work. This is the expectation. Let me know if there is something preventing you from accomplishing this.
Disagree with me. The best solutions comes from a healthy level of debate. We need to be able to separate our ideas from our egos. I’ll challenge your ideas with the goal of coming to the best possible solution, I hope you’ll challenge mine.
Tell me when I screw up. This is very important. I screw up and sometimes don’t notice. I need to know or I’ll likely do it again.
Communicate. One of my jobs is to provide context. Are you missing some? Let me know and I’ll fill you in or go find out.
Your career is yours. You know best how you’d like to grow and in what areas. I can provide feedback and an outside perspective.
I’ll do my best to sponsor growth and learning opportunities, it’ll be up to you to seize them. Let’s work together on this.
At the end of the day, it is your career. We set your goals and I can help you achieve them.
I prefer to have weekly 1:1 conversations with you. It's important for me to constantly stay in touch and get a better understanding about how you are doing and how I can support. The scheduled meeting is not a blocker for us to meet more often if a project requires it or if there's much to talk about.
This are the subjects I'm intersted in but don't see your 1:1 as status report. Your topics go first.
Looking around. Tell me what’s on your mind. How are you doing since the last time we met? Do you have any concerns or frustrations you want to share?
Looking back. Are you engaged with your work and the company? Do you have an opportunity to do your best work here? Do you get appropriate recognition for good work?
Looking forward. Is there anything blocking you? What’s preventing you from reaching your goals?
Feel free to come with a topic you’d like to discuss. I’d love it if you spent a few minutes beforehand preparing so that we can get the most of our time.
If you see me not living up to anything included please let me know. It’s possible that I’ve changed my mind (👍). More likely I’m dropping the ball (👎). Either way I’d like to know.