I believe that the most effective team/organizations get that way only through intentional effort. As such, active management to guide the team towards the practices that result in effective action is a key. As a manager, I consider it my responsibility to work towards these.

Values

First, for contributors to feel valued and motivated, they must get certain things from their work. Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose, and Psychological Safety.

**Autonomy **means that a person must feel like they can make meaningful decisions that impact their daily work. A person who spends their days executing work assigned by someone else will not be exercising their mind and will not be bought into the work that they are accomplishing. As a manager it is important to remember that you must let your reports make some decisions and execute their visions as well as yours.

**Mastery **means that a person must feel a sense of progress. From day to day, they should be able to enumerate the way they are growing to a more capable individual. If not given opportunities for growth and learning, people will use that part of their mind elsewhere, and will be actively looking for new work. As a manager, I must ensure that people get the chance to grow into new tasks and skills, and give them the time and resources to master the ones they are already good at.

**Purpose **is the feeling that you are accomplishing something. Unless a person believes that their work is building up to accomplish a goal they can be proud of, it will be hard for them to care about the work. This doesn't have to be a "save the world" type of purpose, but it does have to be something that, if it works, they would be able to brag about ten years from now. As a manager, this means that I must ensure that toil does not dominate the work streams, and that project work is relentlessly building towards organizational objectives.

Psychological Safety is the ability to freely apply your intellect and ability without holding back because of fear. Things like "shooting the messenger" or "finding the guilty party" are counterproductive. If a person knows they will get in trouble when they screw something up, they may try to hide evidence or avoid doing anything risky at all. Instead, use failures as an opportunity to improve the system. As a manager, I consider something that goes wrong my responsibility- the system should be built in such a way that humans can't make routine mistakes. As such I will conduct blameless post-mortems, feel free to own up to mistakes or being wrong, and celebrate people taking disciplined risks.

Framework

To accomplish these goals, I look at these four frameworks:

TEAM FIRST

The capabilities of the team are the capabilities of the company. In order for the company to continue to get better, the people in the company have to get better. I consider my primary mission "improving the team" because it is the most multiplicative way to apply my energies. Because "Team First" I:

Prioritize 1 on 1s, hiring, training, and mentorship as high or higher than day to day work in most circumstances.

Am not afraid to go the extra mile to provide the tools / services that team members feel they need to do their best work

Do my best to ensure that team members feel like they are building autonomy / mastery / purpose and that they feel their work is valued

Make decisions that favor long term team growth over short term throughput such as assigning a less qualified individual to work on something for learning purposes.

Role-Modeling: Start/End meetings on time, prioritize 1-on-1 and reviews

Storytelling: Recognition for team accomplishments

Incentives: Align raises / promotions with personal and team growth

Rituals: weekly 1 on 1

RUTHLESSLY IMPROVE

The "Broken Window" theory of software development goes that when people are used to things being broken they aren't afraid to break more things (like a warehouse with a single window left broken will soon have them all broken). It is important to not ignore little broken things, and to spend time and effort iterating towards "delight" rather than "good enough". Because of this I:

Allow a percentage of work to be spent improving existing systems

Ensure that automation and integration are planned for aspects of projects

Try to not be dismissive of bug reports raised by users- "yeah, we know" ** This is one I am working on

Value people iteratively improving things as much as building new things

Rituals/Frameworks: Improvement Kata, reserve cycles for improvements

Storytelling: Identify incremental improvements as big deals

Role-Modeling: Don't gloss over small things, personally take steps to improve work

Incentives: Keep track of small quality of life improvements for review purposes

DISCIPLINED RISKS

If someone knew a safe and reliable way to build a company, you couldn't do it. Every fortune 500 would have already jumped all over every possible business idea! Because of that, we have to constantly be pushing boundaries and exploring new paths. We cannot let fear of the unknown prevent us from accomplishing great things, though it is equally important to think through exactly what risks we are taking before we do so! Therefore:

We prioritize releasing new code over multi-level QA (though with the guardrails of automated tests and feature toggles)

We make quick decisions on hiring and technologies (after taking into account all the information we can gather)

We build ambitious projects (but we do take steps to evaluate the costs and benefits)

BE CREATIVE

Since we don't know the right way to accomplish our goals, we must work to discover the best way. This happens by having and trying more ideas than our competition. We need to work hard to create the environment where new ideas are born, to capture them when they happen, and to ensure that it is safe and rewarding to come up with crazy ones. We do this by:

Getting as many people as possible involved in ideation phases

Don't shoot down ideas as "too hard" ** This is another one I am working on

Reward people who come up with "out of the box" ideas

Make sure that we spend as much time as possible on the crazy ones, even if they are harder and riskier than the more obvious solution (so long as the rewards are worth it!)

Rituals: Retrospectives that force everyone to participate

Frameworks: Brainstorming and design sessions with all stakeholders for new projects

Incentives/Storytelling: Ensure great ideas get recognized and rewarded

AS AN EMPLOYEE

As my employee or team member, I expect a few things from you. When the time comes to write performance reviews or whatever the practice is, they will be based on how well you accomplish these three things. They also will not be a surprise, as I commit to communicating early and often about behaviors (both positive and negative) that align with these.

1. Initiative: The most important thing you can do as an employee is make your boss's job easier. Find tasks that help the team get closer to its goal, proactively schedule meetings or take care of broken windows, or volunteer for unpleasant work. The best employees see the PURPOSE of the team, make it their own, and use their AUTONOMY to advance that purpose while building their MASTERY.

2. Responsibility: If you say you will do something, do it. Be on time for meetings, read agendas beforehand, complete tasks as agreed or communicate early and often when they are not progressing as planned. Be the first to jump in when something needs to be handled unexpectedly. Figure out who is supposed to be responsible for something later- handle it now.

3. Creativity: The team has problems to solve, and that's what we all get paid for. Someone who can follow directions is great, but someone who can solve problems without direction is even better. No individual has the answer to every problem, so the best employees are the ones who contribute the most answers and ideas (even if those ideas don't always work)

4. Positivity: When everyone is sarcastic and unhappy, things just don't work. Even worse, there is a feedback loop where bad vibes lead to more bad vibes. The team as a whole should work on being positive. Don't put down others, limit gripes to one-on-ones with your manager, and try to find the good side of things. I am happy to work with you to make bad things better, but ideas to fix the problem are far more likely to work than complaints about things we can't change.