Oct 22, 2022

My Manager ReadMe

This is my manager ‘ReadMe’. It outlines how I think about leadership, strategy, people and culture. The principles I describe are ideals, I often fall short and am always trying to learn.

About me

I’m Connell. I’m originally from Belfast, but have lived in London for 10 years. I trained as a medical doctor before branching into software engineering, product and entrepreneurship. Though today medicine takes up only a small fraction of my time, it is a huge part of who I am, and how I think.

Algorithms & ICU

I once worked for an ICU consultant with an acerbic wit, and who only ever wore shorts — no matter the weather or time of year*. One day over coffee in the department, a doctor from a different team had gathered an audience and was regaling us with tales of rare and difficult cases from his past. Each one was solved by some stupendous insight or moment of brilliance. As junior doctors we sat and listened politely. Once it was over and House MD had left, the man in shorts turned to us and declared: “Look, medicine is actually quite easy: you just make sure the air is going in and out, and the blood is going round and round!” We all laughed.

A couple of days later I needed his help with a deteriorating patient:

ME (worried): I need help… …has cardiac failure… GI bleed… [blah blah …]
CONSULTANT (impassive): Is the air going in and out?
ME (confused): …uh… yeah…
CONSULTANT: Good. Is the blood going round and round?
Me: …uh, well… he’s been transfused 9 units and the blood pressur–
CONSULTANT (interrupting): Make the blood go round and round!

I couldn’t see it at the time, but he was on to something. The problem was complicated, with lots of details, numbers and plot twists. But on another, deeper level, it was quite simple: the patient will die if they can’t breathe or if their blood pressure crashes. In a crisis I was being reminded of the basics: airway, breathing, circulation.

* Except for scrub pants while in the OR, the only time I saw him wearing trousers was when he had to give evidence in Coronor’s court.

It’s a Craft

This early lesson was hammered home to me many more times as a doctor. Clinical practice is about recognising patterns and approaching problems in a structured way. But the profession is anything but robotic — good doctors also understand people. The craft of medicine is about combining knowledge and technical skill with difficult, high-stakes conversations. The same lessons hold true in business leadership.

A diagnostic pathway for businesses: From experience I think most big organisational problems can be diagnosed by asking the following questions:

Vision: Is it compelling?
Strategy: Is there focus?
People: Are we looking after people?
Teams: Are we optimising for the team?
Execution: Are we learning fast enough?

Organisations that get these things right, win.

Leadership

Great leaders serve.

The archetype of the all-seeing, all-powerful executive is bullshit. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are extraordinary, but they are too often venerated in a way that shows no understanding of their actual gifts, and total ignorance of their weaknesses.

The role of leader isn’t to wield power, but to distribute it. I can’t amass all the information and make every call, instead I scale my time by empowering others, and ensuring decisions are made at the right level — by the people with the right expertise and context. This means my job as a leader is to find great people, enable them to do their best work, and help them to grow. I do all of this in the context of the team (discussed below).

I try to keep weekly 1–1s and use that time to focus on the employee, not the business. There is more to life than work, though one influences the other, so I’m interested in your personal life, as long as you’re willing to share. I care about your family, interests, hobbies, what you did on the weekend and so on. When it comes to work I’ll ask you to bring any problems you have, and we’ll work through them together. I’ll set expectations about your role, give feedback when I think something should be better, and set goals with you. I want every person to have the opportunity to be challenged, thrive and grow. Psychological safety and trust is paramount. As I am candid with you, I expect no less in return! The most important feedback of my career has come from the people I have managed.

Being Let Go

Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Being let go is not easy, it’s emotionally painful and creates personal uncertainty. My goal when dealing with these hard decisions, is to optimise for you. First, it should never be a surprise. If I’m not giving clear feedback and setting expectations, I am failing. Second, when the decision is made, I will do what I can to support you. Your dignity matters, and just because it hasn’t worked out in one place, doesn’t mean you won’t succeed elsewhere. I have exited several people who have gone on to have flourishing careers in other companies. After exit, I am still available to you if you would like feedback from me, or to give me feedback.

Teams

Great companies aren’t defined by heroic individuals, but by incredible teams.

Teams change the world, and so my leadership strives to be ‘team-first’. I try to optimise for teams at every level: by hiring collaborative people, by setting cultural standards for inclusion, insisting on candid communication, and by empowering groups to take ownership.

When it goes right, the results are amazing. Great teams embrace responsibility, accountability and ownership. They are hungry for challenges and move fast. Best of all, they celebrate their wins, commiserate their losses, and challenge themselves to get better. Teams are so much more important than any individual (including me!) so I expect everyone I work with to be 100% committed to the team, first.

Systems

Optimise for alignment, not control.

At scale communication becomes harder, coordination tends to break down, and departments can slip into silos. A common response is for executives to create more processes, rules and meetings… but this causes even more damage. The way out of this swamp is to accept that scale has tradeoffs, and focus on alignment. I coach teams to think in terms of systems, and to build scalable interfaces that deliver the outcomes the business wants. Not everyone can know everything, but everyone needs to know the company’s strategy, and be armed with enough context to be effective and create impact.

Strategy, Planning and OKRs

“Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensible.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower

Although plans never work out the way we hoped, the act of planning is how we decide what’s important and where we should focus our efforts. Good strategy defines a clear problem and describes how the organisation intends to solve it. Done well, it results in focus, alignment, and objectives, all of which are essential for successful execution.

My view is that company strategy and objectives flow from the executive level downwards. But alignment is achieved from the bottom-up. Once the company strategy has been scrutinised, finalised and communicated, I enable teams and departments to set their own strategy and objectives that feed-in (ownership!).

OKRs follow naturally from strategy. Their purpose is to enable execution by maximising focus, alignment and accountability over a 2–3m period. OKRs should be ambitious but they are not a measure of individual performance, and never a stick to beat teams with. Any initiative or work that doesn’t contribute to a KR should ring alarm bells. OKRs should frame our day-to-day work and we will talk about them often. (NB: I like OKRs, but similar frameworks are also valid)

Execution & Learning

Every tech company and team says they are ‘Agile’, but the truth is usually different. Achieving a steady rhythm of ‘build-measure-learn’ is very difficult, and I have plenty of scars. Fortunately I have learned a lot from great PMs, TPMs and engineers.

One of the first things worth saying about ‘Agile’ is that it shouldn’t be conflated with ‘Scrum’, ‘Lean,’ ‘SAFe’, or any other (complex) framework. It’s far more simple: we’re just talking about a set of problem-solving principles that tell us to focus on the outcome we want to achieve, and then move towards it incrementally by testing and improving our ideas as quickly as possible. Agile reduces strategic risk because short cycles of innovation enable teams to learn faster and change direction. Frameworks offer a way to implement agile principles, but ‘don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.’. Agile methods should be applied in every setting and department, but adoption requires leadership buy-in, clear strategic focus, and empowered teams.

If you’re a PM or engineer, I’ll constantly ask: “How can we shorten the feedback loop? What are we learning? What is the key metric? What is our most risky assumption to test?”. Teams must own their objectives, optimise for fast iterations, and be committed to learning and testing. Investment in application observability can’t be optional: teams must know how users are interacting with their product, and know which metrics are most important. Design has a huge role to play, since most product ideas can be tested without the need to write any code (see ‘Inspired’ by Marty Cagan, linked at the end). Therefore PMs and designers must work hand-in-glove with each other, and be hands-on with users as often as possible.

I’ve been fortunate to help introduce this kind thinking to other departments outside of Product-Engineering. In one example a marketing team adopted the practice of structured retros each time they hosted an event. This simple change generated a wealth of learnings and created a flywheel of improvements in how events where run: where to seat people, how to handle attendee registration, when to pitch, when to schedule entertainment, what metrics to track success, and so on.

Culture

Culture matters as much as anything else. The best talent wants to work in organisations that are mission-driven, fun, psychologically safe, and challenging. I expect everyone in my team to want these things and live these values, anything less than this is a red flag.